Differences between English and Japanese Grammars (Part 2) (Gillian)

In my previous article, Differences between English and Japanese Grammars (Part 1), I talked about some of the more rudimentary differences between the Grammars of English and Japanese. In this article I want to dig slightly deeper, and consider some aspects of Japanese grammar that are expressed in a completely different way to how they are expressed in English. I hope that in reading this anybody who is either hoping to earn money by teaching English, or who is struggling with some of the never-before-seen grammar of Japanese, will be somewhat clearer on these differences.

The differences I will be pointing out in this article are all verb-based. They are transitive vs. intransitive verbs, the passive form and the causative form. The reason why I have chosen to look specifically at these is because I felt that these are the most commonplace parts of Japanese grammar that seem to work completely differently to the English method. I found that when I was learning Japanese I would want to know how to say something causative, but it took a long time before I was introduced to Japanese causative forms. When I finally did learn how to use the Japanese causative form what struck me as particularly interesting was how the causative form was so different to the English form. To explain the English causative form to a native Japanese speaker when you yourself might not know what the causative form is in Japanese, would be notably difficult.


Transitive vs. Intransitive Verbs
If any of you are tugging nervously at your collars, wondering whether or not you should admit that you do not actually understand what I mean by transitive and intransitive verbs, do not worry. You are not stupid. To be quite honest, these are terms that you really do not need to know unless you are studying either a foreign language or Linguistics. So, for those of you not in the know, transitive verbs are essentially verbs that require objects. In the sentence “I stopped the car”, for example, “the car” is the necessary object. Intransitive verbs do not need objects, so in the sentence “The car stopped”, having an object would make the sentence ungrammatical.

In English, transitive and intransitive verbs are more often than not the same word. You have sentence pairings such as “I opened the door” and “The door opened”, or “Tammy dropped my mother’s vase” and “My mother’s vase dropped”. There are a few exceptions, the most well-known of which perhaps being “set” vs “sit”, as in “Will you set the box on the table?” vs. “Will you sit down?”

In Japanese, however, these verbs are often different words. For example, “I stopped the car” in Japanese is “watashi wa kuruma wo tometa” (「私は車を止めた」) while “The car stopped” is “kuruma ga tomatta” (「車が止まった」). “I dropped the vase” in Japanese is “watashi wa kabin wo otoshita” (「私は花瓶を落とした」) while “The vase dropped” is “kabin ga ochita” (「花瓶が落ちた」). Native Japanese speakers would naturally assume that English verbs would have some sort of phonetic differentiation between the transitive and intransitive as well, and hope to use that differentiation to tell the verbs apart.

The interesting thing, however, is that the phonetic difference between transitive and intransitive verbs is actually not necessary, because it is perfectly clear from the context and the surrounding words (i.e. whether there is an object (covert or not) in the sentence) if the verb is transitive or intransitive. In English we are easily able to tell the type of verb using the context and nothing else, and it would perhaps be beneficial to make sure the Japanese are aware of this.


Passive Form

In English the passive form is separable from the active form in two main ways. First, the special passive “be” is added to the perfect form: “catch” vs. “is caught”, “ate” vs. “was eaten”, “will buy” vs. “will be bought”, etc. Second, the object and the subject switch position in the passive sentence, so the object comes first in the sentence. “The policeman caught the burglar” vs. “The burglar was caught by the policeman”, “The cat ate the fish” vs. “The fish was eaten by the cat”, “The boy bought the toy train” vs. “The toy train was bought by the boy”, etc.

In Japanese, however, there is no passive “be”. Instead there is a special “passive” form, which is more or less the same for every Japanese verb. “Eat” is “taberu” (「食べる」) while “was eaten” is “taberareru” (｢食べられる｣). “Speak” is “hanasu” (｢話す｣) while “was spoken” is “hanasareru” (｢話される｣). This is fairly different from the passive “be” that we use in English, and I would argue that the Japanese passive is easier, as it is one routine change in form, while in English the phonetic realisation of the perfect “be” changes as well as the verb form, and different English verbs have different phonetic realisations of the perfect form.

