Bradley's English School
Koriyama, Fukushima, Japan

This is another paper I wrote for my masters degree. As with the other research topics available on this website, I am very interested in doing more reasearch in this area. This paper focuses on loanwords that are used in Japanese. It compares the usage of some of these loanwords in English and Japanese by using English and Japanese corpura. It then moves on to discuss the way in which two or more loanwords are often combined and shortened in Japanese. The findings were that individual loanwords did not differ in meaning as much as one (a native English speaker living in Japan) might expect. However, even though the meanings are often similar, students still have some difficulty with using loanwords. One of the main problems is that many Japanese students tend to think that all loanwords used in Japanese are English (which of course they are not). Another problem is that when the loanwords are imported into Japanese, the pronunciation is obviously adjusted to suit Japanese speakers. As I have found in speaking Japanese, it can be very difficult to learn the pronunciation of a word that you pronounce differently in your own langauge. In addition, loanwords are often combined to make phrases that English speakers would find difficult or impossible to understand. For example, English speakers understand the words "gasoline" and "stand", but in Japanese these words are combined to make the noun phrase, "gasoline stand" which in American English (the closest to this) should be, "gas station". To complicate this even further, the two words of the phrase are often "abbreviated". For example, "Pocket Monsters" becomes, "Pokemon" and, "Sexual Harassment" becomes, "sekihara". This "abbreviation" of the two words has made them incomprehensible. Students need to be made aware of the problems that such phrases and "abbreviations" can cause with understanding. What do you think? Are loanwords helpful, or do they create problems for language learners (of any nationality)? Click here to send me a message.