A popular Japanese song "Tokyo Bon"
In recent days, Musician Huang Mingzhi from Malaysia has launched a new song "Tokyo Bon" with a Japanese theme, which has become popular on Japanese Youtube.
When many tourists travel to Japan, it is inevitable that there will be a situation of pointing and communicating with the locals, and the other party may not be able to hear the English clearly, and the Japanese speak English, it also takes a little thought to understand, it seems that this song can help everyone.
In this context, Huang Mingzhi cooperated with the Japanese government's online platform "Cool Japan TV" to create this "Tokyo Bon" for tourists in Japan, and found Japanese actress Ninomiya As the MV heroine, and even went to Tokyo to shoot the MV.
In the MV, Huang Mingzhi plays a Japanese tourist who can't understand Japanese English when asking for directions in Tokyo, so he sings this song composed of Japanese English words. In addition to Huang Mingzhi's singing voice, the film also features Ninomiya Yasheng singing out various English words, and with Japanese Roman subtitles, so that everyone can clearly understand. For example, "Makudo Narudo" means "McDonald", "Dizunilando" means "Disneyland", "Sutabakkusu" means "Starbucks"...
"Japanese English" - Eternal Pain!
Learning English is an eternal pain for Japanese people. However, "Japanese English" is also an eternal (head) pain for foreigners.
With Tokyo hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2020, Japan is working to ensure that enough people can speak English fluently.
Some English teachers even bring out BBC classic comedies such as Fawlty Towers to help improve students' speaking skills, rather than just learning to write and grammar.
The Japanese government and business community hope to use the Olympics to promote tourism, international trade, and show the world a positive image of Japan. Therefore, there needs to be enough English-speaking Olympic volunteers to provide services in the accommodation, tourism, retail and other industries.
The Olympics are approaching Japan's bad English hope for a translation machine: the user says a sentence, it translates a sentence
Since the successful bid for the Olympic Games, the Japanese government has been trying to bridge the Gap in English.
Japan is rich in tourism resources, and some cities are often ranked among the top of the "World's Best Tourist Cities", but they are still full of fantasies about various translation machines:
Back in 2012, Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Docomo launched the app "Hanashite Honyaku" under the banner that "cross-cultural barriers will be crushed from November 1" – but today the obstacle is clearly unmoved.
Panasonic also launched a Megaphoneyaku in 2015 that instantly translates broadcasts into foreign languages.
In the past year, there has been a leap forward in the machine translation industry - AI translation.
Google uses NMT neural machine translation technology to translate in units of complete sentences in a way that resembles the human brain's thinking pattern, rather than traditional mechanical word-for-word translation. Google says the technology can reduce error rates by 55 to 85 percent. Google just launched the Pixel Buds, an instant voice translation headset that supports 40 languages in October, which can translate a sentence in just 1 to 2 seconds, but the headset needs to be used with a Google Pixel phone.
If technology has made leaps and bounds, does that mean that AI can dominate the translation forest, so that Japanese people no longer have to worry about the English language that is warped and mixed?
The Yomiuri Shimbun interviewed Minoru Eido, CEO of Docomo's future translation company, who, even as the owner of a translation company, is not afraid of "self-blackness", making it clear that AI translation is difficult to unify the translation community:
AI translators can't write short, concise sentences, can't paraphrase, can't summarize; they can only translate literally. Japanese is particularly different from English usage. In terms of the form of words, what english conveys or logic, but in Japanese it becomes emotion.
As simple as an AI voice system, Americans may directly use command sentences to ask for a request: "Call a taxi." ”
But the Japanese would prefer the AI to ask, "What can I do to help you?" The user responded: "I want to go out." The AI asked again, "Need to help you call a taxi?" In such a response, Minoru Eido stressed that the correlation between language and behavior is the reason why it is difficult for machines to fully conquer the translation market.
When the advanced version of the translation is weak, it is not the only way out, but to restore the basic steps and learn English well
The original glimmer of hope turned out to be just an illusion, only to restore the basic steps and learn English well.
Unfortunately, more and more Japanese people are shocked to realize that other Asian countries have left Japan far behind in English education, and China and South Korea once struggled with Japan in the sea of letters, but now the TOEFL score has been thrown away from Japan:
According to TOEFL's 2016 annual report, the average score of Japanese who applied for the TOEFL test was 71 points, surpassing Tajikistan (the smallest country in Central Asia), Laos and Afghanistan in Asia, and on par with Cambodia. South Korea is 84 points, and China is 79 points.
The Japanese government is anxious like ants on a hot pot, and they have summarized two reasons:
1
Japanese students start learning English too late;
2
The weekly study time is too short.
As a result, Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology announced that from 2020, the official implementation of education reforms, primary school students need to start learning English in the third grade, in other words, two years earlier than the current system:
Third graders will then learn English through listening and conversation in their daily curriculum, and grades 5 and 6 will need to learn both writing and reading. And increased from one English class per week to two.
The Junior High School English Curriculum will change the previous practice of teaching in Japanese and implement full English teaching in 2021, and the number of words to be learned will increase by 50% to between 1600 and 1800.
At this point, the most important question for Japanese people to ask is: Why is the English of Japanese students so poor?
One of the reasons why Japanese English is bad is that there are huge differences in language structure between English and Japanese:
Japanese verbs appear at the end of sentences, while English and Chinese verbs are placed after the subject.
When Japanese people speak English and Chinese, they must think in a different order than usual. In addition, the obstruction of pronunciation is also obvious. There are differences in pronunciation mechanism between Japanese with clear vowel sounds and English with many consonants.
Even if Japanese people can speak English, it is difficult to pronounce English accurately. At this point, there are many vowels and consonants in the Chinese, and Chinese may be more advantageous than the Japanese in learning English.
In addition, the japanese have a low ability to speak English, which has a lot to do with learning methods.
Japan has taken the time to learn the most important part of learning a foreign language – what do you want to express?
The Japanese are very prominent in the "How to's" and tend to shift the focus from "why do this" to "how to do it." Therefore, English education in Japan is quite dependent on the English testing of the Japan English Testing Association.
According to the 2016 Japanese English Education Report, only 36.1% of junior high school third-year students achieved Grade 3 or above in the English Test, down 0.5% from the previous year. 36.4 percent of senior high school seniors reached the junior level 2, up 2.1 percent from the previous year, but both figures are far from the Japanese government's target of 50 percent.
After learning this disappointing figure, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology is still determined to leapfrog the challenge, seeking to soar to a 50% pass rate by the end of 2017.
Going back to how the Japanese people view English, is it just a quantitative indicator, how many middle school students pass the British test, which is equivalent to Japan taking a step forward on the road of "internationalization"?