Do you have Japanese friends? If you have, how about their English?
It is said that Japanese aren’t able to understand English at all, their pronunciation skill is terrible, they speak “Japanglish”, you know.
On the other hand, it is also said that Japanese language is one of the most complex languages in the world.
Why are they not able to understand English well despite they use a complex language?
Let me explain the reasons with a point of view from a native Japanese speaker.
1. Japanese grammar is quite different from English grammar
For example, we don’t have counting nouns and articles (a / the), besides that, we often skip subjects. I mean, we often don’t need a subject in a sentence because of our grammar. It can make sense without them. That’s why our thinking way follows a quite different process compared to English speakers to begin with.
2. Japanese characters
Did you know we use 3 kinds of letters in Japanese? 50 Hiragana letters, 50 Katakana letters and so many letters which are called as Kanji.
By the way, Japanese Kanji is basically different from Chinese Kanji. Well, I will post about it in another opportunity. Anyway, I’d like to tell you that there are not Japanese letters which express only consonants, so we don’t get used to catch the sounds of a consonant only.
3. Japanese unique intonation
There are Japanese words which have the same spelling and pronunciation exactly but having a different meaning. We distinguish them with the difference of the intonation.
Since intonation is important in Japanese, we always mind it unconsciously if we try to understand English as well.
What bothersome is that it’s sometimes pretty difficult to understand it for us if non-native English speakers are speaking English because of their origin intonations.
Especially, it’s sometimes difficult to understand English which is spoken by native Italian or Spanish speakers because of their unique intonation even if they have less specific accents.
On the other hand, it is said that French speakers often have a strong French accent if they speak English, but it’s not that difficult to understand it for us because their intonation isn’t unique.
Their “h” is too weak and their “r” sounds unique but that’s all. Furthermore, I am sure their English would be quite better than English we speak to begin with.
4. The length of the sound
In Japanese, some words are distinguished with the length of the sound.
For example, A Japanese word “Obasan” has the meaning of a lady who aren’t young. Something like a madam in English, maybe.
If you pronounce the part of “ba” slightly longer than the other syllables, you refer to an old woman. It’s a small but big difference.
That’s why we tend to think if the accent is puts on a syllable the sound would be pronounced a bit longer than the other syllables.
This is a bad habit if we learn English…
5. We don’t learn Phonics at school
The biggest problem would be caused by our English education at school in my opinion.
I wonder if non-native English speakers usually learn Phonics at school. I had never heard of the word Phonics itself till I learn English again by myself.
How to pronounce is often written in Katakana above the English words when it comes to our English textbooks.
You remember what I said in No.2, don’t you? Every Japanese letter has a vowel, there are no exceptions. That means, Japanese letters can’t express English pronunciation exactly.
These Katakanas would rather confuse the learners because they express wrong pronunciations.
We learn a lot of wrong pronunciations in Katakana, that’s the reason why we are not able to catch English speakers pronunciation at all. Unfortunately, it’s not a joke…
Maybe, there would be the reasons besides them as well, but I guess that’s all of the main reasons.
Ok, that’s all today.
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