Studying English - Blog Posts

Some common English mistakes in Japan

After teaching English here in Japan for nearly 20 years, I've noticed that there are some common mistakes that keep coming up. Fighting off the urge to roll your eyes, a teacher needs to understand this is a teachable moment. This is like finding a nugget of gold while swimming in the river. Because they are common errors, we can make a dent in this fault in the local language skills by explaining why they are wrong.

Here are a few that have come across my path in the last week or so;

"I choiced to go to school in Kansai." -> It is common to hear students mistakenly use 'choice' as a verb. I will challenge them; choice is a noun, what is the verb? If they can't come up with it, I'll introduce choose-chose-chosen. (Success/succeed has the same problem)

Safety Driver. In a similar vein, for years the Japanese police and other safety-concerned agencies have made stickers to put on cars saying 'safety driver'. Safety is a noun- safe is the correct adjective.

Do you drive MY CAR? Rather than saying 'your own' they often will staple 'my' in front of words like 'home' or 'car' for instance. I think a few clever advertising campaigns are to blame for this problem, but, hey, let's remember that 'my' means that is the speaker's own possession.

I overworked yesterday. While many may argue that it is overworking, the truth is, what the speaker wants to say is, "I worked overtime yesterday."

These are just a few examples, but there are a lot more. I will keep note as I encounter them and post again on this topic in the future.

What is the best rate of study?

I had an epiphany while I was standing in the rain watching my son's team practice for soccer. My son was in junior high school at the time and he has been doing soccer since he was in kindergarten. I had been a teacher and language coach for around 16 years at the time but I never could settle on how much was the best amount of time to study to really achieve results. So, there I was standing in the rain watching my breath dissipate in the air in front of me wondering why the heck they had to practice every day. My mind flashed to Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers and his theory about needing 10,000 hours to become proficient at something. That was it, not only the amount of time but the total immersion of the mind and commitment to a regular rhythm were a key to reaching the next level.

Doubtlessly the more time you dedicate to something, the more you can see improvement, but the rhythm of soccer practices suggested to me that constant and frequent repetition is also important. I thought this was the way to get the students at the company I was teaching at to remember some words for their TOEIC goals. I set up a practice sheet where every three days they had to focus on a single word. The first day, they look up the word in English (afterwards Japanese was permitted) then on the second day they had to come up with a practice sentence. If they followed this program, they would think about the word on successive days and interact, making a better chance to remember. On the third day they would get another chance and they would find some synonyms for the word. The following day was a new word and the cycle began again. The problem is that the students didn't follow the theoretical path and only studied everything on one day, before their class. The most serious students did follow it and I thought it was a good program. The beauty of it was that the students should be thinking about English everyday. They established a rhythm, even if just for 10-15 minutes. If I were stricter about it, I think we would have seen more results.

Looking through the Internet at ideas about how much to study, theories range between 20 minutes and 3 hours per day. An interesting post by Ouino (We know, get it?) language says 30 minutes of active studying and 1 hour of exposure is good. Of course they are promoting their business so it's merely a theory. If you don't subscribe to Medium, you will be trapped by the pay wall, but this post says 1-2 hours is best for rapid language acquisition.

I will say it again though, I believe that the true key lies in the daily rhythm more than the amount of study, though logically more time spent should yield more results.

Idioms, a key part of language

I noticed a lot of textbooks don't have enough idioms. Particularly on a junior level. It's kind of crazy when you consider how common they are in our daily conversation in the realm of natural English.

So, here are a few that might be of interest to students;

When it rains it pours -> This can be used in both negative and positive situations. We use this to describe that when one thing happens, another or a few events seem to follow. For instance a student came down with COVID 19 and her air conditioning broke down a day later. When it rains, it pours, eh?

Kill two birds with one stone -> This idiom meaning to accomplish two things in one action is easy to imagine. In fact there is a similar idiom in Japanese, as there is for the previous one, so when your students study this, they will say, 'oh, I get it!'

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. -> This is more of a proverb than an idiom but it is a good way to encourage positive thinking. The basic idea is when you are met with trouble (lemons), you should do you best to turn it into a positive situation (refreshing lemonade).

Take it on the chin -> When you are down or something bad happens to you, accept the situation and don't complain or turn it into a big problem. Be positive even in adversity.

I like to focus on positive expressions and situation as sometimes learning a language can feel like a very negative situation, especially for some beginners.

Teachers can teach idioms by making a guessing game (can you guess the meaning of this idiom), or finding ways to draw these out in the course of discussion in class. Make sure the students make a note and try to quiz them later or provide them with an opportunity to use them in a class.