Engrish and English in Asian Shows

In my time watching Asian TV shows and movies, I've come to notice that most of the English in them is bad. Really bad. Both spoken and written English. It isn't just the fault of the Asian actors/writers either; most of the Token White People in Asian shows are horrible, horrible actors, say their lines like robots, put emphasis on the wrong words in a sentence, or have the wrong accents for their characters.

White People in Asian Shows
She Was Pretty (Korean) has fairly good examples of shudder-inducing Token White People scenes. I'm pretty sure that the White Guy from the New York office of The Most magazine was played by a robot, considering his utterly wooden and cringy performance. Also, there's one scene at Ha Ri's hotel where a White Guy with a very posh British accent is supposed to be playing an American.



William, the White Guy in Tamra, The Island is supposed to be British, but he has a very strong non-British accent (I'm guessing French, based on the actor's name) and doesn't appear to be able to speak English well at all.




But this problem goes both ways, I'm sure--I believe that most, if not all, of the non-Korean cast members in Moorim School had accents when they spoke Korean.



Asian-Americans and Americanized Asians
Then there's the characters that are supposed to be Asian-American or supposed to have lived in America for quite a while, but act very Asian (familiar with the culture, food, public transit systems and whatnot) and have extremely strong Korean accents when they speak 
English. 



She Was Pretty illustrates this quite well: Sung Joon, the Main Guy character, is supposed to have lived in America for quite a while, around 10 years, I believe. He moved there as a kid, and eventually got a high-profile job at a high-profile magazine in New York, The Most. While it's reasonable to expect that he would have some type of Korean accent, you would expect him to be able to clearly communicate in English, right? Well, his Korean accent is so strong, he's barely understandable when he speaks English. Also, he seems to mesh right into the culture (aside from his a-hole attitude, but that's to be expected for a main male character in a K-drama), with no culture shock whatsoever from having lived in America for ~10 years.

The 2007 and 2011 versions of Hana Kimi (Japanese) feature an Americanized Asian (Ashiya Mizuki) who speaks Japanese fluently and adapts perfectly to living in Japan. Same with To The Beautiful You (Korean). Then again, I'm not really expecting realism from either of those shows.

Ode To Joy (Chinese) and Big (Korean) did make some sort of effort to make their American(ized) characters go through cultural difficulties. An Di from Ode to Joy (a Chinese girl who was adopted--around 10 I believe--and taken to the US) has some difficulty understanding certain aspects of Chinese culture and is unfamiliar with Chinese food (real Chinese food, not Americanized Chinese food). Though I do wonder why she speaks Chinese so well. I guess it's because she's a genius.

Kyung Joon from Big (played in part by Shin from Cross Gene) has lived in America for some time. While his English isn't quite as difficult to understand as Sung Joon's, he still has a strong accent. His character (from what little I saw of the show) isn't intimately familiar with Korean culture (though some of his odd actions can be explained by the fact that he's a massive weirdo). Shin's normal Korean sounds odd enough, so I'm not sure if his character is supposed to have an American accent.

I'm sure that American and other English-language TV shows commit similar crimes against Asian languages. However, I can't really point them out/complain about them since I'm not intimately familiar with Asian languages like I am with English. Also, I know that learning another language is very difficult and pronouncing English is probably very hard. That being said, having an English consultant (at least for the high-profile shows and movies) might not be a bad idea.

One Asian show that really gets the English right is My Name Is Kim Sam Soon (Korean). A Korean-American is one of the main characters (and actually speaks English like a native American!), and another one of the main Korean characters speaks very good, understandable English. 

Written Engrish and Crazy Books and Backgrounds
The strange and funny English in Asian shows isn't limited to spoken language; it also appears in writing and background bookshelves. I generally don't pay much attention to background bookshelves in Asian or English-language TV shows, and I'm sure that both have crazy, nonsensical background books and text. The two most egregious examples of bad/funny English text and background books I recall seeing so far in Asian shows appear in the Korean webdrama Bong Soon: A Cyborg in Love (Korean) and the Taiwanese drama Bromance.



Bromance
In the office of Du Zi Feng, the main male character/love interest of Bromance, there are a number of...odd book choices. Most notable, however, are the copies of the Divergent series. Now, it's not *entirely* out of the realm of possibility that Zi Feng could read and like a generic English dystopian YA series. However, it's a little odd that he would have the books in his office, and even odder that he would have several copies of each book. He also seems to have some of the same books that Pi Ya Nuo (the main character)'s parents have in their house. He also has several copies of the same book. 







However, there's some good background English in a coffee shop.




So, why the Divergent books? Was one of the cast or crew members a fan? Were they,
along with the other English books, just random filler?

Bong Soon
Bong Soon: A Cyborg In Love stars Kyuhyun of Super Junior and the girl who plays Jin Yi in Let's Eat. It's a silly, unrealistic little webdrama, so the English mistakes are more funny than anything. ("BS Project", "BS Electronics"...hehe.)






An intense debugging scene in the latter part of the show (featuring Token White Guys) shows just how much they didn't try with the English. They used the Lorem Ipsum dummy text instead of actually stringing a few English sentences together.




