{oh christ, here I go again...}HeartbreakerByZep wrote: The thing is, English isn't like Japanese. In English we can produce an extreme variety of sounds, whereas the Japanese Language is set-up in a more structured way. Due to English's lack of structure, it would be simple as pie to have "anime" be pronounced the same way that it is done in Japanese.
That's pretty much true. English doesn't have an extreme variety at all, actually, but it does have a larger phoneme set than Japanese. The larger reasons for Engrish are
a) syllable structure. Japanese only accepts one-vowel or consonant-vowel syllables (with one CVC exception), whereas English can have as many as 6 sounds per syllable (maybe even 7, can't think of any). That causes them to totally mess up everything and insert vowels where they don't belong.
b) English's hellishly complex vowel system. Although they write differently, you could say Japanese writing only has 5 possible vowels it can indicate, and you can only pronounce each of them one way. English has 5 vowel letters responsible for 23 possible combos. Go figure.