While the form of the verb is completely different in both languages, and for Japanese people to learn how to say and speak and recognise the change in the English verbs will probably take some time, the passive form can at least be recognised fairly easily by the fact that the subject and object swap around the same way in both languages. So in Japanese the sentence “the cat ate the fish” would be “neko ha sakana wo tabeta” (「猫は魚を食べた」), while the sentence “The fish was eaten by the cat” would be “neko ga sakana ni taberareta”「魚が猫に食べられた」. If a native Japanese speaker understands that similarity, then hopefully the English passive form will not be as much of a struggle.


Causative Form
The causative form is when, in English, we “make someone do something” or we “let someone do something”. So instead of saying “He went home”, with the causative it would me more like “I made him go home”. Instead of “I ate cake” we would say “He let me eat cake”. These are the past forms. The present forms would be “I am making” and “I am letting”, and the future forms are “I will make” and “I will let”. These all attach to the dictionary form of the verb, with the person being caused to do something nestling in between the “let/make” and the verb.

In English we use both “let” and “make”, and these words have different connotations. “Make” implies that you are forcing the action upon an unwilling participant, while “let” implies that you are allowing a willing participate to perform the action. Interestingly enough, we can probably tell whether “let” or “make” is implied by the context of the sentence. It is as highly unlikely that we would “let” a stubborn child do their homework, as it is that we would “make” that same stubborn child spend the day in Disneyland. In Japanese both “let” and “make” are represented by the same causative form. “To make/let eat” is “tabesaseru” (｢食べさせる｣), and “to make/let go” is “ikaseru” (｢行かせる｣).

This makes things difficult for both native English speakers learning Japanese and native Japanese speakers learning English. The native English speakers have to learn how to pay more attention to the context of the sentence to determine whether the “let” or “make” meaning is implied in a Japanese sentence, while the native Japanese speakers need to remember the difference between the two words. Perhaps it would help to have explained to them the difference in meaning between “make” and “let”.


In conclusion, the differences between English and Japanese grammars are certainly there, and it helps to understand these differences if one wants to either learn the other language or teach your native language to somebody else. Often native English speakers trying to teach Japanese people how to speak English struggle with these sorts of differences, because without the knowledge of either the linguistics of the English in question, or knowledge of how the Japanese equivalent works, it is hard to explain. Hopefully this and my previous article have helped in some small way to make that job easier. Good luck with your teaching.

Differences between English and Japanese Grammars (Gillian)

In my article, The Truth behind English Conversation Classes, I mentioned that one possible way to teach Japanese people English involves comparing the grammars of the two languages. To people who do not know any Japanese, this probably is not particularly helpful advice. To you, I offer this, and my next article, Differences between English and Japanese Grammars (Part 2), as sources of reference. To people who either already know some Japanese or are interested in the linguistics of world languages, consider these articles as something of academic interest as well. I am going to talk here about some of the more noticeable differences I have discovered between English and Japanese grammar.

Often when people start learning another language, they might learn the literal words of their new language, but will not necessarily know how to put those words together. As a result, it is common for non-native speakers of a language to speak that language while using the grammar of their native language or some other language with which they are more familiar. For example, when a native French speaker attempts to say the sentence “I do not eat apples”, they may say something along the lines of “I eat not the apples”, because that sentences structure follows the word-for-word grammar of the equivalent French sentence, “Je (ne) mange pas des pommes”. Japanese speakers speaking English are just as wont to do this, and as a result their English does not sound natural. While their unnatural-sounding sentences are more often than not perfectly understandable to the ears of a native English speaker, if the Japanese person wishes to learn to speak English more like a native speaker, there are a few grammar differences that it wouldn’t hurt to have pointed out to them. These include:

• Different sentence order – This is probably one of the very first things any Japanese person is taught about English. English sentences follow a basic Subject-Verb-Object structure, so in the sentence “I ate an apple”, “I” is the subject, “ate” is the verb, and “an apple” is the object. In Japanese, however, the sentences follow a Subject-Object-Verb structure, so the sentence “I ate an apple” in Japanese, 私はりんごを食べた, literally translates to “I an apple ate”. Most Japanese people are well aware of this difference in sentence structure, but to those that are not, this is probably one of the first things they need to know.
  
