Pull In Japanese Hiragana,Diy Long Drawer Slides Video,Free Router Table Box Joint Jig Plans - And More
How do you say it? Did you think you were going to learn 2, discrete units of kanji and be done? Not even close. At least in Mandarin you learn one hanzi and one reading. In Japanese, kanji readings are broken up into onyomi and kunyomi.
Merciful are the handful of kanji with just one or two readings. But what exactly are onyomi and kunyomi? Well, these are the Chinese and Japanese readings, respectively. They were brought over from China a little less than two thousand years ago.
Of course, Japan already had a language, so they just mapped the word they already had onto the related kanji. Now, this gets complicated for a couple of reasons. One is that some kanji carry multiple related meanings, so when using the kanji in one definitional sense, you use one reading, versus another. Another complication is, in my opinion, even more interesting if no less frustrating.
As Chinese words joined the Japanese lexicon, they came over from different regions of China, with different dialects.
They also came over at different times, sometimes separated by centuries. As the different pronunciations arrived in Japan, they simply got appended to the list of possible readings. This is especially interesting because Japanese has acted like a sort of time capsule for researchers of classical Chinese phonetics.
Pretty neat! When do you use onyomi and when do you use kunyomi? Kunyomi is typically used when Pull In Japanese Te Form the word has kana attached to it to make a word.
Onyomi is for when the character stands alone or with other kanji. But even that bit of info only gets you so far. Because of multiple readings of kanji, your 2, journey to kanji-fluency is actually many times more difficult. But does it stop there? Oh no…. Once you can recognize them, you can start combining them.
If you can write it, even better. A truly robust understanding of kanji would be knowing at least one kunyomi and one onyomi of each kanji although some have only reading, fyi , preferably within the context of a bit of vocabulary. Writing kanji on a computer uses a sort of auto-complete system. You type out the way a kanji sounds, and the options for all kanji with that reading show up in a dropdown menu.
We can do better it turns out. I did a review a while back about WaniKani , which is a great resource for many people for learning kanji. The premise is simple. Learn some super-simple radicals. Then learn a bunch of super-simple kanji that use those radicals. Then learn some compound words that use those kanji. Then rinse and repeat with harder radicals and more complex kanji.
Do that over and over for a while and viola! My personal favorite system comes from a book I mentioned earlier in this post. This is, in my humble opinion, the best resource out there for learning kanji. It introduces kanji to you in the perfect way, balancing simplicity , frequency , and similarity.
That is to say, he starts by showing you frequent, simple kanji, and groups all the kanji that seem similar. Lots of people take their sweet time learning this stuff. Some people go all out. Become familiar with them so they stop seeming like strange squiggles on the page. About two thousand will do the trick. Now get studying! Strictly for learning to simply recognize them, you could go for anywhere between 5 and 30 a day.
Start with the radicals and use them as building blocks to learn the rest. And use mnemonics to speed things up. They are also always teaching wrong grammar to the students because they are too arrogant to check their own English. So this circle of people who can't speak a single word of correct English continues despite learning it for years in middle and high school. The quality of the textbooks IS quite low. If one is going to write about English, it would be nice not to have a grammar error in a subhead.
If you are an ESL teacher, you can pick up on the katakana pronunc. If you are a tourist good luck. Start mispronouncing Japanese and see how well it goes over The fact that you would ask this on a Japanese news website that's written in English is quite frankly disturbing. As the author pointed out, much of the internet is presented in English. With people using the internet heavily for multiple purposes, it becomes increasingly important to speak English.
Then factor in that English is one of the 5 most widely spoken languages in the world 1. The odds of meeting an English speaker is quite high. Learning English also allows for the possibility of finding work abroad, say in America, or for making business deals with corporations in other countries. Monoligualism limits the number of job opportunities a person has.
In this day and age, when multiculturalism is on the rise and with the job climate being so uncertain, learning more than language is becoming crucial as opposed to simply beneficial. As someone interested in teaching English in Japan, this article is quite troubling. It sounds as though I'd be facing challenges, especially if there isn't a serious change in the testing standards and in the available resources archaic textbooks? I'll have to keep a close eye on this situation, and see how it progresses.
The quality of foreign teachers is very low in Japan. There's a handful of good ones but the vast majority appear to be lacking in relevant experience and qualifications.
Pay peanuts get monkeys I guess. I don't disagree with the article, but it strikes me as a bit superficial. The problems of ESL go much deeper, and are in my opinion is tied to the roles assigned in the distinction between Japanese and foreign often ALT teachers.
Japanese teachers are trained and expected to explicitly teach conscious knowledge of grammar through lecturing, demonstration, and testing.
Foreign teachers are often untrained and expected to implicitly teach fluent communication through bingo, fruit basket, and whatever other "fun" activities they can think of. Neither role is an accurate representation of what is needed for language acquisition.
Students need massive input, and they need a chance to meaningfully use that input to make choices and communicate meaningful responses. In all the years I've been here, I've never seen a language class that actually provides those things.
