"Your English is weird"

said a Japanese co-worker....to me !
Honestly, that sentence was a blast. Being told your English is weird....by a Japanese !
You have no idea.
For those who don't know, most Japanese people suck at foreign languages. They know Japanese and....that's it.
Even after spending like 10+ years at school learning it, they can't, for most of them, make a simple sentence correctly, not to mention the complex ones...
I know that we, the French, are famous for our lack of skills in English yet we are able to make sentences correctly and pronounce the words without chopping off most of the syllabes.
Because they have this hell of an accent, which is in my opinion dictated by the "alphabet" they use for foreign words : "katakana".

Here's an example: the word "elevator", the kind of word you see everywhere here, is written　エレベーター and is pronounced "erebeta" (because that's exactly how it's written in its katakana form).
The first time you hear it and without anyone telling you what it means, you spend like 2 hours looking for its meaning.

Anyway, that will teach me to make things easier for them to understand.
I was purposely speaking slowly, using simple words, making simple sentences and lowering myself to use their horrible accent when speaking English, up to the point that recently I found it quite difficult to use English as I used to in the "old days".
But no more. I will make sure they are flooded from now on and we will see who's the weirdest of the two.

PS : if you want to see English in its full nature, as seen by Japan (and more generally, asian countries) be sure to check http://www.engrish.com.