Anyone trying to learn a new language is going to make plenty of mistakes. And some of them just might be entertaining enough to be worth jotting down and sharing with a few friends.

This book is a collection of innocent mistakes from international college and professional students I’ve tutored in conversational and written English over the years. Laugh all you like — at least until you find yourself in their situation.

Some Words of Appreciation

As almost any Conversational English tutor will tell you, when you spend up to six hours a week talking one-on-one with someone, you’re not just meeting a student. You are developing a friendship.

From the time the idea first arose to compile this collection into a book, I have talked about it with all of my students, who without exception have been supportive, encouraging, and genuinely pleased to be of unintentional service.

So, to all of my students, a sincere thanks — for your friendship, for your enthusiasm and encouragement, and of course, for your wonderful mistakes.

And if I ever come to your country, have a pen and paper ready. I’m sure I’ll return the favor. Until then, buenos Dios! Buenos Dios!

Anyone trying to learn a new language is going to make plenty of mistakes. And some of them just might be entertaining enough to be worth jotting down and sharing with a few friends.

This book is a collection of innocent mistakes from international college and professional students I’ve tutored in conversational and written English over the years. Laugh all you like — at least until you find yourself in their situation.

Some Words of Appreciation

As almost any Conversational English tutor will tell you, when you spend up to six hours a week talking one-on-one with someone, you’re not just meeting a student. You are developing a friendship.

From the time the idea first arose to compile this collection into a book, I have talked about it with all of my students, who without exception have been supportive, encouraging, and genuinely pleased to be of unintentional service.

So, to all of my students, a sincere thanks — for your friendship, for your enthusiasm and encouragement, and of course, for your wonderful mistakes.

And if I ever come to your country, have a pen and paper ready. I’m sure I’ll return the favor. Until then, buenos Dios! Buenos Dios!

“… We keep it in our bathroom- which is actually a great compliment.”

“Some hilarious gems.  My favorite was the one about Clinton.”

“My daughter and her friends love your book. She’s in high school, and in one class they passed it around and the teacher read some.  The students thought it was great. Thanks!”

“I just wanted to say thank you for the very funny book.  Our family got plenty of chuckles, some good hard laughs, and two incidents of drinks coming out the nose.”

This book is what started the popular site InnocentEnglish.com, which is hitting 4 million visitors this week. The retail price of the book  is  $10 each, or $30 plus shipping and handling for three books. 

But with this special holiday offer, you get 3 books shipped to you- a $40 value- and each  book is signed, and if you want, inscribed with a short personalized message to the recipient. And to celebrate 4 million visitors, and  in an attempt to spread a little cheer and laughter this holiday season, I’m actually offering the books for free!

 You just pay $3.50 for shipping, handling and payment processing per book (Otherwise, I would lose too much money). That’s  about the price of a nice Christmas card. That’s  a total of only $10.50. for three  signed, personalized humor books!

This special will have to end after 200 books are given away, so if you want to give 3 or more people a cool, thoughtful personalized gift, and cross them off your list, order now. 

PLEASE NOTE:
~This short term offer is only good for the U.S.  For Canadian addresses, add $6. (Customs might attach a small customs fee to your order). Orders aren’t available to other countries at this time.
~All three books will be shipped together to one address. They are not sent individually to seperate addresses. (If you prefer to have just 1 signed book sent to someone directly, the price is the same as the three book special, so just pay with the “buy now” button and then send an email to books@InnocentEnglish.com requesting I just send one.)
~ Orders should be received within 7 days of your order, but this cannot be guaranteed. 

Ordering is as simple.

Simply order through Paypal’s trusted and secure payment system, by clicking the Buy Now button.  All books will be signed, but if you want something else written in the book, write it in the  “Any specific signing requests?” box, at paypal, or send your inscription request within one hour of your order to  books@InnocentEnglish.com .

