Job Discussion Forums

[jwbhomer]

It's also typical of English that for every rule there is an exception.
Of course I was generalizing. Don't pick the nit too much, Bird.

[fluffyhamster]

[gaijinalways]

Japanese uses stress in the sense of long and short vowels, and these change the meanings of words (obaachan/ obachan, sake/saake, tori, torii).

As to English, the tone is used differently and the stress on different syllables is more for pronunciation than meaning changes usually, whereas Chinese the tones change the meaning depending on the tone of every syllable within a word or phrase.

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

I think people are going around in circles saying that there must be something about English that is making it difficult for native speakers of two entirely unrelated languages to learn.

There are aspects of all foreign languages that make them difficult to learn.

Example: Japanese has 'long' and 'short' vowels (actually it doesn't- it has single and double mora vowels- it's a time stress language as opposed to an accent stress language). So what? Not having them in English if anything makes it easier for kids to learn it (like going from a language where you have to learn masculin feminin and possibly neutre to having only neutre words). Is this even a big problem for English people learning Japanese? Not for most people, no. What about the number system in Japanese? It's crazy complicated. It's not in English. It's so much easier in English that it can be a problem for Japanese speakers because they are looking for something hard where there isn't anything, until they finally change their way of thinking about it and it becomes almost natural to use the two English number systems (ordinal and cardinal). The same thing happens to any foreigner who's been in Japan for more than a couple of years- they just start using the appropriate counters from having used the wrong one and been corrected, or having actually studied them...like from a BOOK or a TEACHER. Of course even listening to the correction takes an effort...so, you know...

You can talk about the phoneme structure of English being difficult for Japanese kids because English has so many more vowels than Japanese, and English has consonant clusters whereas Japanese is (in theory) consonant vowel all the time (except for the mora /n/). But have you ever actually compared an IPA chart for English and French? They're very, very different. People get by with an English accent in French, or else they manage to train themselves to make sounds that are closer to or the same as those by native French speakers. That kind of thing isn't actually a huge impediment to learning the language either. It's more of an issue if you never really even try to sound more like a Fench person than you do when speaking your native language (or even worse- refuse to even try to read the phonemes as anything other than English ones), but most people actually try when they use a foreign or second langauge.

How do so many foreigners learn the language in Japan? They are forced to use it- they are surrounded by it. Basically, they are forced to try because if they don't then they will get nothing done. What does this mean? It means they are forced TO TRY (they have heightened motivation due to the possiblity of starving in the middle of a city street because of dumnassedness that would cause them to never learn "Big(u) Mac(u) Setto wo hitotsu!") The exception is of course the people who show up and just immediately try to find a Japanese person to basically baby them, and then never really learn the language.

How is it that tonnes of Australian kids can manage to learn Japanese in a foreign language environment to the extent that they are able to come to this country and actually communicate, whereas most Japanese students won't ever attain that level of English?

They try.

Why do Japanese kids often never seem to improve?

They don't try.

You get out of life what you put into it.

[JZer]

[JZer]

[Glenski]

[And Your Bird Can Sing]

[JZer]

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

[gaijinalways]

[Llamalicious]

Why are the Japanese so poor at learning English? Learning methods may play a part...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhUFCgHJ6r4

[Sour Grape]

In my mercifully short team teaching career I never once saw a Japanese English teacher with the slightest ability to motivate the students, apart from warning them that they wouldn't get good scores in their English tests. In one class a 3rd year junior high student looked up from what he was doing and grunted something along the lines of as a Japanese person, why the hell did he have to study English? I decided to give him a serious answer, and summoned the spinster team teacher over to translate. I told him that it would be invaluable if he wanted to work anywhere else in the world or went on holiday abroad, that he'd need English to have a chance of a decent job, and that it was the law, so if he didn't like it he should complain to Mombusho. I also added that it was a great skill for impressing women. Not exactly the Gettysburg address, but the best I could come up with on the spot.

Unfortunately, it was a wasted effort anyway, as Spinster-sensei, by way of translation, merely mumbled "Gambatte ne" and pointed his attention back to [drawing Ampanman faces on] the list of about 50 past participles he was supposed to be copying out.

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

[Sour Grape]