CTJ, I LMAO, but my husband rolled his eyes when I told him.
I have an Internet friend who is Japanese. She writes English beautifully (and Italian and French and Portuguese.) She was explaining how, being Japanese, she sees writing pictorially. Her daughter lives in France and when her mother (the grandmother) wants to write to her she calls my friend to triple check the spelling on the envelope. When my friend says "m" her mother says "two mountain" and "n" is "one mountain."
But I actually think that's a large part of why you end up with Engrish. Not only are the grammatical structures foreign, the alphabet and the concept of how an alphabet is used are foreign as well. Languages like Russian, Arabic or Hebrew have different alphabets but they're still "this letter represents this sound."
I find languages fascinating, though I've yet to become proficient in any language besides English. And being a Southerner, some would argue even that.
That's interesting, about seeing writing pictorially. It seems obvious now that you said it, but it's not something I would have figured out on my own.
My son and I study Latin together, and particularly with an inflected language, a wrong translation can be a hilarious thing. It's also fun when you know just enough of a foreign language to order drinks and get thrown out of a bar. I got my French and Spanish all mixed up once in French class. I know the Spanish word for cat
el gato. And I know the French word for cake
le gateau. They sound exactly alike (well, with a Texas accent, they do). I barely managed to refrain from screaming, Ewwwwww! in class one day when a fellow student read the sentence,
Il mange le gateau. Luckily, I realized that he said, He eats the
cake, before I made an ... of myself.
