Comical Synchronicity

Most of foreign words are converted to KATAKANA characters when they are imported to Japan. Of course those 45 types of characters can not describe every words from every other country completely. We select a KATAKANA character which has most similar pronunciation to each syllable of original words. Since there is no Japanese pronunciation for both L and R, these two consonants are converted to the same Japanese consonant. So they always confuse us.
And when we pronounce those imported foreign words, we follow the pronunciations of those KATAKANAs. This custom prevents us from improving speaking foreign language.
Sometimes the same foreign word has several ways of description in KATAKANA, because those conversions are very subjective. For example, the English word "mobile" had been described like (MOHBIRU), but it has changed to (MOBAIRU) in these years.

Sometimes, those converted foreign words happen to have the same pronunciation as other Japanese words. And on rare occasions, these foreign and domestic words happen to be related in their meanings. It's so funny.

Because a new pope was elected several days ago, the word "Conclave" (the conference for election of the pope) has been seen many times on news reports. Conclave is written in KATAKANA like (KONKURAHBE) and this pronunciation is very similar to Japanese word (KONKURABE) which means "patience contest". I heard that the word "Conclave" came from the meaning of "with a key" because the voting cardinals are confined in a room not to be influenced by anyone else while the election goes on. So it's very funny since they must have been required to be patient in those several days. It's just like a patience contest, isn't it?

"Taberna", which means "restaurant" in Greek, is converted to (TABERUNA). It has the same pronunciation as (TABERUNA) which means "do not eat".

In the following examples, each pair of words does not have any relation in their meanings. But, I think they're still funny.

"Scheveningen" is a name of a place in The Hague, The Netherlands. If you write it with KATAKANA like (SUKEBENINGEN), its pronunciation changes to be the same as (SUKEBENINGEN --lechery human).

There is an island named "Erromango" in Vanuatu and it seems to be a very beautiful place to visit. But please forgive us that we can't help associate its name with (EROMANGA --erotic comics).

Her name is mostly called as (YUMA) by Japanese people because "Uma" means (UMA --horse). "Horse" may not be suitable for the name of an actress in spite of her narrow face.

I found "Bimbo" means "shallow woman" in English, "child" in Italian, "bread" in Spanish. Are they correct? In Japanese, (BINBO) means "poor".

It's easy to imagine that some opposite things can be seen. We describe beautiful things as (KIREI), but I've heard that it sounds just like a Thai word "keeree" which means "ugly".

Although it is off topic, I'm wondering what does the word "kuso" mean in Chinese. Because every time I search the word "kuso" (which means "shit" in Japanese, but it's typed with English alphabets in this case) with Google, a bunch of pages written in Chinese are hit in these years. (Don't ask why I'm doing this!) By using an online translation service, I found that "KUSO-culture" in Chinese seems to mean some hilarious or foolish things, but I'm not sure. I'm also wondering whether this came from the Japanese word or not. Please let me know if you have some information about it.