Teach English in Yanping Zhen - Shangluo Shi

Why do Japanese tend to have trouble with pronunciations of the English language? In the English alphabet there are 26 letters that represent not just one sound, but multiple depending on how it is used or its placement in a sentence. This is called phonetics. Phonetics is a difficult but important subject of learning to grasp and understand in order to pronounce English words properly. An example of this is in the very word “phonetic” itself. A Japanese or young learner of the English language, may see the word as is “p’ ho’ ne’ tic” without understanding the concept of the sound change when “h” is placed right after “p”. The correct pronunciation of this word is “fo’ ne’ tic”. This is just one example of many words usages in this method. Another such thing is words that are spelled the same, however pronounced differently when used in a sentence, “the dove dove into the bush.” One may wonder why the same word is placed twice, but in fact they are different words and pronunciations with the same spelling. In Japan, their writing system is not of English lettering, so although some words are said the same way, but mean different things, they can distinguish it by the symbols used, vise versa of some of the English words. The Japanese do not use individual letter, besides their five vowels, “a, i, e, u, o” and the exception of the letter “n”, rather they use over 42 syllables to pronounce their words. Unlike the English phonetics, in Japanese, there is no such thing. The vowels make one sound and one sound only. Potentially some may find that in certain situations, a Japanese speaker may drop a sound off of a syllable. Example of this is their polite sentence endings like, “desu” and “-masu”, the “u” is usually dropped and not said, so it sounds like, “des” and “-mas”. Although, at times one will hear the “u” sound, especially when the Japanese speaker is emphasizing. Becomes of this, it makes it essentially hard for a native Japanese speaker to pronounce English words. Using the word “phonetic” again, although the “ph” is not an “f”, it could be easily explained to a foreigner. Except, Japanese do not say the letter “f”. Although, it is in their writing system, it is pronounced as a “h” sound. Another problem with the word “phonetic” is the ending. The Japanese do not just have the letter “k” by itself, so most likely it would be said as “ku”. Putting this all together, rather than getting the word “phonetic”, one would hear something like, “ho’ ne’ ti’ ku”. Similar but not the same, and most likely will confuse the English listener. Japanese typically use the front of their mouth to pronounce their words, while English speakers use the front of their throat. Making the accents of words different. There are also multiple letters that are not used or pronounced the same from the language of English to Japanese. Such as “l, q, v, x” are not used, however, at times these letters will be said in order to pronounce a foreign word to the Japanese in the Japanese tongue. An example is “X-Ray”. They do say the letter “x”, but rarely, and one may find the sound “tsu” followed right after. Another to add, is the letter “r” is particularly very difficult to say for the Japanese. Because, their letter “r” is pronounced more like a “d” and a “l” sound. As a mother, mentor, or teacher will drill phonetics to native children of the English language, so too does a teacher need to do the same to students of other languages. Although naturally, a native English speaker will pick the sounds up through listening to everyday conversations, there are still those many English speakers that have trouble pronouncing a word properly. This leads to multiple English words that have several slightly different ways of saying them, which often confuses the Japanese. All in all, pronunciation of English is overall difficult even to the native English speaker, making it twice as hard for Japanese to learn.