And come to think of it, in all my years here, I have never recieved training from a Japanese person as to how to do those things. Not once. I've had lots of criticism from other foreigners, with the quality of that criticism ranging from uninformed criticism based on theories of language that were disproved in the 60s to uninformed criticism which is only provided in order to make my eikaiwa classes more profitable to some very useful criticism based on years of qualified experience - so quality was all over the map really.
But any Japanese feedback as been very tentative, far more fawning and kind than is necessary, never based on scholarship in TESOL as a science, and generally focused on small details of procedure to optimize some aspect of my efficiency- never anything about how to help me tie in my lessons to big-picture ideas coming from state-of-the-art research in the field.
And most times, Japanese superiors have been reluctant to criticize me or train me at all. So every bit of training I've ever received in this field has come from my personally seeking out training from outside the structure of the place I'm working at. Certifications, grad school, JALT workshops, my participation with all of these has been outside of the structure of my work place, occasionally even discouraged by my workplace.
Because in every EFL job I've ever worked here, the foreign teacher's job hasn't been a rung on a ladder leading to more responsibilities but a dead-end.
We get slotted into "the foreign teacher job" at whatever level of the industry our credentials allow us to reach and it's very rare that there's any thought at all given to how this job fits into a career arc. Most places I've worked at even have limited-time contracts that the foreign teacher can only renew a certain number of times, which means at that level there is a built-in cut-off to how much expertise we can build before we are out the door looking for our next dead-end.
Japanese English teachers from what I've seen have the career arc sometimes but are stuck in the same dead-end. Year after year, school after school, I see Japanese teachers who genuinely want to teach in the best way that they can, but they're overwhelmed with club duties, homerooms, meetings, and holding the hand of an often fresh-off-the-boat ALT with no expertise in how to teach their own language and often no ambition to put any more than the minimum effort to not get fired.
How are these teachers supposed to enhance their skillset and be part of the international TESOL community with so many demands placed on them? In practice, both sides have high ideals to do the best that they can, but especially at a lot of public schools serviced by dispatch ALTs or JETs, neither side knows what they're doing.
The "foreign English teacher job" has evolved into a supplement for the old and perhaps outdated notion that all Japanese teachers do is teach grammar. So the foreign teacher is expected to teach everything but grammar. Grammar was never the problem, however. Languages have grammar. Languages are learned through grammar.
It's not the lack of or presence of or degree of grammar teaching that drives EFL off- course here, it's the teaching of grammar as explicit rules rather than tools for a purpose, the assumption that grammar has been acquired because the rule was taught, and the lack of presentation and practice in meaningful contexts.
And like another person above menitoned, the assumption that an incorrect use of grammar results in complete failure to transmit meaningful information, which is what happens when you grade students' English almost explusively on their knowledge of grammar and vocabulary instead of on their ability to identify, comprehend, synthesize, and express meaningful information.
The problem is not that JTEs are bad or foreign teachers are bad or that the Japanese school system is bad. The way I see it, the problem is one of leadership. In general over the EFL field here there are too many people not working up to their potential, and the people who are in charge of them aren't leading them to be better teachers.
The teachers have to figure out how to be better teachers entirely on their own if they even have the drive and ambition to do that , because we don't have leaders, we have managers.
What a myopic statement to make. While the odds of someone possibly being assigned overseas to an English speaking country may be low, the chances that a worker in Japan may come in contact with English on a day-to-day basis is pretty high.
Just think of all the people who work at Dentsu or Hakuhodo who work in some capacity on multi-national accounts. What's more, saying this basically implies that the person never wants to have the opportunity to work for a multi-national company, which is tragic. With a 15y English teaching experience in Japan I can say that one of the main problems is the luck of a clear objective.
What does the school education is aiming at? What is the English level the students are supposed to reach? Conversation fluency? From my experience I see students who have never practiced reading and actual listening and therefore have absolutely no sense of rhythm and punctuation. If English at school is just another lesson like all the others then it as useful as the rest of the material students usually forget after graduation.
If it's supposed to actually help students to learn then I'm afraid you are asking too much. We are talking about a different form of education.
Inspirational, interesting, creative Another thing is that if English is not to be examined like all the other lessons, students lose their interest. If it is to be examined then it becomes another school subject that is to be tested in a similar way as all the other subjects.
You cannot separate English teaching from the way other subjects are taught and examined in a Japanese school. And in my opinion that's where the problem is. As I see it, at the moment, the whole thing is a complete mess. Students are stuffed with lots of grammar and vocabulary, ALTs are doing their best to teach pronunciation and communication and all is done haphazardly regardless of level or clear objective.
Not to mention messing with British vs American English. That article and the proposed changes will conflict with the three big M's what the japanese society really drives one. If you have lived in Japan long enuff and made japanese male friends who are honest to you ,they will say. And they like to keep it that way. The rest is just bullocks. And by the way Iam in this country because i like the big M's too. Just look around the globe and see for yourself where multiculture is going English is a business in Japan, not a language, so no real change to improve the overall English level will happen unless the same people are making money from the change.
The result would be instantaneous. Most Japanese don't know the root word from which the katakana derived from. Some cases in point, a certain Japanese mother I know would repeatedly scream "machigaeta" "That's wrong! That child went from having a mild interest in the piano to hating it. A coach I worked with would yell "baka ona" "stupid girl" every time a jhs athlete would cost her team a point. The young athletes would then visibly avoid contact with the ball.
