Maji de Otaku na English! Ribbon-chan: Eigo de Tatakau episode 2 is in America which would be a perfect natural time for Ribbon-chan to use English. Do they take advantage of this setting though? No the people in America speak perfect Japanese instead.
One of the biggest problems with this show is that the English is so tacked on. There is no reason for her to be holding up cards and speaking English. All of those parts are so stilted. They could have made the English fit into the show, but they are not even trying. Moetan, the show that Maji de Otaku na English! is copying, fit the teaching English portions into the story to certain degree. It was easy to tell what was going on, but it did not stick out nearly as much as the English in this show does. Right now they might as well just have her holding up and repeating the words on the cards the whole time. The phrases have nothing to do with the show, so it does not help with teaching them.
The actual show portion was not interrupted this time. They shoved all the teaching to a block at the end. It did not improve the quality of the show much though. At least they were not going over the same portion over and over though. Ribbon-chan was in a pet carrier and her friends must have been too since they somehow got sent back to Japan without her. I also have to wonder why she took a plane to New York when she was going to San Diego. Well there was not much to the story and it was all pretty much leading up to a joke about Ribbon-chan not understanding American hand gestures.
Now unto the phrases they were teaching this episode:
I know they worked really hard on this, but Eroge is not a word in English. Otherwise this sentence would be good. Also I guess it could be some kind of nerdy pick up line.
This sentence is grammatically incorrect. They could have left out the ‘an’ and it would have been ok.
Finally, a sentence with no problems in it. If only I had any idea what they need to do something about.
I know this is supposed to be a quote from someone, but it is such a mess. It looks like they took several English phrases that sounded determined and jammed them together.
The phrases from this episode and the last episode of Maji de Otaku na English! all seem to be only things you would use going to some kind of otaku event. It feels like they should have named it “Things to say when trying to get an American girlfriend.” Well even with the strange choice of phrases it would have been better if they got a native English speaker to write them. Instead they are just teaching even more Japanese to speak in broken English.
