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Historically and linguistically speaking, English is one of the languages far from Japanese. Japan is only one country where people do not speak English among the so-called developed countries people once called. As a matter of fact, most Japanese people who have studied English as a L2 language do not appear to be good at English pronouncing and actually their sounds are often quite different from native English speaker’s ones. There appears to be many factors why these problems happen. The following are six of the factors. Firstly, different types of articulation between English and Japanese are one of the factors. Although English articulation is not varied so much compared to Japanese one, Japanese articulation does not have labiodental fricative and dental fricative whose sounds characterise spoken English. In addition, although Japanese has similar type of articulation to palatal alveolar approximant “r” in English, its tongue movement is usually smaller than the one of the “r”. Secondly, English has a stress accent while Japanese has a pitch one. Therefore, generally speaking, English sounds rhythmical while Japanese sounds like a song and rhythmically flat. As a result, English spoken by Japanese people sounds flat and less energetic. Thirdly, English needs a more amount of air breathed out than Japanese does. This means if Japanese people speak English in the same way as they speak Japanese, English words and sentences then becomes unclear phonetically because of the less volume. Fourthly, English has definite linking. Although Japanese also has linking to some extent, its phonetic change is smaller than English one. The more speedily English is spoken, the more dramatic its linking becomes. On the other hand, if Japanese is spoken speedily, that just causes fast paced speaking. Change of pronunciation on each word does not happen then. Fifthly, subtle difference in size and shape of speech organs is one of the factors. For example, native English spoken by African race sounds different from that spoken by European race. Similarly, English spoken by Asian race sounds different from that spoken by other people who have different physical characteristics related to utterance. Sixthly, difference in structure of a single word. English has more consonants in a word to the number of vowels in the same word than Japanese does. For example, the English word “stress” has only one vowel and three consonants while the Japanese word “Sutoresu” which has the same meaning as the “stress” has four vowels and four consonants. That is, even the same word is pronounced differently in each of the two languages. The ratio of vowels to consonants in a Japanese word is basically one to one as in the above word. This tendency triggers a critical phonetic difference between English and Japanese and makes English spoken by Japanese people sound awkward or like another language than English. In conclusion, for the above mentioned six factors, difference in articulation, difference in accent, difference in the amount of air breathed out, whether or not considerable linking happens, difference in size and shape of speech organs and difference in structure of a word, the pronunciation problems in Japan occur.