Similarly, I have seen countless Japanese students so concerned about making mistakes in English that they say as little as possible almost nothing beyond "yes" and "no" knowing that doing so increases the likelihood of mistakes. Make it an option at high school and stop trying to drum it into people who don't want to learn it and will never use it or could never use it.
There are plenty of language schools around for those find they need English for work companies can and often do help with tuition or develop an interest in it. The majority of Japanese people don't need English and many would freeze like a deer in headlights if they had to use it the tour group an example of this.
Stop wasting valuable educational time and money by flogging this long dead horse. That said, I also came across a lot of foreign teachers who seemed more interested in drawing attention to their Japanese speaking ability than their student's welfare.
I suspect there is a connection. Make English an optional subject, after a year or two as mandatory, so only kids who like it will attend classes. That will make things a whole lot better for the student's remember them?
Class for an hour a day in a group lesson! Need more immersion. But that doesn't fit in with the way classes are scheduled at K It would be better to try an immersion class or self-study in the summer, when there's no regular season workload to deal with. My Chinese cousin did that and speaks English very well. For hardcopy review. Here is one reason which I feel contributes to the problem. Indians, especially in urban areas, are not just taught English, but taught all their subjects in English as well.
The Japanese learn English like the Indians would learn Sanskrit or the Brits would learn Latin - just to clear an exam. No-one became fluent in Latin or Sanskrit just by cramming a few grammar rules and vocabulary for exams. While it may be difficult to change text books to English, at the very least, the government should explore incentives for Spoken English lessons.
To those who think it is not required, as someone who worked with a major Japanese investment bank in their Tokyo, New York and London offices, I can tell you the Japanese nervousness with English is costing them, especially in industries where speed of execution is key - just take a look the IT boat which Japan missed.
Several other countries are making conscious efforts to improve their peoples' English, and the people themselves are flocking to specialist online trainers like iRikai which, incidentally has Japanese roots , EnglishClub, Duolingo and so on. With their spending power and access to networks, the Japanese have tremendous potential to pick and encourage some of these methods, but to me it just seems like they are content in a comfortable shell waving to the world as it whizzes by!
I love Japan, and I hope they take steps to integrate before they become truly noncompetitive. English education is a step in that direction. No, that is not what I am saying at all. This means that they learn that the simple past can be used in a whole load of situations where in fact it is not properly used, so that when the present perfect is finally introduced the explanation of when and where it should be used makes no sense to them, because they've already been using the simple past to do the exact same job.
It's a lot harder to unlearn something that has been learned wrong than it is to learn it right in the first place. If a passage requires the use of the present perfect and the student is not yet ready to learn the present perfect, then the use of that passage should be delayed until it is appropriate, not doctored into 'easier' but incorrect Engrish. Another gripe I have is how students are made to 'practice' the passive voice: they're taught the mechanics of how to turn the active voice into the passive voice, then given lists of contextless sentences that they're expected to convert from active to passive or vice versa, with no mention or explanation of when, why and for what purpose the passive should be used in preference to the active; it's just 'another way' of saying the same thing - which of course it isn't.
Vocabulary is another problem. Part of it is the rote learning of one-for-one vocab lists, another part is once again the inappropriate dumbing down of what the students are exposed to. I was recently asked to check the English of a passage that waxed lyrical about the UNESCO designation of traditional Japanese cuisine as an Intangible Cultural Heritage; the passage was made partly incomprehensible, partly meaningless and partly laughable by the use of 'Japanese food' throughout.
I explained that food and cuisine are not the same, and pointed out in the passage where cuisine was the appropriate choice: but cuisine , I was told, is 'too difficult' and they wanted to use food , 'because it's a word the students know'. In the end they decided to use the word washoku instead. Good luck to the student who cannot understand cuisine trying to explain to a monoglot English speaker the meaning of washoku.
That is, the actual culture of the language and the culture of the education system in Japan. The japanese education system is based on a very rote style of learning, which is great for learning kanji cos it's the only way you can learn kanji.
However, this style of learning has been adapted to teach English and it does not work. Memorising and performing conversations does not produce English speakers, simply because, no two conversations are ever the same in English, unlike Jaoanese where you can have the same basic conversation with four or five people in the same day.
Learning English is a skill and should be taught as such. It is no different to learning to cook or to build a house. It is something you learn to do! It is not something you learn to memorise.
Allow me to elaborate. I don't question the utility of learning English, nor the value of being multilingual; I think it's very valuable, and can be very rewarding.
However, I know many Japanese who would prefer to learn another Asian language or a Romance language instead. I'm not saying that anyone should be forbidden to learn English, obviously. But it seems fairly obvious to me that if you've got a bunch of students who are apathetic and who get most of their exposure to English from terrible classroom experiences rather than, you know, actually interacting with or in English on the internet, where it's so pervasive, or via media that at least part of their lack of motivation and competence might stem from the fact that they don't actually want or need to learn English.
