One of the biggest difficulties in teaching English to adults in Japan is you are constantly battling against what they have previously learned. Most Japanese have studied English in some capacity for at least six years, most of which, if not all, were at the hands of a Japanese English teacher, and in some cases the teacher wasn’t even an English teacher, just a homeroom teacher reading from an English book!
What this means is that their pronunciation is awful, and their listening ability is equally dreadful. There’s a world of difference between listening to a Japanese speak English and then an Australian. They sound completely different!
It wouldn’t be so bad if English were isolated to situations requiring just English, but unfortunately, a bastardized version of English has been absorbed into Japan’s own national language. There are literally thousands of examples, many of which are abbreviations of English words that, along with different pronunciation, make them unrecognizable to native English speakers, and likewise few Japanese understand the original English versions. Here are some examples:
- aircon (air conditioner)
- super (supermarket)
- basket (basketball)
- volley (volleyball, confusingly pronounced like “ballet”)
- pato-car (police car / patrol car)
- televi (television)
- radicasse (radio-cassette player)
- potato (fried potato, used when meaning French fries)
- note (notebook)
- persocon (personal computer)
You get the idea. The problem is, most Japanese actually think these are English words, which means you have to un-teach the “English” they know, and start again. This includes going right back to basic ABCs, because…
In Japan, the letter “W” is pronounced “double”, without a “you”. They don’t seem to realize that “W” looks like it does because it’s a double “U”. This leads to the letter “W” being used to mean “double”. Here are some pictures to prove it:
A cheeseburger with W beef!
Some mints with W grapefruit!
A can of insecticide with “W jet” !
I’ll wrap up this post with a little poem I’ve written. I hope you like it.
Double With You
I thought I’d be without you for a while,
You left me and I thought I’d be okay,
I’d come back stronger, last a bit longer,
Feel double without you each day.
When you were gone I lost my will to smile,
By myself, things didn’t go my way,
Together we are stronger, last even longer,
Double me, double you, always.
