Nihongo, The Japanese Language Lesson in English

Teaching English to the Japanese isn’t always easy. To begin with the language is constructed very differently from English. Mind you, I don’t speak Japanese, but I am picking up some words and grammar as I teach them English.

Take for example the sentence, ‘I walked the dog.’ The Japanese would order the sentence ‘I (wa) dog walk (with the time marked by the context).’ The Japanese mark their nominative case of their sentences with ‘wa’ or ‘ga’. The receiver of the action, the dog, follows the doer of the action. Japanese verbs don’t decline. There isn’t a past or future tense. Past and future tense are carried by the context of the sentence. Furthermore they don’t decline for number or gender. With the example: walk, it would be I walk, he walk, she walk, they walk, it walk.

Sentences end with the word ‘des’. ‘Des’ is to show the end of the sentence. Questions end with ‘des ka’ or ‘desu ka’. Polite sentences end with ‘mashta’. ‘Mashta’ provides a softer ending to the words. Polite commands are given as questions beginning with a word equal to ‘maybe’. So if someone tells you to do something their sentence would be, ‘Maybe you would not come to school tomorrow des ka?’ Or ‘Maybe, you (wa) school not come des ka?’ In English that would be, ‘Don’t come to school tomorrow.’

The Japanese also are very passive in how they construct their sentences. Many of their sentences are constructed in the passive voice, much like this sentence is a passive sentence. In a passive sentence the ‘doer’ of the action is not readily discernable. ‘I wrote the sentence,’ Is an active sentence. ‘The sentence was written,’ is a passive sentence. What happens with this is you don’t know who is telling you what you cannot do. For example when we were exchanging money the other day, the bank ran out of forms to exchange money and they couldn’t tell us this straight out. They said, ‘maybe this can’t be done today. Maybe come back tomorrow.’

Without knowing who is telling you no or why they are telling you no, it is extremely difficult to find ways to get something done. So the passive nature of the language just compounds frustration when we are trying to accomplish something.

Underlying the passive voice and sentence construction differences is the fact that the Japanese have three alphabets. The fact that they have three of alphabets isn’t a problem; it is the fact of where these alphabets came from that creates problems. The first alphabet came from China. It is Kanji, symbols that carry meaning but do not carry phonetic markers. In China, Kanji works. Traveling across China in pre-modern times has always been difficult. So people living within mile of each other may never speak to one another because they are separated by a river or canyon, yet they are able to read the same words. So Kanji was perfect. The way words were pronounced changed greatly across China, but all of them had the same script.

The second alphabet is Hiragana. This is simply a Japanese phonetic alphabet. Japanese is a phonetic language. Even their Kanji can be written in Hiragana. In fact one of the problems with the current Japanese language is that many younger Japanese are losing their ability to interpret Kanji. When they type on a computer, the computer checks their phonetic words and changes them to Kanji. The problem comes from translating Kanji back into a phonetically recognizable word. Many Japanese have problems. I have had teachers tell me that they could not read certain Kanji words.

The final alphabet is Katakana. This alphabet is reserved for words with a foreign origin. The intent is to keep the Japanese culture pure, unsullied by foreign influences. That causes problems. Words shape how we all view the world. In fact, words create the ways we think. Democrats discovered and used this under Clinton with ‘politically correct’ speech. Bush and the Republicans perfected it by equating criticism of government policies as ‘un-American.’ What results from this third alphabet is a hyper-inflated attitude that the Japanese have about the superiority of their-own culture and language.

The instruction of English in Japan is universal, as far as I am aware. Cities such as Nishinomiya actually spend large amounts of money to bring native instructors over to teach English, but when in the schools it is very difficult to break through the attitude that has been created by Japanese culture. Japanese students approach English with a split personallity. Their government tells them they have to study the language, but their culture devalues everything foreign. So everyday, I go into a classroom I have to deal with grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, but mostly psychology.