Getting back to karaoke, as in the subject line, this is something that goes back generations. I know it was around in the 30's and 40's and probably before that. I've seen it done on cruise ships, and some of the participants are pretty good while others are pitiful. People are generally nice enough to clap for effort even if a singer is terrible.

On our most recent cruise, they got singers from among the passengers, put them on stage with a professional band, professional dancers, backup singers and elaborate coutumes and even rehersals with a professional director. It certainly didn't sound like amateur night.
Howard

> > It's not just Japanese, it's a whole lot of languages. Finnish, German, and Spanish come right to my mind, and I'm sure there are many more. I would guess the majority of the world's languages have close to 1-to-1 correspondence between written and spoken letters. But because English does not, English speakers have trouble learning these languages.
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> What native English speakers have trouble learning to pronounce written Spanish? We may have trouble pronouncing the sounds in Spanish that we don't have (e.g. the Spanish R sounds), but I've never heard of anyone complaining that we can't figure it out because the orthography is too straightforward. "This is too simple! I can't figure it out!" Come on.
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> Part of the reason Japanese seems so easy to pronounce is because it's not a very phonetically diverse language. There is a very small phoneme set, the vowels are pretty much always pronounced identically, and there are only five vowels.
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> It's also worth noting that Japanese is really only easy to pronounce when it's been transcribed into the Latin alphabet -- actually learning to read written Japanese is probably as hard or harder as learning to read written English, since you just have to memorize thousands of unique characters that usually have zero relationship to their pronunciation. If I were to transcribe spoken English words into a phonetic alphabet, it would also be easy to pronounce.
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> Ste "Though learning to read hiragana and katakana is simple" phen