The English mistakes Japanese speakers make, and why

Japanese speakers usually arrive at English with a large vocabulary already in hand, because thousands of English words live inside Japanese as katakana loanwords. That head start is real, and it is also the source of most of the trouble: the katakana version of a word carries Japanese sounds, Japanese rhythm, and sometimes a Japanese meaning.

L and R: one sound in Japanese, two in English

Japanese has a single liquid consonant, the sound written with ら, り, る, れ, ろ. It is usually a quick tap of the tongue, somewhere between an English /l/, an English /r/ and the /d/ in American ladder. English splits that space into two separate sounds, and swapping them changes the word: light and right, glass and grass, fly and fry, collect and correct.

The problem starts in the ear, not the mouth. If the two sounds are heard as the same thing, no amount of careful speaking will reliably separate them. So the order matters:

• Listen first. Work with minimal pairs, lead/read, lock/rock, alive/arrive, and test yourself on which one you hear before you try to say them. Laboratory studies of this exact problem found that perception training works better when the words are spoken by many different voices rather than one, so vary your sources.
• Then the tongue. For /l/, the tongue tip presses on the ridge behind the top teeth and stays there. For English /r/, the tongue tip touches nothing: it curls back slightly or bunches up, and the lips round a little. If your tongue taps something and lets go, that is the Japanese sound, and English listeners will hear it as neither.

The vowel katakana adds after every consonant

Japanese syllables almost always end in a vowel (the main exception is ん). English is full of consonant clusters and words that end in consonants, so katakana inserts a vowel to make them fit. Strike is one syllable in English and five in katakana: su-to-ra-i-ku. McDonald's becomes ma-ku-do-na-ru-do. Desk becomes de-su-ku.

The inserted vowel is predictable, which makes it easier to catch. It is usually u, but o after t and d (bed → be-do, test → te-su-to), and i after ch and j sounds (match → mat-chi, bridge → bu-rij-ji).

Two practical fixes:

• Count syllables. Clap the English word. Christmas is two claps, not five (ku-ri-su-ma-su). If you clap more times than a native speaker would, a vowel has crept in.
• Stop, don't release. English final consonants are often barely released. The /t/ at the end of hot is mostly just the tongue stopping the air. Under-pronouncing it is closer to real English than giving it a vowel.

Five vowels trying to cover about twice as many

Japanese has five vowels; English, depending on the accent, has well over ten. Katakana maps several English vowels onto one Japanese vowel, which is why hat, hut and heart tend to collapse into variations of ha. The same thing happens with consonants English has and Japanese does not: th becomes s or z (thank you → sankyu), v becomes b (very → berii), and f before some vowels becomes a soft h (coffee → koohii).

The fix is to stop learning English words through their katakana spelling. When you meet a word, learn its sound from audio, and treat the katakana version as a different word that happens to be related.

Rhythm: English squashes the small words

Japanese gives each mora roughly the same length, and every vowel keeps its full quality. English is often described as stress-timed: stressed syllables are long, loud and clear, and the unstressed syllables between them are squeezed short, with their vowels reduced to a weak "uh" sound (the schwa). In "I want to go to the park", the words to, to and the are so reduced they nearly vanish.

Speaking every syllable at equal length and volume, which is what katakana rhythm produces, is often harder for English listeners to follow than a few wrong sounds. Practise by exaggerating the stressed syllables and deliberately swallowing the rest. Where the stress goes in a word is its own set of patterns worth learning.

Articles and plurals: information Japanese leaves out

Japanese has no articles and generally does not mark nouns as singular or plural. Hon o katta can mean "I bought a book", "I bought the book" or "I bought books", and context does the work. English makes you decide every time.

• A introduces something new, or means "any one": I bought a book.
• The means your listener knows which one: The book was expensive.
• No article with a plural talks about things in general: I like books. This is the safest default when you are unsure.

Some nouns cannot be counted at all in English, even where they seem countable: information, advice, furniture, luggage, homework. "Two informations" is wrong; "two pieces of information" is right.

Wasei-eigo: English words with Japanese meanings

Wasei-eigo means "English made in Japan": words built from English parts that either do not exist in English or mean something different. They are the most dangerous kind of false friend, because they feel like English.

So "My friend is very smart" is fine, but "I made a claim at the hotel" does not say you complained, and "She lives in a mansion" suggests she is rich. "My tension is high" tells an English speaker you are stressed, which is the opposite of what you meant.

Yes and no to negative questions

Asked "You don't like coffee?", Japanese hai agrees with the question: "yes, that's right, I don't." English yes and no answer the fact, not the question. If you don't like coffee, the answer is "No, I don't", whatever form the question took. Adding the short verb after it ("No, I don't") removes any confusion, and it is what native speakers usually do anyway.

What to do about it

Treat every English word you already know through katakana as a word you still have to learn: its real sound, its real syllable count, and its real meaning. When you read English and meet one of those familiar-looking words, save the sentence it came in, not just the word. The sentence fixes the meaning in a way a translation cannot. The routine for making new words stick is here.