• Covert vs. overt subjects – This is probably one of the main grammar differences with which both Japanese people learning English, and native English speakers learning Japanese, have trouble. Fortunately it is not a particularly debilitating problem, but not having any knowledge of this difference or forgetting about this difference results in some noticeably strange-sounding English or Japanese.
  In English, every sentence has an overt subject. This means that any sentence that does not have a spoken subject sounds strange. In the sentence “I went to the park”, “I” is the subject. Every sentence in Japanese also has a subject, but very often that subject is covert, meaning that it is not spoken/written/heard/read in the actual sentence, but it is understood through discourse and context that the subject is there. The Japanese for the sentence “I went to the park”, 公園に行った, more literally translates to “the park to went”.
  Sometimes in English the subject is also understood through discourse and context. When this happens, we will often use the word “it” to act as a subject. In Japanese this is of course not necessary. Consider the sentence “It was the first time”. A Japanese person wishing to say this in English might simply say “first time”, as that is a more literal translation of the Japanese sentence 最初だった. A native English speaker will generally understand what the Japanese person means, but the sentence does sound somewhat strange.
  
• Use of determiners – Determiners are words that come before nouns in English, whose function is to specify the noun in question. Consider the difference between saying “apple” or “person” or “pencil case”, and saying “the apple”, “a person”, “her pencil case”. Japanese has some determiners as well, or at least some words that function as determiners, so in Japanese you can literally say “her pencil case” (彼女の筆箱), or “this car” (この車), but Japanese has no “the” or “a”. So for instance, if you wanted to say "the apple" or "an apple" in Japanese, these would both translate most accurately to りんごだ or the more polite りんごです, which also just means "apple". This is a fairly significant difference between the two languages, because many of the nouns we use in English require at least a “the” or “a” before them. So it is fair to say that it is important for Japanese people to practice using “the” and “a” in a number of different contexts, if they are attempting to learn to speak English like a native speaker.
  
• Head initial vs. head final – In linguistics, the most important part of any phrase is known as the head. So in the phrase “the beautiful flower that blooms every spring”, “the beautiful flower”, as the noun, is the head. English is a head-initial language, which means that the head of a phrase comes before something like a relative clause, which is used to describe the head. Another example of this exists in the verb phrase “running like you have stolen something”, where “running” is the head of the verb phrase, and “like you have stolen something” is the prepositional phrase being used to describe the verb.
• Japanese, however, is a head-final language. Because of this, sometimes Japanese is referred to as a “suspenseful” language, because you have to wait for the whole phrase to be uttered before you know what exactly is being talked about. For example, the noun phrase “the beautiful flower that blooms every spring” in Japanese, 毎年春になると咲く美しい花, more literally translates to “every year at spring blooming beautiful flower”. “Beautiful flower”, as the head of the phrase, appears at the end. This is a difference that takes some getting used to, but as one of the fundamental syntax rules in both languages, I would say that it is a pretty important difference and one well-worth mentioning.

These are a few of the basic differences between the grammars of English and Japanese. In my next article I will look into some of the more advanced grammatical differences between the two languages. I hope that this article has been of some use to those of you who are currently teaching or are hoping to teach Japanese students English whilst in Japan. To those that are not planning on doing any such thing, I hope you have at least found this article interesting from an academic perspective.

The Truth behind English Conversation Classes (Gillian)

In my article, Part-time Work in Japan, I mentioned English conversation lessons as being one of the main ways in which foreigners in Japan try to earn money. This is hardly surprising. After all, it seems so easy. Be a native English speaker, advertise yourself as such on a special English lesson website, wait for students to come in drove begging you to speak to them in your amazing natively English way, spend an our talking to them at a cafe, and get paid roughly 2000 yen for your efforts. Some of the students might even pay for you coffee and travel costs.