So there wasn't one English-speaking person that could have noticed and said, "Hey, this looks a little strange..."?? Heck, a recipe for apple pie would have made more sense...maybe one of the White Guys was hungry.

Other Shows
Both the 2007 and 2011 versions of Hana Kimi (Japanese) have some Engrish, though usually just a few letters are out of place. 

Take a look at this scoreboard from To the Beautiful You.




The names of the FBI agents in the 2006 Death Note movie (Japanese) are also gibberish.

However, crazy background text isn't limited to Asian shows. One notable example of this on an English-language TV show appears in a season 5 episode of Leverage, The Corkscrew Job. The text on the TV is supposed to be about the famous Thomas Jefferson bottle.



However, if you actually pause the episode and read the text, it quickly delves into a rabbit hole of weirdness. In fact, it reads exactly like a fanfiction on WTFFanfiction, or a fanfiction from one of those crazy fanfiction generators. Massive kudos to whoever wrote and allowed that in the show, though; that's awesome. 

So why is there such bad English/Engrish/gibberish in the backgrounds of Asian shows? Do they not care because the main audience doesn't speak English? Do they have no one to proofread the English? Is there some copyright issue they have to get around?

If they need an English-speaking person to write/proofread background text, I WILL DO IT. Totally. :)

EXO Next Door (우리 옆집에 EXO가 산다) Episode 4 Recap

Previously on EXO Next Door: D.O. had really nasty hair at some point. Chanyeol hates Yeonhee and Yeonhee hates roaches. Matilda is not who she seems.

As Chanyeol stares at D.O. and Yeonhee, he mentally flashes back to the previous year (2014), when "everything started to fall apart." Oh, so when Luhan and Kris left? Cut to a concert, where everything is going gloriously, and EXO is singing an awesome song. Sehun does the E-X-O hand symbols a few times, and there are quite a few shots of Lay. Interestingly, Chanyeol plays drums at one point.

After the concert, Chanyeol and two other guys (Suho and Chen) go into a dressing room to remove their makeup and congratulate each other. A silver treble clef necklace with a long chain (Chanyeol's) is sitting on the makeup counter. They swipe at their faces a few times, then they're apparently done. I...guess they want to keep their makeup on for the after party or whatever they do after concerts? Even for regular makeup, one wet wipe doesn't cut it. Oh well, maybe S. Koreans have magic wet wipes that do this.

Suho and Chen finish and tell the still-sitting Chanyeol to "come on." As he stands up, he knocks the necklace to the floor. And of course, because this necklace was so important to Chanyeol (as we will find out later), he just threw it on the makeup counter instead of putting it in a box or something. As he stands up, he knocks the necklace onto the floor. Not seeing the necklace on the counter, Chanyeol sits down again, and rolls backward in the chair to look for it. In the process, he rolls over the necklace, breaking it. The sound of the necklace breaking is accompanied by a dramatic chord so the viewers will be sure to know that this moment is Very Important. The necklace is smashed beyond repair. As Chanyeol picks up the pieces, shocked, someone off-camera tells him his grandpa kicked the bucket. So his grandpa died while he was having boatloads of fun at the concert? Ooh, dark. 

The flashback dissolves into a flashback within a flashback back to 17 years ago. So Chanyeol was what, 4? 5? Little Chanyeol and his grandpa sit in a room that's crowded with pictures and other old-fashioned, grandpa-ish things (record player, old radio, etc.), listening to music. Interestingly enough, Little Chanyeol slightly resembles Big Chanyeol, even down to the ears. The music ends, and Grandpa, who is in a wooden rocking chair (the same one Chanyeol touched a few episodes ago), asks Chanyeol why he looks so down. Probably the music. Maybe he didn't get that Ninja Turtle backpack he wanted. Grandpa asks if Chanyeol's girlfriend broke up with him.

Little Chanyeol expresses his worry that Grandpa will get old and die. Grandpa says he totes won't because he has a magic necklace that gives him immortality. He gives Chanyeol the treble clef necklace and says it will keep bad luck away. Kissing the pendant, Grandpa prophesies that Chanyeol will become a universal star. Chanyeol is worried he'll take Grandpa's magic away, but Grandpa says he has an extra necklace in a safe place.

Cut back to Chanyeol, holding the broken necklace. According to his dramatic VO, "From that day on, misfortunes kept finding [him]." Yep, one after the other. First, some joker put green dye in his shampoo, someone else replaced his shoes with ones a half size smaller, and someone ELSE drew a caricature of him with giant bat ears! *cough* D.O. *cough*

Oh, no, wait, actually EXO's new song gets leaked and Suho trips on a water bottle. No, really. Chanyeol and Suho are in their dance practice room (sadly, I don't know enough about EXO yet to know if this is their *actual* practice room, but it looks very similar to VIXX's and BTS's) practicing dancing (what else?). Chanyeol is all tuckered out and decides to call it a night, while Suho stays behind. As Chanyeol leaves, he knocks a water bottle to the floor. It rolls into the path of Suho's feet. Outside the room, Chanyeol hears Suho yell. Rushing in, Chanyeol finds Suho laying on the floor gripping his leg and dramatically gritting his teeth in faux-pain, while the water bottle lurks menacingly in the background.

