ESL Blogs

English Vs Japanese   By Dayne Collins - Academia ESL

Ninjas are badass, I really enjoy sashimi, and Japanese horror films are definitely the scariest.

It's no secret that Japan is the home of many interesting things. Did you know that Japan is also the home to three different writing systems? In English, we have to worry about one alphabet containing 26 letters. Japan has Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Wrap your mind around that!

Just like English, modern Japanese is commonly written from left to right, but Japanese script is traditionally written in vertical lines from top to bottom, right to left.

Believe it or not, there is a theory that the Japanese language is related to Turkish as an Altaic language, along with other languages like Korean. However, just like Korean, many argue that Japanese is a language in a league of its own.

English and Japanese have little in common when it comes to structure and grammar. These differences can create some hurdles for Japanese speakers learning English. Students should familiarize themselves with English sentence structure, tenses, and focus on the existence of auxiliary verbs.

Phonetically, Japanese learners of English may need to pay extra attention to the consonant sounds l and r, as well as particular combinations of consonant sounds that don't exist in Japanese. It is not uncommon for Japanese students to add an unnecessary vowel sound where these combinations occur.

Japanese and English are both non-tonal languages, however our rhythm and intonation is quite different. English is a stress timed language, our rhythm relies on syllable stress patterns, and our intonation is a rise and fall in pitch depending on sentence stress. Japanese a mora-timed language with pitch accents, depending on dialect. For more on Mora-timed languages visit this link http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_(linguistics)

I have had loads of fun exploring the differences between English and Japanese. As usual, if you have anything to add, please leave a comment below.

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