Once I was at a sushi restaurant and I absentmindedly bowed a bit with my hands in the prayer position.
I just said thank you when they brought my bill. I was mortified!!! I left a huge tip and never went back.
One of my local Thai restaurants has "wine by the grass" written out on the menu.
I hope most people aren't hurt when language errors seem funny, my Japanese is not even conversational much less good enough to work in food service or notice if I said something funny. Care must be taken to separate a comical difference in the way we say things from prejudice and thinking it means something about a person's humanity or intelligence.
Oh yeah, the *real* Chinese restaurants (as in, actual native Chinese people choose to eat there) have those in spades. As bad as old NES game manuals. Of course, at those places it's a courtesy that they bothered to put laowai speak on their menus at all.
CE is still used far more frequently than you'd think. I had been phasing it out for retail clients, but one of them had received brand new time clocks that ran CE
From my understanding the Japanese have a sound between R and L, but neither one on their own
Similarly, Korean transliterations of L and R use the same jamo, ᄅ. In actual use the character is pronounced like either English letter depending on where in the word it is.
In many Asian accents fried rice will come out as fly lice. So maybe stupid, but also accurate.
Also relevant, my college Chemistry teacher was going down the mole-related measurements, and noting that some students are going to have trouble confusing molarity and molality which are different things, and you may have to practice a bit.
I worked at a CD-ROM reseller in San Francisco in the 1990s staffed mostly by second-generation immigrants from China. They commonly poked fun at each other's accent, with the fly lice! thing bouncing around the room at least once a week.
