These slogans sound "funny" in the sense of "ridiculous" to a native English speaker, because they use words in a way a native speaker would never use them. In reality, though, that is true to some extent of advertising slogans in English language commercials as well. Advertising slogans often try to be memorable by being somewhat odd.

"For Your Just" is simply wrong; it should be "Just For You". "Just" is not a noun, and only a noun could follow the possessive pronoun "your".

"Feel Wood" should be "Think Trees" or "Think Woods". In English, thinking is something one can do intentionally; feeling is how we react to what happens to us. "Wood" is the material obtained from trees, out of which one makes furniture, for example; "woods" is one possible translation of　「林」.

"For Beautiful Human Life" and "For Precious Life" are grammatically correct, but extremely unnatural. I think "life" is probably a translation of something like 「生活」, but "life" simply isn't used that way in English, and the usages of "human" and "precious" are also very odd sounding. "For Beautiful Human Life" might be something like "Makes You Feel Beautiful"; I can't even think up a possibility for "For Precious Life".

I can't figure out what "Inspire the Next" is supposed to mean. Is it that Hitachi is forward-looking and makes things which are ahead of their time? The word "next" would normally be followed by a noun.

Wood is slang for an erection, so 'feel wood' sounds like....

The others are mostly just odd, slightly wrong grammar.

The main reason people cringe when they see CMs like these is, that people use English as if they actually knew what they're doing, despite sounding like Babelfish (or Google Translate, for that matter).
This is what you'd expect from someone learning the language (it's very common to misuse terms, pick unnatural expressions etc. due to a lack of experience, knowledge or a "vocabulary in progress"), but not from someone trying to (professionally) market a product.

Another reason is, people here would feel as if producers of this kind of CM perceived their target audience as too dumb to realize what pathetic, dumb, primitive language they're using. Noone likes to be treated like Forrest Gump.

It's not very pleasant to see your mother tongue humiliated like that, literally torn to pieces.. "Katakanization" is already pretty bad, but atleast understandable. This ruthless violence towards a language, however, is just... it completely lacks respect.

I'm glad noone outside Germany/Swiss/Austria seems to want to use German for this kind of... gross... disgusting... I lack the words to express what I mean here (even in my mother tongue!) ^^

The only upside is, Japanese people sound totally cute when speaking English (and even more so, German) despite having no idea how to pronounce it ^^

In the US, there is something kind of similar to this where people will get tattoos of kanji without knowing what the characters mean. It can be funny sometimes. :)

Hi folks, thank you for leaving your interpretation and comment.

Most Japanese people think "English sounds cool", they don't notice it's wrong or sounds funny and maybe they don't mind about that. Plus we sometimes believe that such English is correct because we've seen or heard them since we were child.

I know "I'm loving it" which is a famous advertising slogan of the hamburger restaurant, and it's not grammatical in use, right? Probably English speakers feel "loving it" is slightly funny or odd, then they pay attention to it again. Yes, that is what the restaurant wants to do.

Japanese consumers tend to not look at the ordinary and usual Japanese words. And it's kind of hard to create a slogan in Japanese to attract people. I wonder whether creators have asked English speakers that their creations are correct or sound good as a slogan.

Chieさん、興味深い投稿、読ませていただきました。ありがとうございます。
アメリカでは、I'm loving it. はキャッチコピーとして受け入れられても、日本のＣＭの文言は許容範囲を超えた誤用なのでしょうか。（それとも、I'm loving it. も　日本国内用のコピーなんでしょうか。）
う～～ん、やはり native にしかわからない微妙なセンスというものがあるんでしょうねー＾＾；

Great job!


I agree with everyone's descriptions.

I love "funny English".

It's very interesting how Japanese people are interested in the English language without fully knowing the meaning of the phrases.
Many Japanese people seem to be interested in a visual sense of the words, but without learning to actually speak the language.


Maybe it's similar to how we,in the West, are interested in the unique visual characteristics of kanji, but we are too dumb in the West to learn the actual meaning.

Maybe it's the "grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" idea that many people have, or maybe we just get bored at looking at our native language.

I really want to buy some "funny English" T-shirts.
Maybe with the "Japanese Maple Leaf" like Darvish.