Adventures at McDonald's

Each visit to a fast-food chain or restaurant is a window of opportunity to practice your Japanese listening comprehension skills, while making a spectacle of yourself in the process. You not only have to figure out what they are saying in Japanese, but in English as well. There's actually tons of English words in the Japanese vocabulary (a bit of imports from French & German as well) but they sound anything but English. Because of the Japanese language system, every word must end with a vowel (with the exception of -n) so McDonald's would end up sounding like 'Makadonarudo', and a big mac is 'biggu maku'. All our silly impersonations of Japanese speakers as kids are not too far from the truth.