Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- Note for teachers of American English
- List of phonetic symbols
- Acknowledgements
- Dutch speakers
- Speakers of Scandinavian languages
- German speakers
- French speakers
- Italian speakers
- Speakers of Spanish and Catalan
- Portuguese speakers
- Greek speakers
- Russian speakers
- Polish speakers
- Farsi speakers
- Arabic speakers
- Turkish speakers
- Speakers of South Asian languages
- Speakers of Dravidian languages
- Speakers of West African languages
- Swahili speakers
- Malay/Indonesian speakers
- Japanese speakers
- Chinese speakers
- Korean speakers
- Thai speakers
- The cassette and CD
Japanese speakers
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- Note for teachers of American English
- List of phonetic symbols
- Acknowledgements
- Dutch speakers
- Speakers of Scandinavian languages
- German speakers
- French speakers
- Italian speakers
- Speakers of Spanish and Catalan
- Portuguese speakers
- Greek speakers
- Russian speakers
- Polish speakers
- Farsi speakers
- Arabic speakers
- Turkish speakers
- Speakers of South Asian languages
- Speakers of Dravidian languages
- Speakers of West African languages
- Swahili speakers
- Malay/Indonesian speakers
- Japanese speakers
- Chinese speakers
- Korean speakers
- Thai speakers
- The cassette and CD
Summary
Distribution
JAPAN, Korea, Hawaii.
Introduction
Japanese is probably related to Korean, and possibly to Manchurian, Mongolian and Turkish too. It is not related to Chinese. In modern Japan everybody understands and can speak an approximation to the standard language, though wide dialectal variety exists.
Japanese and English speakers find each other's languages hard to learn. One reason for this is that the broad constituents of sentence structure are ordered very differently in the two languages. The following fragment from a Japanese magazine, translated word for word into English, illustrates the learner's problem:
Listener called one as-for, midnight at waking study doing be expectation of person (focus-particle) nucleus being reason is-probably.
or, less exotically:
It must mean that the audience consists of people who are presumably staying up studying late at night.
In addition to the difficulties posed by great grammatical, lexical and phonetic disparity, Japanese speakers' attitudes to language in general are heavily coloured by aspects of their own language. Firstly, ‘respect language’ is so finely graded that an out-of-context fragment of dialogue can tell the eavesdropper a great deal about the age, sex, relationship and relative status of both speakers: even a transcript bereft of such vocal clues as voice quality and articulation reveals a sensitive choice of vocabulary and grammar in this respect.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Learner EnglishA Teacher's Guide to Interference and Other Problems, pp. 296 - 309Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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