> In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words I can assure you that the way foreign words are pronounced in English is usually qui

> In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words I can assure you that the way foreign words are pronounced in English is usually quite far from how they would sound in their original language. There is a simple reason for that: foreign words have sounds that do not exist in English and that English-speaking people don’t know how to pronounce without training, about which most people don’t bother. English words sound weird in Japanese, but the opposite is also true. > in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc This is no different than many other languages. In fact, Karaoke and tsunami are used exactly the same way in French, German, Dutch and Spanish. > Am I right in thinking English is unusual in that respect? I'm not expert enough in any other languages to know for sure. It is not really. English is completely inconsistent because of its history as an amalgamation of very different languages, but apart from that it is not really remarkable in the way it treats loan words.