So why has the verbal tick been attached so firmly to Chinese anime characters?
Instead of the grammatically correct “Watashi ha Chugokujin desu” (“I am Chinese”), you’ll often hear Chinese characters saying “Watashi ha Chugokujin arimasu.”
The weird thing, though, is that you’ll rarely, if ever, hear actual Chinese learners of Japanese putting arimasu at the end of everything like this.
While they all more or less translate into English as “be,” they’re used for different situations in Japanese.