Trust me, you can live and work perfectly well in Japan and consume all the media and internet you want without being able to speak English. Also, come on--do you really think Japanese people need to read Japan Today in English or they'll miss out? This site is obviously for native English speakers. Its existence is more or less completely irrelevant.
Anecdotally, I grew up in Texas, and we were forced to learn Spanish my town was small, and we had no other options ; Spanish was obviously the most practical choice, and there's a far better chance of interacting with a Spanish speaker in Texas than there is a fluent or native English speaker in Japan.
I did the bare minimum to pass my classes, and can stumble through a painful bit of conversation in Spanish if I want to. This is despite studying abroad in Mexico and having multiple opportunities to practice Spanish everyday in normal life, if I wanted to. On the other hand, I never had the opportunity to formally study Japanese a much, much more difficult language than Spanish, at least for the vast majority of native English speakers , but I chose it for myself, and I was extremely motivated, learned very quickly, and continue to derive great pleasure and value from Japanese.
Frankly, I find it a little disturbing that you seem to view English as the only possible foreign language of value to Japanese people, and assume that I am some sort of bizarre crusader against multiculturalism or multilingualism because I don't believe every single Japanese person should be forced to learn English whether or not they are interested or good at it, and despite the fact that other languages may be more fulfilling for them personally or professionally.
There are a ton of everyday words that are katakanized- English borrowed words. To boot, forgive the erroneous romajii I then made some KO-PIes of papers, and other office work. Shall we continue? The fact is that every day people are surrounded by borrowed words. They are used in everyday conversation without the awareness that they come from foreign languages many Japanese are unaware that "pan" is not a native word, but rather a borrowed Portuguese word , nor the knowledge of what some of the original meanings of said borrowed words are.
I cannot agree more. It seems that such lack of communication skills from our western point of view anyway is actually deeply seated in the way Japanese people communicate with each other. Most of the time, it is more like taking the situation in and making your own conclusions rather than asking questions about how things are done or should be done.
For the students, learning western style communication will also mean changing the fundamental way of how things are done in Japan. If teaching western style communication is implemented in English language classes or any other foreign language classes for that matter it may result in more people trying to proactively express their opinions to others.
This, however, will be a very big change in the centuries-old customs I cannot find a better word at the moment establishing the way in which personal and social communication is done in the country. Such changes usually take time though. It is also interesting to know just how many borrowed words there are in hiragana-Japanese. Of course, most of these were imported hundreds of years ago from China, but that's a whole other story.
Best shared over a bowl of ramen. I don't speak Japanese, so I'd be limited. What you really need to do is introduce British comedy classics like "only fools and hourses" and "faulty towers". To understand the British not American English you need to undertand our sense of humour Americans seldom understand irony - once you get us you can understand how somone can say they're their things there.
What you say is only true because of years of repeated errors by language barbarians; they've erased subtle differences through continual misuse to the point that the dictionary-compilers sigh and surrender to the inevitable. Why do we say a "school" of fish? Because some idiot coudn't spell "shoal" and other idiots copied. How about hiring teachers who are qualified as teachers in their home countries, rather than any old Joe Bloggs?
Oh, and ultimately, if Japan wanted Japanese people to be good at English, it would put a proper system in place. Bottom line is, it doesn't want them to be good at English. It takes away their Japaneseness. Well, winter is coming. I prefer this one: "A large number of educated speakers and writers, for whatever reason, object to disinterested in the sense 'uninterested, unconcerned'--a sense it previously had but lost for awhile--and want the word to have only the meaning 'impartial, unprejudiced.
That change causes no harm to language as communication. We have merely lost a synonym for impartial and gained one for indifferent. Wadsworth, Of course, most of these were imported hundreds of years ago from China.
Kanji were imported from China more than 1, years ago to write, but spoken words were not. It's Japanese from the beginning. Hiragana was created from Kanji by Japanese probably female Japanese. I think anyone who has any old degree in anything does not have the teaching skills, should be a qualified teacher teaching not some mutt who studied arts or some other irrelevant subject. With all the English teachers trying to be economists on here it maybe interfering with their classes.
Get a degree in anything and come teach English in japan sure sound s like a plan for success for the teacher and the students - NOT. Teaching a foreign language as a compulsory subject in any country is a tough sell to most kids, not all, but definitely most. And as for any subject, at least in my experience, it comes down to the teacher. Teachers make all the difference, which is why I never understood why they're treated so poorly, overworked, underpaid, and disrespected by govt officials and some parents.
Give future teachers the motivation to study hard the subject they want to teach and then we'll have competent English, math, etc teachers in the classroom. Pay a teacher well, let them rest for god's sake, and show them respect, just imagine how much better their lessons will be and how, ideally, it will motivate the kids. Especially for children's classes. They have misguided ideas that one class a week in English only is the same as immersion.
They also are going with the main purpose of pronunciation, as many falsely think that Japanese don't speak English only because they didn't hear native pronunciation early enough.
Most see home study as 'impossible' and expect to get all their English study in class. This makes for slow progress no matter how qualified the teacher. As for school English, it really needs to be cut down to more basic levels with different types of questions then are currently used.