This small, fun humor book has 400 funny mistakes, divided into over 30 categories, such as: 

A Student’s Christmas Card: May you be full of it this peaceful holiday season!  Food: Do you like this food? I made it from scratching!  Grammar: Should I have a coma in the middle of this sentence? Health: It is dangerous to smoke while you are becoming pregnant.  Music: When he was through singing he had a standing ovulation.  Parents: My bed has three blankets and a large guilt my parents gave me.  The Police Station: The police were attacked by a large group of angry mops.  Politics: The President got off the plane and gave a big kiss to the first ladder.  Recipes: Next, chop all the vegetarians into little pieces. Romance - The Beginning: I fell in love with her the first time I sawed her.  Romance – The End: We have hated each other for so long. I want to borrow the hatchet.  Politics: The President got off the plane and gave a big kiss to the first ladder. Sports: It was so exciting to watch! The cheerleaders threw up high into the air!  Traveling: You can’t sleep with me because it is too crowded. But you can probably sleep with my sister. That’s what most of my friends do when they visit.  Weddings: The groom was wearing a very nice croissant.  Weather: Rain makes old cars lust. So be careful about that. Once a car starts lusting, there’s no way to stop it!  

Another excerpt:  

Top 10 Most Romantic Lines From New English Language Students: 10. I fell in love with her the first time I sawed her. 9. He had such a worm heart. 8. We were two sheeps passing in the night. 7. We have hated each other for so long. I want to borrow the hatchet. 6. My dentist makes me blush twice a day. 5. I don’t know if he will propose, but I am expecting. 4. I have something exciting to tell you. My girlfriend and I got enraged last night! 3. The groom was wearing a very nice croissant. 2. He lifted the veal off her face and gave her a big kiss.  1. I think she is really glad she got marinated.

Order your three signed copies now. A fun, light gift for about the price of a good Christmas card.

Engrish is most often considered to be a humorous misuse of English. Engrish also refers to the deliberately careless or mistaken use of English words in advertising, for example, as an exotic embellishment. It is generally considered distinct from wasei-eigo, which refers to English-based coinages that have found common use in Japan but are unknown in English-speaking countries.

The term Engrish is considered offensive by some Japanese and a few other East Asian languages that do not have separate sounds for R and L. In the case of Japanese, the R sound is pronounced as an alveolar lateral flap, articulated with the tongue flapped against the hard palate behind the front teeth, so that it sounds like a Spanish soft R. Because Japanese does not have a separate equivalent for the English L, native Japanese speakers not fluent in English often mispronounce English words with the letter L in them. While the term mocks the accent, it is used mainly without malice in reference to humorous misuses, puns, and double enendres within written English, not difficulties in pronunciation.

Engrish can also refer to the Japanese pronunciation of English or a Japanese dialect with a number of English loanwords. Because Japanese has only five vowels, few consonant clusters and no distinction between R and L, English loanwords are often pronounced in a manner that sounds unusual and even humorous to English speakers. For example, in spoken Japanese, guitarist Eric Clapton becomes エリック・クラプトン Erikku Kuraputon, Australia becomes オーストラリア Ōsutoraria, and “McDonald’s” becomes マクドナルド Makudonarudo, which is often further abbreviated to マクド Makudo or マック Makku. Japanese uses over 600 imported English words in common speech, sometimes in abbreviated form. Examples are ハンカチ hankachi for “handkerchief”, フォーク fōku for “fork”, テーブル tēburu for “table”, プロレス puroresu for “pro wrestling”, and so on. The more outlandish and humorous the pronunciation change is, the more likely it is to be considered Engrish. Even fairly logical English loanwords in Japanese will often sound foreign and unintelligible to an English speaker, such as the use of チーズ chīzu for “cheese” when taking a photograph. These pronunciation changes are linguistically systematic and are completely unrelated to the speaker’s intelligence.

Engrish was once a frequent occurrence in consumer electronics product manuals, with phrases such as “to make speed up find up out document”, but it is less frequent today. Another source of poor translation is unchecked machine translation, such as that from the Babelfish service or Google Language Tools.