To this I would say, yes, sometimes it can be just that easy. But do not be fooled. Often it is harder than it looks, for a number of reasons. While not wishing to discourage people from seeking out this line of work, I think it is well worth pointing out the possible difficulties one might incur in trying to teach English part-time.

1. Finding people to teach.
   
   This is probably the worst, and definitely the most frustrating, problem of them all. You thought that teaching English sounded like the best, easiest way to earn money in Japan? Well, so did every other native English speaker in the country. It is an incredibly competitive market, and some people will set up profiles on every English lesson website they can find and not get a response for months, or at all.
   
   To attempt to overcome this obstacle, I recommend offering negotiable fees (Japanese people like bargains as much as anybody), submitting legal documents to any website that offers it (over a secure connection, of course) in order to prove to potential students that you are a trustworthy person, posting a friendly-looking profile picture of yourself and, if possible, writing about the kinds of lessons you can offer in both languages, English first. If you just write in English prospective students might not be able to understand it, and if you just write in Japanese they might doubt your English ability, and/or be somewhat insulted at you possibly insinuating that they do not know how to read English. Other than these small measures, finding prospective students is very much pot luck, I’m afraid. Good luck.
   
2.  The student not being able to converse in English.
   
   Say a prospective student gets in contact with you, sending you an email in clumsy but relatively understandable English. You figure that his/her English is pretty good, but a little flawed in places. You arrange to meet up with them, and when the both of you sit down you ask them a question, and they stare at you as though you have just asked them to explain the principle theories behind nuclear chemistry in under five seconds. Congratulations – your student cannot speak English.
   
   This is pretty common in Japan. Most Japanese people learn the bulk of their English in middle and high school, and in Japanese middle and high school very little speaking happens in any class, let alone English. What you therefore end up with are a nation of people who can read and write basic English pretty competently, but cannot really speak it.
   
   Fortunately, this is not necessarily a difficult obstacle to overcome. Your student after all knows English, and knows how to speak. Your job here is to combine those two skills and have them speak in English. The key here is to start off simply: Ask them to talk about themselves, about their hobbies and interests, any questions they might have, etc. Encouraging your student to speak is the most important thing here. Half of speaking a foreign language is about confidence, and if the student feels that you are a friend and you are not going to laugh at them for having clumsy English, they will be more apt to speak. There is no singular method for tackling this possible obstacle, but I would say that it is important to be aware of the obstacle’s existence.
   
3.  Your student cannot even write in English.
   
   Japanese people wanting to learn English come in a variety of flavours. The younger students (16 to early 20s) are generally going to be the aforementioned good-writer-bad-speaker type, as the English they learned in school will still be relatively intact in their heads. Students any older than this will have probably all but forgotten their high-school English. Unless a non-native speaker of any language is in contact with other speakers of that language on a relatively frequent basis, that language ability starts to fade.
   
   If your student appears to be like this, conversing with them straight away will probably not do very much for them. What you are saying will sound like gibberish to them. Before more fluent conversation is possible, it is likely that you will have to become their grammar teacher. Teaching the grammar of your native language is not as easy as it sounds, because although you yourself know the grammar, you have never had to consciously learn the rules of that grammar. You simply acquired it as a very young child. If you are a native English speaker like me, for example, consider how you have always known to change the form of the verb according to the person: “I know”, “You know”, “He/She/It knows”. Non-native speakers do not innately know about this rule – they have to be taught it.
   
   The easiest way to teach English grammar, I find, is to compare it with Japanese grammar. I will talk about common differences between the two languages in my next article, Differences between English and Japanese. If you are a learner of Japanese you probably know these differences.
   
   Another useful thing to do is ask your student if there are any grammar points in particular that they wish to learn. Your student might, for example, say that they want to learn how to say longer sentences (in which case relative clauses and conjunctions would be important), they might say they want to know how to give directions (in which case talking about prepositions, and the subtle differences between ‘on’ and ‘above’ or ‘over’, might be a good starting point), or they might say that they want to learn more conversational English (in which case, you would do well to talk about word shortening in words like ‘don’t’ and ‘gonna’).
   
