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There are plenty of stereotypical qualities of a Japanese speaking person
trying to speak English, so, would I be correct in assuming the reverse is
also the case, and if so, what would the most notable features be?

I ask this both out of curiosity and on the off chance I ever need to actually
try communicating with people in a way that doesn't result in my casual
humiliation.
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culture
What are the stereotypical qualities of a gaijin trying to speak/write Japanese to a Japanese person?
one stereotype I see on Japanese TV, and from my students' jokes, is that
Japanese people believe that foreigners will inevitably put the stresses on
the wrong syllables while speaking Japanese. The exaggerated stereotype is
usually a comical element of the stereotyped foreigner, and the syllables they
stress are, as a result, usually very comically over-stressed:

**_kon** ni **chi_** wa!

unfortunately for beginner learners of Japanese, there is a lot of truth to
this... English words of varying syllable lengths have some predictable
stressed syllables.. for example, 2-syllable nouns, adjectives, and adverbs
are usually stressed on the first syllable while 2-syllable verbs are usually
stressed on the second syllable, etc... The fact that English has these
patterns means that English speakers may unconsciously adopt these patterns
even when speaking foreign languages.

Add to that the fact that Japanese has a lot of words which are syllabically
identical (kumo for cloud and for spider, hana for flower and nose, being two
common examples) where stressing one syllable (or none) helps determine which
word is being said, and the "wrongly stressed syllable" stereotype is actually
pretty valid...

Other stereotypes I have seen involve excessive loudness, and either
intentional or unintentional rudeness based on speech form (a stereotype I am
guilty of fulfilling, still).
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Two things that I notice, at least in caricatures of non-Japanese speakers
speaking Japanese, are mistakes in the vowel sounds and in the cadence of
words.

## Vowel sounds

The Japanese vowel sounds do roughly correspond to some of the sounds in
English, but they take a while to get right. As an extreme example, consider
the pronunciation of the American English word
"[karaoke](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/karaoke)". The first part sounds
like "carry" and the second like the first half of "okie dokie". In
comparison, the pronunciation of the Japanese word "karaoke" is closer to
someone saying the words "car are OK" (although that's still not perfect, and
it may depend a lot on your accent).

For an example of a (Japanese person voice acting as a) Canadian character
speaking heavily accented Japanese, [this anime
clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L7Qt7yMsqk) shows a lot of what I'm
talking about, especially in her "Sew narn dez kar?" lines (for those
following along at home, that's meant to be "[Sou nan desu
ka?](http://delvinlanguage.com/data/segment/3268/)")

## Cadence

This is a little harder to explain, especially if you haven't learned much
Japanese yet, but it relates to the discussion about stressing the right
parts. Japanese is a language where words are made up of very specific
syllables, which means that words have a particular rhythm to them based on
those syllables, and it's very easy to pronounce words with a more English
rhythm until you get used to it.

This is not unusual - there are words in English where their more common
modern pronunciation is different to what would have traditionally been
considered "correct". A great example of this is "Wednesday", which most
people would say as "wenns dei" (two syllables). However, if you look for some
old BBC announcers saying it (since they used to have very strict rules about
pronouncing words like this, so they're a good example for these things),
you'll find that there are three distinct syllables - "wed nns dei".

In Japanese, each hiragana character you use to write a word is effectively
one "beat" of the word when you say it, and although the specific timing can
vary a bit (especially in casual speech), there are some very distinctive non-
native things that crop up.

For example, Kyoto, or to romanise it more accurately, kyouto, which consists
of 3 "beats" - kyo-u-to (although the -u- actually has the effect of
lengthening the o sound before it, so you wouldn't emphasise an "oo" sound
when pronouncing it). A common, but bad, pronunciation, separates the first
sound into two and makes it more like "kai-yo-to", almost like the start of
"coyote"; slightly better but still wrong is "kee-yo-to". The "k" and "y"
sound are part of the same beat, and should not be separated.

One set of words I have trouble distinguishing, part of which comes down to
not being able to hear the distinct timing of, are the words "kon'yaku"
(engagement, as in engagement ring), "ko'nyakku" (cognac) and "kon'nyaku"
(konjac jelly). In "kon'yaku", the sounds are "ko-n-ya-ku", noting in
particular that "n" gets a beat to itself. In "ko'nyakku", the sounds are "ko-
nya-k-ku" - the double consonant is a glottal stop, which gets a beat to
itself, while the "nya" sound is a single beat. And in "kon'nyaku", the sounds
are "ko-n-nya-ku", so there's a beat for "n" and a beat for "nya". However, if
you read those words without the deliberate punctuation to help you see where
to break, then a naive reading of "konyaku" versus "konyakku" may end up with
you splitting them along the same lines and getting at least one of them wrong
(either "ko nyaku" or "kon yakku").
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I'm not sure if this is within the scope of your question, but the following
is about _highly stereotyped_ traits of "gaijin-speech" found in manga and net
forums. They are explained in pages like
[this](https://wiki.chakuriki.net/index.php/%E3%83%99%E3%82%BF%E3%81%AA%E5%A4%96%E5%9B%BD%E4%BA%BA%E3%82%AD%E3%83%A3%E3%83%A9%E3%81%AE%E6%B3%95%E5%89%87),
[this](https://www49.atwiki.jp/aniwotawiki/pages/9328.html) and
[this](https://dic.pixiv.net/a/%E5%A4%96%E4%BA%BA). Please note that they do
_not_ reflect how foreigners speak Japanese in reality. Unsurprisingly, some
of them are rude or displeasing especially to the users of each language.

Western speakers trying to speak Japanese:

  * Wrong intonation, accent, vowel length, double consonant: ニ **ホー** ンゴ **ワー** カリマセーン, オモシローイ **デー** ス, ビ **クー** リデス
  * Trilled/rolled ラリルレロ sounds
  * Overuse of personal pronouns: ワ **ター** シ, ア **ナー** タハー
  * Unconditional sentence-end です: 見るデス, 行けデス
  * Overuse/misuse of sentence-end ナ, ヨ, etc: 本当ヨ!
  * Use of katakanized English when excited: オーノー! ワーオ! ホワット!?
  * Use of ミー and ユー as person pronouns: [ユーは何しに日本へ?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Did_You_Come_to_Japan%3F)

Chinese speakers trying to speak Japanese:

  * アル, ネー or ヨー at the end of every sentence: 私は中国人アル  
(This is based on [a pidgin Japanese
language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyowa-go) but later established as
role language. アル was rather common 30 years ago or so, but today it's usually
a rude way to simulate Chinese accent.)

  * Insertion of の between a verb and こと, とき, etc: 食べるのこと, 見るのとき

Korean speaker trying to speak Japanese:

  * ニダ (Korean copula similar to Japanese です) at the end of every sentence: 私は韓国人ニダ  
(This is almost always rude.)
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