I was watching a South Park clip of the characters speaking Japanese but the word ‘sabushii’ has me puzzled. The south park wiki says “clueless”, but I’m the one that’s absolutely clueless, because I can find no such word on jisho, or a simple google search.
So what the hell is sabushii meant to be?
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tumblr person said it’s not a real word
and i guess i’m inclined to believe them because i’m getting “sabuchii” on most scripts of the episode and it’s translated as “a-hole” or “clueless” but i can’t find it on any dictionary
wait now this is gonna haunt me whyyy would they just make up a word—
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I guess it’s supposed to be 寂しい… either way the double い makes it sound like an い adjective so there shouldn’t be a だ after it either. It isn’t like google translate Japanese and it seems like they put effort in to get the pronunciation decent, yet this line in particular seems pretty bizarre and off, so maybe the joke is that the kids are weebs and don’t speak correctly? I’ve never seen South Park so I have no idea.
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Trey Parker is fluent in Japanese, so I doubt that they’d just make something up.
The ninja episode they did had a whole song in japanese
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looks at lyrics
Oh would you look at that, my first time seeing 金玉 in the wild :DD
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wild 金玉 appears
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Carson used Ember!
It’s super effective!
Wild 金玉 is hurt by its burn!
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They did the song in Japanese BUT the singer mispronounced quite a few words to the point that it’s impossible to understand what he was saying without looking at the lyrics.
E.g. 喧嘩（けんか）is pronounced as きんか
So it wouldn’t surprise me if the voice actors in the shared video mispronounced something too.
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I’ve been summoned
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Wiki says the singer is Trey Parker.
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Then I’d doubt his fluency in Japanese. I saw an interview with him and Matt and Matt said that Trey still remembers some Japanese from his college days. Nothing about either of them being fluent.
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Yeah, the term ‘fluency’ gets thrown around alot. Outside looking in, everyone here is fluent and 上手!
I thought the episode was great though and the Chinpokomon episode is still a classic, I still have natives that bring it up to me who watched it.
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Given the nature of South Park, and how Parker and Stone do the voices, I’d bet that the language butchery is part accent, part deliberate.
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I immensely love South Park, but I have to agree with what @d-hermit said.
Just because someone studied Japanese in college, or in Japan does not mean they’re fluent.
As someone who studied Japanese many years (on and off) in college both in Japan and abroad and at what my schools considered to be the highest level, I can confidently tell you that most college students are not fluent - of course including myself.
Besides, if you look at this clip (especially the last part) you will notice the incorrect grammar usage.
Did you look up this six month old thread just to make this comment about how “high level” you are and how bad everyone else is?
This thread popped up when I was looking up the video. I am by no stretch of the imagination high level, nor do I have a strong desire to be.
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I think you’re misinterpreting his post. He’s just noting ‘fluency’ among experienced japanese learners as a valid reason for why cartman said さぶしいだね。 It’s not good to look for negativity where things are vague, because chances are there is none.
Also, as far as the six months go, many old threads pop up for new people to the forums or those that don’t browse much.
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I mean I wouldn’t take anything in that show seriously foreign language wise. In the episode I can remember that has German in it, the German is painfully mispronounced. I don’t think they’d do much better with other languages either.
Your arrogance knows no boundary
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