Like Cleo said, students should understand how different basic verb tenses are USED, not just how to conjugate them. Why are they teaching relative clauses to kids who feel nervous trying to make an answer to what did you do on the weekend? The problem now is making students feel they SHOULD be able to speak English, when in fact they haven't been given the skills to do so.
Apart from quality issues in the classroom, I think Japan urgently needs to have a national debate about the reasons for learning English. When students are forced to learn a subject without understanding the reasons why, they are bound to fail. Why is English a flop in Japan? Japanese social science. This means that their approach is to make English adapt to their style of communication instead of adopting themselves to English.
Hence, wasei eigo and katakana pronunciation viewed as valid forms of English. Just watch NHK, for any length of time. English has to be cooked into yoshoku before it can be digested.
But it's much deeper than that. Japanese don't really want to learn English as much as they pretend to do. Salarymen dabble in it simply as a vehicle to arrive at a promotion; housewives and young people see it as a cool, exotic spectacle, and they just want to take a walk on the wild side for a little while.
No one really wants to communicate wholesomely with the "others". As long as this species of social science remains the criminal at large, I doubt Japanese will be successful at English, or any other foreign language for that matter.
Finally, the JTEs need to start giving classroom instructions in English. An virtual all English environment needs to be fostered. They also need to stop translating every single minute word.
Teach kids to hunt for gist. David, I misunderstood you, sorry. I was talking about original Japanese before Kanji came along. Yes, lots of borrowed words from China after that, just like English now. Well, sir. So, you say that Japanese students do not speak like a native, because they do not honor the way English speakers speak and that that comes from Japanese social science.
Did not it occur to you that it is because they are still learning? Anyone who learns English as a second language is influenced by the pronunciation system of the mother language. A French may have some difficulty in pronouncing h or th, and French accent is likely to stay with him for life. For Japanese, katakana pronunciation may improve but will not disappear completely. But I do not think Japanese accent is the "proof" of their disrespect to English.
Not entirely true. Many of the words were also imported from China as well. There are "on" readings derived from Chinese and "kun" readings derived from native Japanese.
CH3CHO - I think part of this above statement is that grammar patterns are often directly translated from Japanese phrases to English ones, making the style of English very unnatural.
I think people shouldn't worry too much about pronunciation in the early stages, but there are many cases where I have noticed students do not understand the difference between 'romaji' and 'English' which I think a lot could be solved if people stopped thinking of Katakana as English words, but Japanese words that were borrowed from English.
Katakana words are Japanese. Cleo has a good point. They are taught mistakes are to be avoided at all costs. If they do nothing and do not try to advance by doing something difficult, they will not make mistakes, so they do not try. Basically, high school English teaches that English is difficult by teaching difficult English, that English is boring by teaching what they cannot understand and is not useful and it is not worth trying as the teacher gets angry when they do because they make mistakes.
Students need to be taught that English is useful. They should learn that they may need it in the future. I grew up in Britain when there were large British companies making TVs and cars.
Japanese made cheaper and more reliable cars than the British companies did. Now Korean and Chinese are producing cheaper products and they are getting better and better. The future for Japan is not so rosy. Just look at companies like Sony and Panasonic. They need to be taught that English opens doors, gives them more opportunities. They need to be taught that with English ability, they can work in foreign countries, without they cannot.
To go back to Cleo's point about being taught mistakes are to be avoided at all costs, this is the biggest problem Japan faces. It is not only in English Japanese are afraid of taking chances. Japan will not recover economically until companies and salarymen learn to take chances, too.
To learn anything, you must try and make mistakes. Apple has made many mistakes, but their successes would never have come if they had been afraid to make another mistake. Excellent article; I hear complaints regularly from adults who supposedly learned English in school but can't put a sentence together; they're not too happy with that.
The fact is that English is a universal language and, anyone who can't speak it fluently is cutting him or herself off from many future opportunities. The Olympics are only a few years away; starting to teach English effectively now is a bit late for the majority.
Many of my japanese colleagues write well in English yet have hard time to strike meaningful conversation. They are also less likely to misspell English compared to other non native speakers. They would be better off have they loosen up and chat with anyone who comes their way. Long story short, japanese tend to develop great grammar skill but have poor command of verbal language.
Is there any other country that teaches "Romanji" english? If not, here's the answer. Stop teaching two forms of english. The rest of the world is learning "standard" english hence romaji english needs to go. You're looking at it very elementarily, I think.
I'm not referring to a simple case of accent. What I'm suggesting is that there is a blatant disregard to pronounce the words and expressions in the way that would be intelligable to a native speaker who resides neither in Japan nor is familiar with the country.
Japanese has become saturated with English words and phrases that have been shuffled into the language perversely and that sound outright strange and outlandish to native speakers of English.
This is quite evident with the cases of NHK and the slippings in of unnatural uses of English into pop songs and advertising because it's believed to lend an exotic touch to the latters. I think that this is a case of English being looked at as an abstraction, a novelty, a gimmick. And all is forgiven because English after all is the language of "them", those strange people who do and think differently from "us".
