Are Japanese speakers likely to confuse "message" and "massage" in English?


I've occasionally noticed native speakers of Japanese using "massage" when
they mean "message", but I can't recall native speakers of other languages
mistaking the two. As far as I know, both "massage" and "message" have
katakana versions of the words (マッサージ and メッセージ) which seem reasonably
distinct from each other.

Are native Japanese speakers likely to confuse "message" and "massage" in
English, and if so what is it about Japanese that causes this?




Lacking a more scientific corpus of mistakes, I searched Lang-8 for pages that
contained both "message" and "massage". I got a number of matches, many of
them involving native speakers of languages other than Japanese typing
"massage" and being corrected by native speakers of English to say "message".

Incidentally, the book title "The Medium is the Massage" was the result of a
typo made during the process that the author noticed but wanted kept as-is.

This doesn't rule out differences between Japanese and English being a
contributing factor, but it makes that theory less likely.

