TEFL Shirley Masachusetts

japan is an island country with one of the greatest education systems in the entire world. english became a part of the elementary school curriculum in 2011, making english classes present in grades 1-12. Twelve years of language education does not necessarily make students fluent, but it does fill them with a wealth of english knowledge (Fukada, 2010). However, japanese students still find the english language frustrating for numerous reasons, such as difficulty in pronunciation, opposite sentence structure, difference in alphabet, lack of comparison, and a lack of practical use. To begin, japanese people often have problems with english pronunciation. The japanese language is phonetic and almost every consonant sound is followed by a vowel sound, making pronunciation fairly simple. for example, banana would be very easy to pronounce, because each consonant is followed by a vowel. On the contrary, stripe is very difficult to pronounce because three consonants are together and there is a silent "e" on the end. However, the english language is full of consonant clusters and silent letters. This is completely foreign and difficult to japanese speakers and words are often pronounced with vowel sounds in between consonants (Ohata, 2004). Next, japanese students have problems with english sentence structure because it is almost the complete opposite of japanese sentence structure. The basic english structure is subject-verb-object (svo) while japanese is subject-object-verb (son) and the subject can be moved around. Essentially students have to learn to think backwards, and this is not an easy process (Shoebottom, 2011). Also, english has so many irregularities in verb conjugation, it can be overwhelming for students to recognize a past tense verb as a form of a present tense verb. This may also lead to misunderstandings with the definition of words and general sentence meaning. Moving on, the obvious difference between the roman alphabet and japanese characters may frighten any student . It will take a teacher quite a while just to teach the alphabet. Students have to remember what it was like when they were learning their own script and learn each letter an unique sound one by one (Ohata, 2004). The syllables in english are vastly different than japanese and it might be frustrating . For example, in english, "l" and "r" sound completely different, but to the japanese ear, these letters sounds exactly the same. "B" and "v" also sound similar (Shoebottom, 2011). When comparing one language to another, there are always elements that only exist in one language and not the other. This forces the students to learn parts of a language with nothing to compare them to in their own tongue. For example, articles are used in the english language to determine if the speaker is referring to a specific object or just the object in general. japanese does not have anything like this and nouns are always referred to in the general sense. "The book" or "a book" simply translates to "book." The lack of something to compare will leave students a little lost. This also applies to singular and plural form, as they are usually not conjugated in japanese, unless it is vital (500) that the listener knows something is plural. A separate counting system is used instead (Shoebottom, 2011). Finally, because japan is an island country, the people do not cross borders very often, and therefore only use their mother tongue most of the time. There is a lack of practical places to practice english and ordinary conversation skills do not develop. Millions of children are forced to learn english as school, but many only have one english lesson per week or less. They also rarely use the skills out uside of school. (Fukada 2010). Overall, japan is a country that places a high priority on learning english, but faces a lot of challenges just because the two languages are so different. The country continues to advance its english programs and but only studying helps make students more fluent. There is no easy jump from english to japanese. Fukada, Takahiro. "Elementary Schools to Get english." The japan Times . The japan Times, 29 Jun 2010. Web. 14 Jul 2012.