And if "we" can't pronounce anything intelligibly, then that's perfectly ok; "we're" not supposed to anyway; English is as difficult and strange as the people that speak it naturally. There's a comment from an above poster who says that her child's English teacher insists on teaching katakana pronunciation. He gets upset otherwise. Moreover, have you ever been to a sandwich shop and ordered a ham sandwich?
I was even astonished once by an ad for English lessons that promised "gaikokujin" pronunciation of English. Instead of using the word native, it never occurred to whoever that in the case of English, they were the foreigners.
But you can't blame the youth. They've been shaped and molded with this pseudo-social science. Their main purpose is to get the phone numbers of their female students. The male teachers that is! Granted, Japanese teachers of English are a mixed bag, but by the same token, native teachers are too.
The JTEs may have the qualifications to teach, but not a sufficient English level, while the native teacher has obviously native-level English, but may not be qualified as teachers - many come on the JET programme, fresh from receiving their degrees in fields completely unrelated to education TESOL or otherwise.
Of course, this is why they are placed in the ALT position - merely a teacher's assistant though this depends largely on the school and colleagues - because many lack the experience and, in most cases, the qualifications to lead a class in a constructive and goal-oriented way. The answer to this particular problem would be to get qualified English teachers and make them lead classes, with a Japanese assistant teacher to put students' minds at ease, if necessary.
Some people ask why Japan should be forced to learn English. Well, no one should be forced, but they should be made aware of the benefits of it. Considering Japanese society is was? This country used to be adored by many, but it's gradually losing grace in the public western eye, and doesn't think that it should have to do anything about it.
Well, guess what? Japan will never ever be self-sufficient, so unless anyone has a better idea, people had better pull their heads out and start conversing with their friendly neighbourhood gaijin. Just realised I used "disinterested" instead of "uninterested".
My god, sincere apologies! Unacceptable lol. Like I said before, the problem in regards to romaji is the mixing it up to English. Romaji itself is a valid thing, it is to make Japanese words most importantly names legible to non-Japanese, and provides a way to type Japanese on any computer. Whilst English tuition will always have room for improvement, what I read in the article could equally be applied to the French I received at school.
Even today, in schools across England, you'll hear horrible pronunciation that would have a Monsieur or Madame covering their ears in pain, then there's archaic language like saying bicyclette for velo.
How many schoolchildren leave school being able to hold a free-ranging conversation in French? How many are taught to pass their tests? Yes, let's improve English in Japan but let's not imagine Japan is the only country that struggles to teach its children modern foreign languages. First of all, there is very little English education here. I mean classes taught by Japanese to Japanese in Japanese using Japanese textbooks to pass a Japanese test to enter a Japanese university.
Not much room for English there Many Japanese equate learning English just with communicating with native speakers, or doing business in the US or UK. Reality is that most English speakers in the world are NOT native speakers. The idea that learning a foreign language too well by necessity means that you are somehow less Japanese.
How many times have we heard, "I'm Japanese, so English needs to be taught as a skill, like a sport, rather than as an academic endeavour. Sitting passively in class with an open book and closed mind won't do anything. Language learning requires active participation, gambling, and expecting temporary failure.
These are not things most Japanese like to do. In the U. The program requires study in a foreign language. You'd think it would be a breeze as he was already fluent in Russian, right? The program only recognized Spanish and French as acceptable "foreign languages". This was because the only foreign language teachers they had for the program taught Spanish and French.
No one would be able to evaluate his progress in Russian. Japan is in the same situation. They need to pick one language besides Japanese that can be taught early on because trying to teach a bunch of languages would mean hiring a bunch of additional language teachers. I suppose they looked at the choices the language of our allies or the language of the Communist dogs who threaten our very way of life every day and chose language used by their allies.
English is as good as any other. Each language presents a unique sound set that children - as infants Japanese Push Pull Saw - learn to differentiate.
The next few years of their lives are spent perfecting making those sounds with their mouths. If you want to see an example of how different Japanese phonetics is to English phonetics, you only need to look as far as the popular Vocaloid voice libraries used to give voice to characters such as Hatsune Miku.
Looking at it from the Japanese students' point of view, that's 2, individual sounds that they've never heard before in their lives and never had to make with their mouths. When I look at my native language from "the outside" and see just how illogically the whole thing is put together, I'm amazed we're able to communicate at all!
I have a great respect for those who can master English as a second language. Gee Cleo, don't you think that's just a tad idealistic? I was a kid once too, and I memorized lots of fun stuff as did all the other kids.
Ah, the old "Japanese kids can't learn English because it's not fun" argument. Do we really need a world full of teenagers who don't take things serious unless they're "fun"? The biggest motivation to study for teenagers all of the world is still the short-term goal i. That is why speaking should be included in tests.
The English is pretty bad here. Depends on who you happen to talk to I guess, but in Thailand, China, Korea, and Taiwan, I was able to communicate more easily. One time I went up to a Japanese guy wearing a Chelsea jersey after just watching some footy at a pub. He had a cigarette in his mouth and I said "you like Chelsea? He gave me the deer-in-the-headlights look for a whole 3 seconds, threw his cigarette onto the ground, and quickly put it out with his foot.
