Ingrish Teachaar

I love my English Language students – they crack me up sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I really like all my students, but they have me shaking my head after each lesson simply because they have the wackiest ideas about the English language.

It’s my job to help people to speak English; and one of the ways in which I can help them is on their pronunciation. When you are a native English speaker like me, you have no difficulties differentiating words like: Berry, Belly, and Very. All my Japanese students hear the same word when I say these three.

Belry, Belry, Belry.

No wonder they can’t understand English…

For some of them I have spent a good part of the lesson asking them to close their eyes so that they can’t see my lips when I say Berry, Belly, and Very, but to no avail…. I am starting to wonder if they have different ears to me, because I am clearly saying BERRY, BELLY, and VERY.


(They are so lovely; they try hard, but they still crack me up!)

An old friend of mine, a Japanese gentleman who graduated from the same college as me, is a linguist. He published a book that addresses the same issue that I see in my classes every day. As someone who learnt English when entering Graduate school in the UK, he emphasises the importance for those of us who have very little sound differentiation in our native languages (e.g. Japanese) to learn to listen carefully, before attempting to make the correct sound. (Sound advice! No pun intended…) The Japanese language does not have many consonants, including B, V, F, R, L, S, M, N, and TH, and Koreans (based on my observation) do not seem to get the J and Z sounds, for everything sounds like “jhu”.

I must admit I don’t go pissing myself with laughter when my students find it difficult to pronounce a word, but they do keep me amused with the various sounds they try very hard to make so that they can make themselves understood by us. The pinnacle of my day’s musings was “sympathetic”, which was quaintly pronounced “shimpaceti’ku’u”.

We all have a long way to go....