ドンキは英語の使い方に注意した方が良い+英文チェックの秘訣

At Donki, I saw this sign. It says:

× Happy Price
◯ Great Price
◯ Nice Price

At least they are doing better than Yaechika over at Tokyo Station, like I described in this post; they managed to avoid using a strange exclamation point.

Let me give you a tip. Let's say you've got an English phrase you've written, but you're not quite sure if it's natural or not.

Let's say 例えば～したとすれば、仮に～したとして、～だと仮定して、まあ言ってみれば、例を挙げるならば◆【用法】単に say とだけ言う場合もある (definition from Eijiro on the Web)

Let Google help you! Go to www.google.co.jp. First, you should temporarily change your default language to English. You can do that in the top right corner of the page:




In the settings page, choose English at the top of the page:





In the search field, type your phrase, but surround it with quotation marks, like this:

• 引用符 (いんようふ) (n) quotation marks; (definition from Edict)

Be sure to use the quotation marks. They are essential. The next page will have your results, including a number of how many results. That number is in the top right corner of the page. If the number is small, it's a good clue that you might have a problem with your phrase. "Happy price" has 190,000 results, but "great price" has 8,930,000 results. "Nice price" has 920,000.

In the case of "happy price", almost none of the results on the first page are written by native English speakers. That's a good clue that it's not natural English.

Of course, you could ask me, too!