Engrish features prominently in Japanese pop culture, as some young Japanese people consider the English language to be highly fashionable. Japanese has assimilated a great deal of vocabulary from the English language, and many popular Japanese songs and television themes feature disjointed phrases in English amongst the mostly Japanese lyrics. Japanese marketing firms helped to create this popularity, and have subsequently created an enormous array of advertisements, products, and clothing marked with English phrases that seem highly amusing and/or inexplicably bizarre to a native English speaker. These new English terms are generally short-lived, as they are used more fashionably than meaningfully.

In contrast to Engrish, the term Nihonglish is occasionally heard, as well as the variant 英本語Eihongo, a combination of 英語 Eigo, the Japanese word for the English language, and 日本語 Nihongo, the Japanese word for the Japanese language. It refers to the conceptual opposite of Engrish: badly pronounced and ungrammatical Japanese produced by a native English speaker. A typical example is the American English pronunciation of こんにちは konnichiwa; rendered with an English stress pattern and phonetics as /kə.ˈni.tʃi.wɑ/ . The term Nihonglish is often found among communities of Japanese language students where Japanese can be used sporadically in English conversation much as English is used among English students in Japan. The use of Nihonglish is usually intentional, and is done with a humorous or sarcastic intent. A heavy English accent is used, indicating supposed unfamiliarity with the rules of Japanese pronunciation. It is also known for being practiced occasionally by some non-Japanese fans of Japanese animation, in such cases it is also sometimes referred to as otakuism.

Poor Chinese English (or a mixture of Chinese and English) is sometimes referred to as Chinglish. Whereas “Engrish” is generally not considered a pejorative term, on account of it often being intentional, “Chinglish” is much less neutral, implicitly ridiculing people whose native language is not English. In comparison, English speakers who embarrass themselves trying to speak other languages are sometimes described as embarazado.

Some idiosyncratic usages of English among a community that is largely bilingual (Spanglish, Yinglish, Franglais) have names with more neutral connotations, and are applied largely to people whose skills in English are more on par with those of the society in general.
“ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US”, one of the most popular and well-known Engrish phrases ever created. The infamous mistranslation occurs as part of the subtitled dialogue during the introduction to the Sega Megadrive version of the 1989 video game Zero Wing.

Some video games are particularly noteworthy for their poor Japanese-to-English translations that result in memorable Engrish phrases. The video game Samurai Spirits, for instance, used the word “Victoly” instead of “Victory” at a duel’s conclusion. Probably the most well known of these are the phrases “All your base are belong to us” from Zero Wing as well as “I feel asleep” and “The truck have started to move” from Metal Gear. Naturally, as gaming technology progressed and the mainstream appeal of gaming grew over the years giving way to larger budgets for games, these kinds of poor translations have become nearly extinct due to the hiring of more professional translators. Engrish phrases can still be found in some Japanese versions of games today, such as the popular “Shine get!” from Super Mario Sunshine, which was popular enough to be parodied in the English versions of later Mario games. Fawful of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga is loosely considered to be a parody of poor game translations as well as the less infamous “ZELLLLOOO!!! JUZDIE ZELLLOOO!!!” (which is a mistranslation of “Zero”) and “THE BADDLE HAZ JUSD BEGUNN!” of MegaMan X6.

Anime can also feature examples of Engrish which, over time, become distanced from their original intended meaning. In Dragon Ball, for instance, the character of Bulma (Buruma) was intended to be Bloomers or panties (in the sequel Dragon Ball Z, her son would be called Trunks); later, however, there are ocassions when her name is clearly spelled “B-U-L-M-A”

Another example is “Going faster is the system job” written on computer cooling-fans manufactured by a company called Titan. Engrish has featured in several episodes of the American animated series South Park. In one such episode, Good Times with Weapons, the main characters play ninja accompanied by a ridiculous song, sung in Japanese by Trey Parker, the show’s creator, that featured the chorus “let’s fighting love.”

