So-So Japanese

Please do not upset, but I would like to say it especially to American.

As I wrote before, most of Japanese doesn't have enough circuit to distinguish English sound. For long sentence, we can guess what we are told and could know what words were used, but not for short sentence.

As you know, my English is so-so even I made such an English blog. But almost every Japanese going to US (or somewhere) tend to hesitate to speak their own, in case they have someone to translate.

I always try to encourage them "Please speak yourself as possible as you could. Do not hesitate to make grammatical mistake. Since English is not our native language, nobody expects you to use perfect English. Just speak loud and slow."

It is interesting that "can" and "can't," sound almost same.

I thought that it is just Japanese hearing issue, but people say even native English speaker could misunderstand. But still, it is more difficult for Japanese.

For me, American only distinguish them the rhythm and tempo. Of course, in most of cases, people know if it is can or can't he or she want to say. But it could make serious problem at business discussion.

Do you know how long typical Japanese learns English? Now some school starts earlier than that, but officially, we start learning English from junior high school, 12 or 13 years old.

Thus, 3 years at junior high school and another 3 years at high school. Many people learn additional 4 years at university.

On the other hand, it is well known that Japanese English skill is bad especially, listening and speaking. I think that there are two major reasons.

There is one thing that you'd better to know.

Japanese reply opposite way against negative question.

For example, in case you know that a Japanese man decided no to go somewhere, and when you ask him to confirm,

As far as my experience, "How are you?" is one of the most difficult phrases to reply for most of Japanese. Of course, we learned in school how to reply.