He then bowed to me and said "sumimasen" I'm sorry. Some very good points. I got an A in GCSE Spanish by being able to conjugate 'to be', giving directions and complaining that the shower in my hotel room wasn't working. That said, I truly believe that the English are far more forgiving of poor pronunciation than the French who tend to be a little less tolerant of this. I've often told Japanese people that their pronunciation isn't as bad as they think and I don't think it's just my ear tuned to it.
My brother who'd never visited Asia and I travelled to China and Thailand from Japan and he found Japanese people speaking English the easiest to understand. Lack of confidence is a major reason why many Japanese people are afraid to use English and they often have a very defeatist attitude.
English is the current de facto language for people that speak different languages to communicate with. England, Australia and the USA didn't go out an promote the language Who knows English makes a lot of sense.
Plus English is a very precise language Until auto-translators for all languages are perfected English will probably continue to be the language of international business.
Then they can just get rid of all the Engrish studies. Language is for communication and learning one other than mother tongue could be a challenge to many. This is common not only in Japan but in many other countries too! English language today is perhaps the only one which helps bind people from around the world!
So, efforts in mastering it will not be a waste of time! The Japanese youngsters are pretty hardworking and if they will they can too achieve proficiency in English language! I'm seeing some of the common "excuses" being raised on here, so I thought I might contribute on those:. Yes, it's unfortunate that English "belongs" to the Anglo-American western dominant hegemony. It would be better if we could push a button and get everyone learning something like Esperanto, but that's already been tried and failed.
It is at least fortunate that there is one language that is so widely spoken that it makes sense for a lot of people to use for international communication. Japan isn't the only culture to make noise about this, but from what I know it may be the worst.
Others may grumble, but considering the benefits can at least see it as a necessary evil. The article mentions China and Korea, and this is relevant. Japan has been in an economic malaise for a generation, whilst its neighbours steam ahead. Japan is basically ever becoming more and more marginalised. Another problem is that domestic conservatives and foreign fanaticists like it this way.
That would be fine, but there some to be clear reasons to suggest this isn't sustainable. The aging population being the elephant in the room here. As an aside, I taught in japan for most of the 00s. Whilst it was personally a wonderful time, professionally it was frustrating.
Whilst I got started on the eikaiwa train, I was around long enough to develop my skills and want to do a good job. Frequently, however conditions made this challenging if not impossible.
Eikaiwas are motivated by profit, but education. Public schools are mired in bureacracy and cultural restrictions. The best experiences I had were at private jnr and sort highs that were serious about something close to decent language education as a real selling point.
As another aside, i'm currently having a month off and travelling around sw Europe. At my current hostel there are people from all over, but when mingling it is taken for granted that English will be used.
As a result I've met some very interesting people, which is really the main appeal of such a trip. In these circumstances I usually see Asians not just japanese as the marginalised groups, not even able to mingle amongst themselves.
This makes me sad, since I feel they miss out on so much. Instead their trips are just trotting around eating and taking photos of buildings.
So much opportunity to grow as a person is lost and I think this is a real tragedy. Noidall, Can you pronounce a simple Japanese word the way Japanese do? Maybe you can because Japanese is easier. I always had to find out the way out by myself. It's not a blatant disregard to English. When is ISN'T about the tests. When it ISN'T about getting money into the publishing houses' pockets. When it ISN'T about using texts that are poorly themed, written and used.
When it ISN'T every student forced to study but the talented My guess here is lack of conversational speaking and writing, such as email or chat. I am coming from the other side, learning Japanese. With only my teacher and a few friends far away to speak japanese too, my written skills are better than speaking for lack of practice. There is simply no way to learn a language without practicing speaking and hearing it.
Also, the way people think is quite different between cultures. Though I will guess over the years this will change as more and more interaction between cultures occurs.
Still, I construct perfect sentences but even then to my teacher they make no sense. She always says, japanese people just would not say that. No question the effort to learn a language requires more than a multiple choice test and vocabulary. No, not the old "Japanese kids can't learn English because it's not fun" argument at all. Read again what I wrote, I expressly said things should not be reduced to 'let's enjoy Engrish'.
Another anecdote; When I started my secondary education Latin was a compulsory subject. It involved lots of memorisation of verb conjugations and noun declensions, which was hard work and frankly not much fun - but that led on to actually reading in the original stuff like the love poems of Catullus and the very words that folk like Julius Caesar had written - two thousand!!
The key is not fun but reward, satisfaction, inspiration. Sorry, that's a bit harsh. Probably a good half of the class would actually benefit from spending their time elsewhere.
Sometimes I can make out what Spanish-language TV shows are saying, if there's captions to read. Otherwise the words go by to fast, also I don't really have them correlated in my mind with the written Spanish I can understand. It is a long time since I taught Engiish, 10 years in fact.
Heaven knows how much money is wasted on English language education. I worked for one Japanese lady in Ehime who still runs schools. To her credit she had spent literally thousands of hours studying, and had learned English to a high level without spending any time overseas.
