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I have decided to write a summative task on this subject because I have some experience and observations in the area. I have observed that many Japanese have extreme difficulty pronouncing many English words correctly. The pronunciation difficulties causes some Japanese people to be reluctant to speak English, due to embarrassment, which compounds the problem. I think this struggle has two basic and fundamental causes. Most Japanese obviously have exceptional memory when it comes to reading, writing and pronouncing Japanese. For example, almost all Japanese adults have memorized and can instantly recognize two thousand or more Kanji characters. Most can also draw these characters. Some of characters are quiet intricate. I think the first reason for the difficulty originates in the use of katakana to pronounce almost all foreign words. Katakana, hiragana and kanji make up the Japanese language writing system. However, all the sounds can be represented using hiragana or katakana alone. Japanese kanji is not needed to write down the sounds of the language. Hiragana and katakana are called syllabaries. The same sounds are represented using one of these two different syallbaries depending on if the words are of Japanese origin or of foreign origin. There are 48 symbols called kana. These kana collective make up the complete hiragana and katakana syllabaries. Each of the kana represent a single sound and each kana end with a vowel sound. When a foreign word from English is pronounced in Japanese it is "katakanized". Basically, the foreign word is altered so the kana sounds are used to fit the word into the Japanese pronunciation system. For example, the word "hot" would be "hoe toe" and the word "stop" would be "sue toe poo" In Japanese, consonants always end with a vowel sound. Japanese words never end with a consonant. Japanese are often not taught to clearly distinguish this fact when studying English. I have been told some native Japanese English teachers will sometimes teach katakana when teaching English words creating great confusion. The student may believe they are correctly producing the English word. The second reason is because the Japanese language only has five basic vowel sounds. There are many more vowels sounds in English. Additionally, there are also a few very difficult consonants such as the English letters "l" and "r". These sounds do not exist in the Japanese language. Japanese students are often unable to hear native English speakers produce them, and even if they do, they still often cannot make the sound without phonetic training. Consequently, many Japanese student of English often fit the five Japanese vowel sounds to all English words with no correction, and then memorize the words with katakana pronunciation. Many Japanese learn how to read and write English without any training in English pronunciation or worse the wrong pronunciation. The confusion is compounded by the fact that English spellings often do not represent the sounds of the language and require special phonetic training. Even Japanese who become fluent in English frequently have strong accents due to the inability to make certain sounds. I believe English pronunciation is extremely challenging to Japanese students of English for these reasons. I also think this is an extremely challenging area to teach, but one of great interest and use to Japanese students studying English.
