I suspect that’s deliberate to make someone that speaks English and doesn’t know German still get the correct impression of what it actually sounds like, rather than get the spelling right

Hot take, English got it wrong. I’ve never heard a frog make a sound like “ribbit”.

It’s a real thing. Super common in the Southern US when I was a kid.

I’ve definitely heard some sort of frog/toad make the “ribbit” sound, but I’d say the German “kwaak” is probably more common. The various Asian sounds seem odd to me though. I suppose it is entirely possible the frogs makes different sounds there.

Have you ever set by a creek on a warm summer night? It’s more like riib riib riib riib, but I can see where ribbit came from

Edit: found this which is pretty close to what I’m talking about.

Counterpoint: “Kwaak” is the sound a duck makes, so frogs gotta say something else.

Fun fact: Most frogs don’t say ribbit, but one of the earliest film sound libraries included a frog that does say ribbit, and so that sound is the sound of a frog in many films and television programs, but not in nature documentaries which record their own audio.

So much of the English speaking world, far, far more broadly than the spread of that type of frog, think frogs typically say ribbit.

If you watch a nature documentary about frogs, you’ll hear a vast array of different sounds, and this map will make much more sense.

Exactly what i was thinking, it would be like asking people what a bird sounds like and getting completely different results from different locales.