When she spoke though, it was like she was speaking Matsuyama Japanese using English words. Thought patterns were still exclusively Japanese and she was cross-culturally illiterate. As she had studied so long, any of her teachers who used English she didn't know were using 'wrong English'. At the end of the day she was making money with her school and good luck to her, but to me she encapsulated everything that was wrong with English language education in Japan.
The nature of these three areas into which comments typically fall reveals a big part of what is wrong with English education in Japan. Japan hires a bunch of inexperienced, untrained foreigners to teach English. Japan, for the most part, isn't hiring experienced, credentialed instructors. The government hires a lot of fresh college grads, many of whom never studied education, let alone language education, let alone teaching English as a foreign language.
Japan hires a lot of people who don't know what they are doing, and it's no surprise that the results are poor. Meanwhile, the teacher training system for Japanese teachers is conservative to the extreme. Prospective teachers spend very little time studying pedagogy or training as teachers in college.
Instead, they are quickly dispatched to schools, where most of their training occurs. Senior teachers model teaching practices for the new teachers, and new teachers are heavily pressured to fall in line with what their seniors advise. As a result, Japan still uses a pedagogical model that is largely rooted in the 19th century, with a bit of window dressing from the 20th century.
If Japan really were interested in English language taking root in the country, the government would invest some of that JET money in hiring foreign teachers with meaningful credentials and in sending Japanese English teachers abroad to study EFL teaching methods.
These teachers would have the training and sense to drop the grammar-translation mindset and to teach English as a communicative tool. They would give students meaningful choices in the classroom. Students would have to accomplish real tasks using language, and those tasks would form the context in which students discover the language. Students in junior high and high school would regularly be sent abroad to boost their English language skills, and schools and the government would create more opportunities in which students could encounter English within Japan.
Beyond this, the problem is simply the self-defeating mindset of Japanese people. People who think they will never master English invariably don't. I went to a high school where English was taught in a grammar class, composition class and conversation class.
We were, of course, tested for different skills in each of these classes. Japanese people in general know so much more English than American people know Spanish.
What is lacking is their listening comprehension and speaking ability. What works best for Japanese people who try to master English is to expose themselves to living English on daily bases.
If you live in area where this is not possible, you can listen to daily English conversation program on radio or TV. Get used to listening to spoken English and expressing your feeling and thoughts in English.
Let's face it - speaking in a foreign language is difficult. Some of you commenting here see things through your own perspective but forget to realise that you are highly motivated and basically smarter and more gifted linguistically than most people. There very people who will disagree with me with probably write a very nice rebuttal - but it will be something that most native English speakers would struggle to write.
Cleo, I agree with your initial comments about making mistakes. I'd put that at more than half the problem. And that persists later. How many times have you watched TV when it's all about people laughing at English mistakes. A Japanese politician giving a speech or interview will always be criticised for mistakes.
So a lot of this is cultural. Japanese have to learn to "give it a go" and realise that speaking a language is less like studying history as it is like riding a bike or playing a guitar. You will make a lot of mistakes, and you have to be prepared to make mistakes even after 20 years. For every student like you there are probably dozens who never got that far and rejoiced the day they could not have to think about Latin again.
So, it may be difficult for you to relate to the average Joe learning things. Basically, half the foreigners teaching English here wouldn't know the grammatical terms you used in some of your posts. Back to the solution.
I think three simple things would go a long way. First, start English education earlier even if its just encouraging all elementary teachers to use English words and expressions naturally in the classroom.
Secondly, they should spend 6 years learning what they now learn in 3 years. If Japanese would speak and understand the content of their Junior High textbooks, they'd be fluent.
Most kids are lost by the time they're in high school. Have many of you looked at the high school text books? It's just not necessary. Take a look at most conversation of native English speakers and you'll realise most of us speak on a very simple level. Even the President when answering questions isn't using difficult words or sentence constructions, and also includes lots of ehs etc.
Lastly, while I'll offend the guys on the JET program, maybe it would be better the other way around. Get the Japanese English teachers going overseas or somewhere in Japan where they use real English with native speakers.
Young Japanese need to see more models of older Japanese using English. I disagree, I teach occasionally and one student was actually a qualified English teacher And from what I hear from other students, she is not alone. I do not think there is any desire for foreigners guests to come in and make 'employees' look bad. I personally majored in Applied Linguistics, and I found that any time I've tried to apply what I learned, I am fought and told basically that 'Japanese people don't do things that way' Thankfully I do not work in public schools, or for a 'chain' for profit school, but getting students to change bad habits is very difficult and I find most do not want me to explain how English works, but to tell them 'the correct answer' and to fix every little pronunciation flaw so they can 'sound' like a native.
The biggest problem with conversation school is people who want a quick fix to their English woes, and think they can 'buy' English as if it were a hat you put on your head and makes you talk. Actually it's not really a rebuttal - for the most part I agree with you. Obviously for most people that 'something' will not be there for Latin, and as you say, for every student who gets their jollies from studying a dead language and splashing around in the Classics, there are dozens - probably scores hundreds?
Because it gives them nothing, and means nothing to them. But when it comes to English , the virtual lingua franca of the modern world -? How can there not be something there to appeal to anyone with a pulse and a heartbeat?
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