   The bottom line here is that you might need to start off as a grammar teacher before you can become a conversation teacher, so be prepared for that possibility.
   
4. Not knowing what to talk about.
   
   This can be surprisingly debilitating. The thing about learning is that it happens most efficiently when you can relate what you are learning to something that interests you. For example, when I am learning a new grammar point in Japanese I try to think up examples relating to my family, or to my pets. Linking the grammar point to something I am interested in helps me to remember it.
   
   Conversation classes are no different. For this, I recommend that you take some time to learn about your student before you try to teach them anything. Find out what their hobbies are, why they wish to learn English, do they have a husband/wife/child/pet, etc. Having found out about your student, you should try to engage them in conversation about something that you know interests them. For one thing this makes the student want to speak more, which is what the class is all about. For another, if there is some new grammar point you end up teaching them while conversing about that topic of interest, they will most probably remember it better because they can associate it with something they like. You can encourage your student to remember in this way as well.

In short, English teaching might seem like the easy option for many, but it is important to bear in mind that your students want to learn, and in many cases simply talking to them in English might not be enough for them. Don’t forget, your students can quite easily say that they do not want lessons from you anymore, so you have to make sure that they are satisfied with your service if you still want to be paid. But if you manage to figure out an effective teaching method, English conversation classes are an incredibly rewarding experience, and well worth trying while on exchange if you are considering a career in teaching in the future. Good luck and happy teaching.

Part-time Work in Japan (Gillian)

Those of you planning to come to Japan as university students are probably worried about a few things. Issues concerning foreign registration, adhering to Japanese laws (particularly laws involving recreational drugs and alcohol), the possible language barrier and a university life that may be wildly different to that in your own country, are some of the primary issues that I was worried about before arriving in Japan. Probably one of the most troublesome worries concerns part-time work. We all need money, after all, and for some the best way to obtain money is to work part-time. However, is this a feasible option in Japan?

In short, yes, it is possible, but part-time jobs in Japan are somewhat different to part-time jobs in English-speaking countries. For one thing, as a foreigner on a (most likely) student visa, you will have to obtain a permit giving permission to engage in an activity other than that stated on your visa before you can engage in any part-time work at all. Also some jobs, such as working in bars or clubs, are not allowed under any circumstances under the terms of your student visa. Furthermore (and this might be the biggest hindrance you will encounter in finding part-time work), being a foreigner in Japan is a far more noticeable thing than it is in English-speaking countries. Many places of employment (shops, restaurants, convenience stores, cafes, fast food outlets etc) either wish to preserve a Japanese image, or are run by people who dislike foreigners. So unless you happen to be a foreigner of south-east Asian ethnicity who looks particularly Japanese, there is a good chance that you will be denied any chance of an interview.

This attitude is pretty unthinkable in English-speaking countries. Admittedly in some English-speaking countries you might encounter some racial discrimination when it comes to finding part-time jobs (some places advertise part-time jobs in different languages, others only seem to have staff of a particular ethnicity, etc), the places that do that are an unquestionable minority. This is not so in Japan, unfortunately, and many foreigners who have tried to find part-time work in Japan have a horror story or two to share.

However, fear not! Not all hope is lost. There are a few ways in which you can earn money in Japan without having to resort to desperate measures. These include:

