Contrastive Analysis: English and Japanese.
The majority of Japanese find learning English hard, especially learning to speak English is the hardest part for them. The main reasons of these difficulties are in English teaching system in Japan and the distinctive features of Japanese language.
In Japanese schools, English are taught as academic purposes rather than practical one. Its teaching materials are emphasized more on grammatical rules or sentence patterns rather than the pronunciations or conversation. Therefore, students perform very well on writing or reading, but they perform poorly on speaking or pronouncing. .
Learning English through this teaching system, I experienced a lot of difficulties in having a conversation. When I first started to practice a conversation, I often try to translate sentences in my mind before I actually speak it. This takes a lot of time just to say one sentence. Besides, by the time I finished saying it, I often forget the point of the subject. Because the Japanese grammatical order or composition of the sentence is completely different from those of English, it causes to have fragments by translating the sentences. Thus, it was impossible to translate Japanese into English without changing the meaning of the sentences. However, I have learned English only through reading and writing, this is the only way I found to speak English. .
The cause of the poor performance of Japanese in speaking English is not only in the English teaching system of Japan but also in the unique features of Japanese language. Japanese has less stress on words compare to English, and the sentences flows constant. Japanese find it very difficult to distinguish the stressed syllable and unstressed syllables, and this problem caused them to have wrong rhythm in speaking English.
