Next time, how about heading it off then instead of being like a two-year old with a prize?
Except for the minor little bit that Japanese isn’t a tonal language.
See above.
What you’ve been taught and what you’ve learned aren’t always the same thing. In any event, my Japanese teachers said it was a difference in accent, as in emphasis, just like the accent in English is a difference in emphasis.
Speaking of heading things off…
The bit above about the two-year old with a prize is just a figure of speech I had hoped would be seen as describing the joy that the other poster would display when someone “took the bait,” so to speak. Of course, I couldn’t think of an appropriate emoticon for it either, drat!
It’s not your reading – it’s your age.
Back during WWII, the had a thing called the “Good Neighbor Policy” that encouraged friendship between the US and South America, largely in an effort to keep them away from he Axis powers. Carmen Miranda (from Brazil) became a big star up here, and Disney made cartoons with South American motifs, like Three Amigos. As a result, South American tuff got a lot of play up here. The carioca among these. IIRC, one of the cartoon characters in Three Amigos is Jose Carioca, a parrot.
Also IIRC, a lot of people in the US pronounced is “carry-okee”.
This interest in things Latin continued into the Fifties and petered out in the Sixties, when I was growing up i the cultural fallout of WWII. I recall hearing about carioca a lot, and so, I’ll bet, did most Boomers. Get a tape of Three Amigos. Or watch “I Love Lucy” reruns. Or something. Folks m age, I’ll wager, were familiar with “carry-okee”, and shoehorned “Karaoke” into that pronunciation. The first time I heard about “Karaoke singing” I thought someone had revived the Latin music (recal that I heard it – I didn’t see “Karaoke” written for quite a while after that).
I have seen similar distortions with other words. I think someone above mentioned “Hari-kari”, which is the way I first heard that term. It wasn’t until later that I read Japanese history and learned that the correct term was “hara kiri” = “belly slit”, the vulger slang for seppuku. (I prized this little gem, until Shogun came along and blabbed it to the world.) It’s still not clear to me if this is a transformation to a rhyming form, so much more common in English (“hurly burly”, helter skelter", etc.), or was based on anuncer Harry Carey.
I suppose “shushi” is out of the question too, then? 
Thanks CalMeacham, that explaination makes a lot more sense to me. (Plus it was educational!)
Monty, if English isn’t a tonal language, how come my English teachers were always talking about the tone of a passage or a word?
…and lay off my mate Tsubaki. If she’s lived in Japan and married a native AND learned the local dialect so as to make the locals slack-jawed with amazement, her opinion is as valid as your teacher’s.
Monty, if English isn’t a tonal language, how come my English teachers were always talking about the tone of a passage or a word? So it must be valid talking of the tone of a japanese word?
…and lay off my mate Tsubaki. If she’s lived in Japan and married a native AND learned the local dialect so as to make the locals slack-jawed with amazement, her opinion is as valid as your teacher’s.