I think Water Bottle and Robert from Rubber would get along.

Cut back to the present, where Chanyeol has teleported upstairs and is sitting melodramatically at his desk. Or maybe he sloooowly walked upstairs, flashing back to the concert, then to being 5, then to Water Bottle's nefarious scheme.

Sehun: Why is Chanyeol acting like a zombie?

Baekhyun: Eh, he's just flashing back. He does that a lot. 

Chanyeol's Dramatic VO: "That was it. Our plans went to hell." (This sounds more like something out of a noir film/book than a webdrama.) So apparently, Chanyeol came back to Grandpa's house to find the other necklace and get his mojo back. Oh, and he also wants a "new beginning." Hey, do you think they have those at Walmart? Remembering how Yeonhee trashed his room earlier, Chanyeol gets all pissy and blames her for ruining his peaceful vacation.

Yeonhee's phone, which is still on his desk, rings. In her room, Yeonhee paces back and forth with the home phone, obviously trying to locate her cellphone by calling it. Well, at least she's being proactive about trying to locate it. Chanyeol is rude and doesn't answer. Yeonhee panics and stretches her 2 brain cells to the limit trying to remember where she last had it. Mentally, she reviews her day at EXO's house, and finally recalls that she left it on Chanyeol's desk.

*cue shrieking Psycho violins* 

Meanwhile, Chanyeol is doing what any good teenage young adult male would do: go through her phone and snicker everything in it. He finds her selfies particularly amusing and mentions "she's a freak that blushes." Thanks, Captain Obvious. 
Gaeun texts to ask if she's done "being EXO's housemaid" and if she has "anything good to share."

Chanyeol: Respect people's privacy, beeyotch.

Gaeun: *picture of murderous bunny*

Gaeun: Friends are like farts; you can't get away from them.

Me: Okay...thanks for the lovely analogy. So does this mean that Baekhyun,

Sehun, and D.O. are like Chanyeol's farts? If so, he has some really

hot farts.

Chanyeol: *is either pissed off or slightly hungry*

Gaeun: *blushing bunny*

Gaeun: Hey, do you think EXO farts too? [BAHAHAHAHA]

Me: Yeah, probably after they eat kimchi...

Chanyeol: Tell the owner to come get her phone. NOW!!

Me: >:( You're such a wet blanket. Hello, prank-texting opportunity of a 

lifetime!

But in all seriousness, I'm glad that someone finally wondered about farts in a K-drama--people just don't wonder about others' bodily functions enough.

Yeonhee screams "NO!!" (not a dramatic Darth Vader no, just a whiny no that echoes a little). Cut to her and Gaeun sitting on her bed. She begs Gaeun to come with her to get the phone. Gaeun reviews Yeonhee's "perfect trifecta" of Crimes Against EXO:  "spitting, peeping, and ransacking." Due to Yeonhee's impressive rap sheet, Gaeun refuses to be seen with her (but I bet the actress was disappointed she didn't get to meet EXO).

Gaeun and Yeonhee hear a noise outside and rush to the window. The black van is pulling away from the house, so Yeonhee decides to get her phone while EXO is away. (I originally thought that this would be a plot hole, but then I remembered her mom gave her a key to the house.) Up in his room, Chanyeol is clicking away on a keyboard. Pulling off his headphones, he sighs, rubs his face in frustration, and leaves.

"I just CAN'T remember how Hot Cross Buns goes!"

Quietly, Yeonhee tiptoes up the stairs and slips into Chanyeol's room. He is nowhere to be seen. *facepalm* He's going to come out in a towel, isn't he? *heavy sigh* The phone isn't on the desk, but is laying on Chanyeol's bed. O_o Overjoyed, Yeonhee runs to pick it up, turning her back to the bathroom door in the process. Can you guess what happens next? Yup. The bathroom door opens. DUN DUN DUN. Chanyeol comes out, wearing polka dotted leggings...and nothing else. Just kidding. He's in a bathrobe (which kind of surprised me, months of previous dramas have always yielded towel scenes--like Moorim School).

Yeonhee whirls around just as Chanyeol walks out. She stammers that she has a legit reason for being there (getting her phone) but Chanyeol accuses her of sneaking in. Yeonhee slows signs of maybe having 3 brain cells instead of 2, and tries to leave, but Chanyeol grabs her arm and roughly jerks her back. I should make a compilation of all the arm grabbing/dragging/jerking scenes in k-dramas. I wonder how many of them would NOT be guy-on-girl. Ooh, I should also make a video of all the staring scenes in my favorite dramas. It would probably be around 10 minutes--JUST for the staring.

Chanyeol: Don't you know who I am?? (lol, wonder how many times

that's worked for him)

Yeonhee: *blush*

Yeonhee: *stare*

Chanyeol: *stare*

Both: *STAAAAAARE*

Episode: That's all folks! 

Okay, so far, Kai, Chen, and Suho have appeared in addition to the main four. I

eagerly await the appearance of the rest.