• English teaching – This is admittedly a very competitive market, because every native English speaker, and a fair few non-native speakers, wanting extra money turn to holding one-on-one English conversation classes. Typically what happens is you either put up notices around the university, or you set up a profile on an English Lesson website (http://www.my-sensei.com/ and http://www.enjoy-lesson.com/ are two examples of such websites). Somebody will then hopefully contact you. You will meet said somebody in a cafe somewhere and talk in English for an hour. They will pay you between 1000 and 2500 yen for your trouble. You can find more information on the specifics of this in my article, The Truth Behind English Conversation Classes.
• Translation work – This might be a difficult area to get into if you do not have a degree, but bulletin boards at the university advertise for native English (and occasionally other language) speakers to proof-read already-translated documents and other similar activities, for fairly substantial levels of pay. If you are a native speaker of the language in demand, then this would be a perfectly do-able line of work for you to explore.
• Culture-based restaurants/cafes – If you happen to be of an interesting ethnicity (Indian, Chinese, African, etc) – then hospitality joints that specialise in your ethnicity will certainly be interested in hiring you, particularly if you can speak some Japanese. This is not particularly helpful for culture-less white folk like myself (especially since we are not allowed to work in British-style pubs), but I like to give advice to everyone. While it could be argued that in using your race to obtain a job you are doing exactly what the Japanese do in refusing to allow foreigners to work for them, I would argue that two can play at that game, and sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures.
• Other restaurants/cafes/fast food joints, etc – Some places might not care if you are a foreigner. I have seen foreigners working at fast-food joints in Japan, for example. There are a lot of part-time jobs advertised along the main streets around Waseda, and despite my previous warning about racial discrimination in Japan, I would say that it is worth applying anyway. You never know, after all. You might get lucky. And a job normally held by a Japanese person would surely improve your Japanese immensely, if you care about that sort of thing.

In conclusion, finding part-time work in Japan can be difficult, and the types of jobs that would be best to apply for may be different to those in your home country. It is, however, absolutely possible to do, and the best possible advice I can give is to keep trying and trying and trying, and to not give up. As we say in Japanese, ganbatte!

A romantic and thrilling adventure in Tokyo Disney Sea (Ding Yiyin)

As for every kid and kid-at-heart adult Disney themed park is always on the must-visit-list. So it is for me. The trip to Tokyo Disney Sea started with a ride in the special designed express train inside Disney Sea Park. With a swift peek at the layout through the Mickey-shaped window we arrived at the entrance of the park. 



Tokyo Disney Sea internal express

Halloween Decorations

The entrance to the park is Mediterranean Harbor, which opens up to six more nautically themed ports: American Waterfront, Lost River Delta, Port Discovery, Mermaid Lagoon, Arabian Coast, and Mysterious Island. With the upcoming Halloween the whole park was styled with beautiful Halloween decorations.

Our first stop is the Indiana Jones Adventure: Temple of the Crystal Skull in the Lost River Delta. It is a huge, ruined Central American Aztec pyramid. While you were waiting in lines the speakers will display background music from the original movies. After stepping into a mini-bus, the trip started. In the dark alley where the trip took place you would encounter various visual and authentic scary characters from the movies. The highlight will be at the end when a huge stone ball running directly towards your bus.  What happens next? Well, I will let you discover yourself after you try it. Trust me, it is fun!!!



Tower of Terror

Besides the Indiana Jones Adventure, for people who love risky adventures, I would definitely recommend the Tower of Terror in the American Waterfront. It is the port's most popular attraction, an elaborately themed free-fall E-ticket ride with a unique storyline which is markedly different from other incarnations of the same ride. But prepare yourself before you try it! It’s really scary!!!

Duffy& Shellie May



Aside from the adventurous part, Disney Sea is also a romantic place for sightseeing as well. First introducing the cute bear couple Duffy& Shellie May. Disney created Duffy and a new back story to tie in the character to the Disney Sea experience. These two bears are exclusive in Tokyo Disney Sea. They are of diverse shapes and you could style them up with different outfits available in store. So while you were there don’t miss your chance to buy a cute bear while you leave.

Another romantic destination is the Mermaid Lagoon. It is home to the characters of The Little Mermaid. The facade is made to look like the Palace of King Triton and features fanciful seashell-inspired architecture. It is mostly indoors and recreates the feeling of being underwater. Attractions include Flounder's Flying Fish Coaster; Scuttle's Scooters; Jumpin' Jellyfish; Blowfish Balloon Race; The Whirlpool and the Mermaid Lagoon Theater.

Last but not the least is not to miss the water and light show in the evening when they are available, it will be a mind-blowing experience to watch! Tokyo Disney Sea is a perfect combination of romance and adventure so what are waiting for!? Go buy your ticket!