Mmm, this sushi is rubbery: Why the Japanese struggle with English

  There is a common stereotype of Japanese people mixing up the letter L with the letter R when trying to pronounce non-Japanese words, for example "hello" becomes "herro". While people imitating the Japanese often exaggerate this (watch Benny Hill for a good example), there is some truth in the stereotype - the Japanese alphabet is not very compatible with most other spoken languages.

  There are three alphabets in Japanese, two consisting of phonetic characters and one containing pictograms adopted from Chinese. These alphabets do not contain individual letters and none of them contain sounds for the following consonants:

  C, L, Q, V, X

  It is also arguable that the sound for L does exist, but in fact the R sound is pronounced with a slight roll of the tongue so it sounds like a mixture of R and L and is therefore used for both letters. For this reason, "crowd" and "cloud" are essentially the same word when written phonetically and Japanese people will often not hear the difference when these words are spoken.

  A similar example is V which is mostly substituted with B, therefore the "lovely" can sound like "rubbery" and the phrase "I love you" can easily be mistaken for "I rub you".

  In addition, the following sounds do not exist in Japanese:

  See/Si, Too, Th, Woo, Zee/Zi, Fo

  The Japanese try to use sounds as similar to these as possible, e.g. "zip" usually becomes "jip" and "thank you" becomes "sank you", however "a woman bought sixty two/four thimbles in Woolworths" is an almost impossible tongue twister.

  A final difficulty for Japanese people learning English is that in Japanese, all consonants (except N) are followed by a vowel, usually O or U. This means that "hand" can sound like "hando" and "have" is pronounced as "habu".

  It's no wonder Japanese schoolchildren often have such pained expressions on their faces when first learning English and lack confidence when speaking. They have a huge disadvantage in just being able to pronounce some basic syllables, however things seem to be getting easier for them. Everywhere in Japan there is more and more exposure to English-speaking culture, particularly American, and the government has introduced measures for English to be taught in primary schools with native English-speaking teachers regularly visiting schools at all levels. Moreover, Japanese people young and old are generally very enthusiastic about studying other languages and cultures. Despite pronunciation difficulties, their collective language ability is a shining example to other countries.