But, having said that...

There is in Japanese an increasing amount of English, pronounced with native Japanese sounds, as described in my previous post. 

In addition, there is an increasing amount of straight English written everywhere. Some of it's for tourists - not only for Americans, but as the universal language, for all non-Japanese speakers. But much of it is clearly intended for Japanese consumption. 

This reminds me of the English that was written in (what was about to become) the United States around the time of the Revolutionary War. This English was sprinkled with straight up French, or so is my impression from what I've read of it. At that time, a high percentage of those who could read and write English, knew that much French as well. 

Similar in today's Japan, I do believe. I sometimes think one could almost get away with English vocabulary in a framework of Japanese grammar, along with a sprinkling of some basic Japanese verbs. 

That is, one could possibly get by, so long as he knew how to say all those English words in Japanese. And for me at this point that is one of the most difficult parts of speaking this language. Since the borrowed English words don't sound like the originals (and don't always mean quite the same thing), one has to remember how to say each of these words. They are not logically based upon some borrowed Chinese roots as so many native Japanese words, and worse, they are seldom pronounced using the closest possible Japanese sounds. 

Indeed, the conversion to Japanese typically goes by spelling, rather than by sound, sometimes causing conflation. Lamb Raisin ice cream anyone? A friend sent me a picture, taken in Japan, of such a delicacy. The problem is that both lamb and rum became ramu in Japanese, and they don't always choose the right one on the way back out. Actually, that's not a great example of my point, because it would appear the pronunciation of rum might have been chosen for sound, or it might have turned out to be rumu.

When words come into Japanese, they typically end up full of glottal stops and long duration vowels. The idea of the glottal stop is as follows: take a word with a double consonant, such as stopped. Now say both p's when pronouncing: Stop ped. This is common in Japanese words, and used very often in borrowed words, often making them sound entirely different than they did in English. 

The long duration vowel is also used often in both native Japanese and borrowed English words. For example, the word room is ru-mu or ruumu, and it's intended that the vowel sound be held longer than for the word rumu, if there were one.

I know many foreigners who know how to order a beer in Japanese: bi-ru. If they said only biru, that would mean building because that word is typically abbreviated. Of course, a foreigner sitting in a bar or restaurant that orders a biru, doesn't end up with a $48M tab and title to the establishment, though that would certainly teach him to watch his language. But out of context this would cause confusion.