The way Brits pronounce Nissan makes me cringe

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It is so far from the Japanese pronunciation it is just awful.

I'm British myself but have learnt a bit of Japanese.

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WonkeyDonkey said:

The way Americans say Jaguar makes me cringe but that's just regional dialects for you.

Usually on Americans are much worse on pronunciations but the way they pronounce Nissan and Hyundai is a lot closer to the correct Japanese and Korean pronunciations, maybe because of the much larger number of Japanese and Koreans in the US?

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Robb F said:

So you learnt some Japanese and need to find a way to let everyone know, so you've started pronouncing Nissan in a silly way to flex your superior knowledge.

Meanwhile everyone else is trying to avoid talking to you because they don't want a smug 5 minute lecture about how "Neesarn" is actually much closer to the Japanese pronunciation

It's actually like Nees - ahn, with the emphasis on the first syllable.

Edited by DOCG on Thursday 18th June 10:24

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Wadeski said:

Pronunciation is interesting, isn't it?

Anglicized pronunciations of certain words makes you a total pleb, yet if you go around saying Paree and Barthelona you are a pompous ass. No consistency, or really, reason.

Very true, although I do err on the side of pronouncing foreign words the way they are in their language of origin.

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Cyder said:

It's going to deeply upset you when you I tell you that everyone in the UK technical centre and production plants pronounce it the UK way too isn't it? And many of us speak an element of Japanese too.

It'll make it even worse if I tell you that when I visit the Technical Centre in Japan they mispronounce English words.

I'm aware that the mispronunciation is very well established, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest considering that Nissan UK uses it in advertising (for obvious reasons).

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hyphen said:

Why didn't they spell it Nee san over here? If they spell it Nissan, we will say Nissan.

They didn't name the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo Wi did they. And so its pronounced wee and not we

I don't know why, but the Japanese character of ? is always anglicised as "ni". In Japanese Nissan is written as either ?? or ???? depending on the alphabet used.

EDIT: Seems this site cannot support Japanese characters haha