The Japanese have a marketing culture very different from what we see in Singapore. Each and every successful commercial always seems to use some kind of rhythm and/or music. These rhythms and music are either catchy, short and simple to remember or so out-of-the-ordinary, it’s hilarious for people to want to mimick it. These tactics are their basis for exploiting the power of viral marketing it seems to be working very well. So well that I didn’t even realise the problem with the video above until recently. Watch the video again and see if you notice something that is incorrect.
I said watch it again. Don’t be lazy. The clue is in the title.
Some of you might have gotten it the first time and some the second and some, maybe not at all. But regardless, the point is in the contraction of “wanna.” In this video, it appears to be a contraction of “want a.” Ignoring the meaning of the Japanese texts (which for the purpose of this shall be introduced as a Noun phrase), although the pronunciation in the singing is perfectly fine, the subtitle should have been written as “You want a 酔わないウメッシュ” since “wanna” is a contraction of “want to” instead of “want a,” and “You want to 酔わないウメッシュ” is just grammatically unsound.
This reminded me of a class we did back in university on the same topic when I first learnt that “want to” cannot always be contracted to “wanna.” But I shall skip it since this blog will just end up looking like a textbook.
If it hasn’t already.
In American English, while “wanna” usually means “want to”, it can also mean “want a”. Most famous example I can think of is “You wanna piece of me?” Really anywhere that you say “want a”, you can replace with “wanna”. It looks a little funny if you write it, but it’s very common in spoken American English. I’ve never thought about this before, but people actually say “wannan” too if the noun starts with a vowel just like “a/an”. Haha, I’ve never once seen that written before though.
On a slightly related topic, there seem to be a lot of ads lately for non-alcoholic drinks. My wife says it’s because men want to be more alert for their family in case there is an earthquake or tsunami. I did read that the market for alcohol in Japan keeps dropping year after year, a combination of changing tastes and of course dropping population.
Yea, I thought it sounded ok but looked odd in writing.
Interesting idea on the non-alcoholic drinks issue. I’ve never really thought about why they are promoting non-alcoholic drinks that much but it does make a lot of sense.
Do they actually play the ad twice in a row on tv?
Hi Ken,
I don’t think so. I haven’t actually seen it run twice although there are commercials that run two versions one after the other.