People often say that Japanese are bad language learners. One may agree on this point when he/she sees the ranking of the TOEFL average. Japan no doubt hits the worst score in Asia. However, there was, and still is, a myth where people believe that the Japanese students are good in Grammar as they study for the Entrance examination for years and years. But is that true?? It is not only the question about the talent of language learning. We can not simply conclude that Japanese students lack the talent of second language acquisition. It's more because of the educational system which puts weight on test-taking and score-getting. Although they do have a good knowledge of grammar and they can read and write according to what they have learned from the text book, it seems that most Japanese English speakers have problem in real-conversational-situation where they can't pick up what the NE speaker is saying, and make NE speaker to understand what they are saying.When we learn Japanese, we do not have to be taught to discover the phonemes of our language, We do it unconsciously at an early stage and know what they are. However, English is the second language that students encounter when they are 12 in middle school. They start off learning English from NNE teachers and mostly grammars. They would not have the chance to learn how to differenciate the phoneme in English, for example /r/and /l/sound. They may be able to convert some phonemes into similar sounds that exists in Japanese, but they would not understand to the smallest distinction that /l/ in leaf and /l/ in feel are different. That the position of the tongue can differ when it's lateral and velarized, but who cares? Within each language there are phonetically similar sounds that prove to be contrastive phonemically; i.e., the phonetic difference between them is linguistically meaningful in that language. Minimal pairs are frequently used to ‘prove’ that sounds ...