The Pokemon game is another rich source of Engrish. For example, one Pokemon creature was intended to be named after the Greek hero “Hercules”, but when written in Japanese it appeared as “Heracures”. American translators did not recognize the famous name, and translated it back as “Heracross”, believing it to have been an unknown or possibly nonsense Japanese word.

Engrish is occasionally employed deliberately for an amusing or exotic effect, just as Chinese characters or letters of the Greek or Faux Cyrillic are equivalently used in Western society (usually incorrectly) as a graphical embellishment. Similarly, in English, umlauts, accents, Ø, and misspellings are added to give an exotic look to otherwise ordinary phrases like Mötley Crüe and Hägar the Hørrible (see heavy metal umlaut)— or Häagen-Dazs. See also French phrases used by English speakers for examples of distortion or deliberate change of meaning.

The term Engrish has been increasingly used for any occasion when English is misspelled or misused in other countries.
Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engrish
Perhaps the best known site with pictures of “Engrish” mistakes is Engrish.com

Note: The people I know who use the term “Engrish” do so as a term of endearment, out of a love of the language, not in any way that is derogitory. However, there are those who consider the term to be insensitive. I coined the term “innocent English” to refer to these mistakes as well as those of native speakers, as a more sensitive term for English mistakes.

I began adding more blooper pages, and other types of humor pages, as well as cute animal pics. For a while, I started adding a resource section with other sections, including an online degree section and a personal finance section. I thought this would be easier than starting new sites. At this point, it would be too much trouble to move them, so they remain, though in the periphery.

If you have any thoughts or concerns about the site, please feel free to contact me. My contact info is on every page, in the left navigation table.

In case you are interested, here is the text from the “about” page from when the site first opened, way back in 2004, about the funny English mistakes section (which was all the site had then):

Several years ago, on a college trip to an orphanage in Mexico, I enthusiastically greeted each of the children with “Buenos Dios! Buenos Dios!” After many puzzled looks and much laughter, a friend explained, “You’re not saying “Good day.” You’re running around shouting “Good God! Good God!”

And recently a friend of mine told me that for the first few weeks when he was teaching English in Mexico, when students and others asked him his age, he would always say the same thing: Tengo 18 anos.” He of course thought he was saying “I have 18 years”. However, his pronunciation was not quite right, so instead of saying “I have 28 years”- Tengo 28 años- he actually said- and several times- “I have 18 anuses.”

Anyone trying to learn a new language is going to make a great many mistakes. It’s a natural, unavoidable part of the process. Although I have heard a few funny stories of English speakers saying funny things while learning a new language, the process of translating it back to English and the extra steps required in explaining the mistake tend to make it little funny to English speakers. I have heard there are Japanese and Spanish websites of funny mistakes English speakers have made when trying to use those languages (and if you start one, please feel free to use the two examples above!).

I have been teaching Conversational English for about five years, and am recently finished my Masters degree in Educational Psychology, with an emphasis on TESL. I have spent over 3000 hours tutoring one-on-one with ESL students.

This website, and the book Never Lick a Gift Horse in the Mouth!
And 400 Other Innocent Mistakes From New English Language Students contain part of my collection of innocent English mistakes from international college and professional students I’ve tutored in conversational and written English over the years.

A final note, just in case anyone has any doubt:
This English mistakes on this site and in the book are very definitely not meant to be in any way judgmental or negative towards anyone or any group for whom English is not a first language. Any of us learning a new language are in the same boat (as is evidenced by several sections, even those of us for whom English IS a first language have quite a bit of trouble at times…) These mistakes are offered in the spirit of enjoying the wonderful nature of any language, in which the smallest mistake can completely change the meaning, with unexpected and often humorous results.

Is “Engrish” a rude or offensive term?

InnocentEnglish.com’s custom design was done by Cory Miller Website Designs (The parts you like are his work, the part’s you don’t are Bryant’s). The design was loosely based on a design based on a design that was based on a design created by Brian Gardner Themes and Designs.

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