Why is Japanese struggling with English?

In Japanese, there are only 114 clear vowel sounds and consonants, while English has about 2100 different pronunciation mechanisms. Even if a Japanese person can perfectly read English, it might be extremely challenging to accurately pronounce those words.

medium.com - Why Japanese People Find English So Difficult | by Jason Xiao - Medium

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In the 21st century, English has undoubtedly become the language of international business and one that is required to be taught worldwide beginning sometimes from elementary school. However, despite Japan’s extremely high level of development and being a leader of a globalized economy, the English skill among its average people is far behind that of most other less developed countries in Asia. In fact, while Japan has the most foreigners teaching English in the world and English is taught at school from the 3rd grade, the average TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) score of a Japanese student is ranked disastrously low at 35 out of 36 countries in Asia. It is confounding to me that Japan’s economy relies so much on foreign investments and yet the people generally have much difficulty communicating with the most basic English. As a foreigner in Japan myself, it has also become an obstacle for me to get to know its people and not getting lost at an unfamiliar train stop. With these questions in mind, I decided to dig deeper and find out the reasons why English is spoken so poorly in Japan.

Differences in Language Structures

One of the reasons why Japanese people are poor in English is that there is a huge difference in the language structure between English and Japanese. Japanese verbs appear at the end of the sentence, while English verbs are located after the subject. When the Japanese speak English, they must think in a different order than usual.

For example: “I Love Tokyo” becomes “(I) Tokyo (ga) Love” in Japanese.

Pronunciation of Japanese is Much Simpler

In addition, the obstacles to pronunciation are also obvious. In Japanese, there are only 114 clear vowel sounds and consonants, while English has about 2100 different pronunciation mechanisms. Even if a Japanese person can perfectly read English, it might be extremely challenging to accurately pronounce those words.

Historical Reasons

The low ability to speak English in Japan may also have a lot to do with the history of foreign languages in the country. In the Edo period, Japan studied European medicine and military methods through Dutch. After the Meiji Restoration, it absorbed science and culture through the English, French and German languages. But at the time, there were very few foreigners living in Japan, and the Japanese lacked the opportunity to speak a foreign language. Thus, though many of the Japanese scholars were able to read those texts, they could not speak the languages. Those who needed to speak a foreign language were limited to government-related persons who engaged in diplomacy or international traders. So the point of learning a foreign language was not to speak it but to only to become proficient in reading.

Japan Has Never Been Colonized

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Today, countries that speak the best English in Asia are generally ones that have had a history of colonization. People in Singapore, Hong Kong, India, and the Philippines have the highest level of English proficiency in Asia, and yet they all have another thing in common which is that they all had previously been colonized by a Western power. Japan, on the other hand, has never been colonized, and in fact, it is one of the only five countries in the world that have never been colonized by a European nation. Thus, people only began to speak and learn more English in recent decades because of the growing number of tourists and foreign employees in the country.

The Influence of Japanese Loanwords “Gairaigo”

There are three types of vocabulary words in Japanese: Wago “Japanese words” (~30%), Kango “Chinese words” (~60%), Gairaigo “loanwords, mostly from English” (~10%). Though words of European origin make up of less than 10% of the entire Japanese vocabulary, they are in fact much more commonly used in daily life, especially among younger people. In Japanese, “Camera” becomes “Kamara”, “Restaurant” becomes “Resutoran”, “Light” becomes “Raito”, and “McDonald” becomes “Makudonarudo”. These words of English origin ultimately are transformed into Japanese words with Japanese pronunciations. They are similar enough to be confusing for Japanese people to switch back and forth between their original pronunciation and how they would be pronounced in their mother tongue, yet different enough to sound completely off the board to native English speakers.

So, Is the Japanese Foreign Language Pronunciation Just Bad?

This is certainly not the case. The pronunciation of Spanish and Italian is much similar to that of Japanese in which the vowels are clearly pronounced. Thus, Japanese people are easily able to pronounce Spanish, Italian, or other languages with clear sounding vowels. Once I asked a friend of mine who is originally from Tokyo about how Japanese people feel about foreigners speaking Japanese. Interestingly he told me that from the Japanese point of view, the Japanese spoken by the Anglo-Americans sounds very strange and unnatural while people who grew up speaking Spanish sound a lot more accurately when speaking Japanese. So that being said, Japanese people may not good at English, but Anglo-Americans are also very bad at pronouncing Japanese.

medium.com - Why Japanese People Find English So Difficult | by Jason Xiao - Medium

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