Katakana English

One of the worst aspects of life in Japan for foreigners is learning the language. Not only is it quite a complex language in its own right, (levels of politeness, hidden meanings, etc. not withstanding), but there are three scripts to master, Hiragana, a phonetic alphabet of sounds used for writing Japanese words, Kanji, Chinese writing symbols borrowed from China and with an amazing number of readings, meanings and combinations, and my least favourite, Katakana, which is used to write foreign words borrowed from other languages. The trouble with Katakana is that the Japanese language has a much smaller range of available sounds compared to English, so they take an English word like 'Christmas' and mangle it to fit their linguistic norms and it comes out as 'Kurisumasu'. That's not too bad, but many word are transformed into gibberish. 'Remote control' is twisted and abbreviated into 'Rimokon' Abbreviation only adds to the confusion. A personal computer is rendered as 'Passokon', and so the list goes on ad infinitem.

The worst thing about Katakana though is it's interference in English language learning. Because students have learned the limited phonetics attached to Katakana, when they try to learn English, they cannot guess at the spellings of words with any degree of accuracy. In fact, they are bloody awful at it. Katakana has no 'L' character or sound and therefore almost every word containing 'L' will be spelt incorrectly. Students soon start to realise there is a problem with their perception of English sounds, however, and they then tent to overcompensate. So, for example, the teacher might say a sentence for the students to write down, 'Round and round the ragged rock the ragged rascal ran'. The teacher shouldn't be too surprised to find it written down as, 'Round and round the lagged lock, the lagged rascaru ran' (they know 'ran' too well to make a mistake there). If I had my way, Katakana would be banned except for writing Japanese names. I think this would be a step in the right direction in helping Japan improve its terrible level of English ability in world rankings.