Not part of the solution

DISCLAIMER

None of the following is true.  I just found it scrawled on a piece of paper slipped under my door.   I publish it for curiosity's sake, but take my advice and don't believe a word of it.  It's just a long, bad-tempered rant from a deranged individual who has clearly never seen the excellent teaching practice going on in real classrooms.

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To-odo ando Furoggu wento fo-o a rongu wo-oku.

If you can read that sentence, you've been in Japan way too long.
 It's the English sentence:

Toad and Frog went for a long walk.

after butchery by rendering in katakana.  And I'm the butcher.

Ze-e ke-em bakku tsu To-odozu hausu.  

They came back to Toad's house.

Katakana is a writing system developed around the 9th century by monks who got sick of writing 祈祷会 (kito-okai) on the temple notice board every time they wanted to hold a prayer meeting.

"Mai fi-ito ha-ato," seddo To-odo. "Ando ai rosuto mai jaketto baton!"  

"My feet hurt," said Toad.  "And I lost my jacket button!"

They hit on the ingenious concept of having one symbol per syllable and -- here's the clever bit -- keeping the symbol the same even when the word had a different meaning!  So the symbols for prayer meeting (kito-o kai, キトーカイ) could also be used by the fishmonger when he wanted to sell you a shellfish (kai, カイ) or even a squid (ika, イカ).

"Do-onto wari-i," seddo Furoggu. "Letsu go-o bakku ando faindo yo-o baton." 

"Don't worry, said Frog. "Let's go back and find your button."

This kind of subversive nonsense was never allowed for proper Japanese words, of course, which is why the poor kids still have to learn kanji.  But it became popular as a way to write foreign loan words. For instance, the Japanese word for sudoku is ナンプレー (nampure-e) which comes from the English number play.

Ze-e wo-okuto bakku tsu za ra-aji medo-o. 

They walked back to the large meadow.

Contemporary Japanese is stuffed full of these katakanised loan words, mostly from English.  Sometimes, it can be entertaining trying to puzzle them out.

Can you guess this one?

フラスタジオ 
(furasutajio)

Would a picture help?

Drag your mouse over the blue box to see the answer:
It's a Hawai'ian dance school!  (Think "hula studio".)
Hey!  That gives me an idea.  From here on down, I'll write the English text of Frog and Toad as yellow on a yellow background.  Then you can have fun guessing the story from its katakanised version.  Drag your mouse over the yellow box to read the original English.

"Hia izu yo-o baton," seddo Furoggu. "Zatsu notto mai baton," seddo To-odo. 

"Here is your button!" said Frog.  "That's not my button," said Toad.

The thing is, the Japanese stock of syllables is pretty meagre.  It has fewer vowels, fewer consonants, and far fewer ways of combining them than English.  If Caesar had been Japanese, his last words would have been e tsu burute.

"Itto izu burakku. Mai botan izu waito." To-odo patto za burakku baton in hizu poketto. 

"It is black. My button is white." Toad put the black button in his pocket.

Etsu burute is Japanese for self-satisfied bull terrier, which is rather a nice epithet if you ask me.

A suparo-o ke-em ando seddo, "I faundo a baton!" 

A sparrow came and said, "I found a button!"

So katakana is a fine way to represent Japanese words, but hopeless for English. I used to get quite annoyed when I saw students writing pronunciation notes in katakana.

"Do you like bowling?" I'd ask.

"Yes, I do."

"Is it boring?"

"No, it isn't."

"Is bowling boring?"

"No, it isn't."

"It is in katakana.  Look: bo-oringu bo-oringu They're the same.  Don't use katakana."

"No-o, itto hazu tsu-u ho-oruzu," seddo To-odo, "batto main hazu fo-o ho-oruzu." To-odo patto za baton in hizu poketto.  

"No, it has two holes," said Toad, "but mine has four holes." Toad put the button in his pocket.

One day, I noticed something strange in the English--Japanese dictionary they hand out at junior high.  The pronunciations were in katakana.  Every single word in the dictionary had been mangled into a Japanised approximation.  (Sure, they have IPA as well, but not even their teachers can read IPA!)  So I gave up.

Zen ze-e faundo a baton in za uzzu. 

Then they found a button in the woods.

You'll need a hint to read that one: uzzu = woods.  I've checked it in the junior high dictionary, and that really is the correct way to pronounce woods in Katakanaglish.

"No-o itto izu sumo-oru," seddo To-odo. "Main izzu biggu." To-odo patto itto in hizu poketto.  

"No, it is small," said Toad. "Mine is big." Toad put it in his pocket.

So why am I writing about Messrs Frog & Toad in Katakanaglish?

A raku-un ke-mu ando seddo, "Ai faundo a baton!" 

A raccoon came and said, "I found a button!"

One of the junior high classes I assistant--teach has to act out this text.  But some of the kids can't read.  It's not their fault.  Until last year, all they knew about reading English was a particular system for encoding katakana in the latin alphabet.  (That's what you're reading now, by the way.  The orange highlights are romanised katakana.)  And over this past year, nobody has taught them phonics.  They just had to pick it up as they went along.

"No-o, zatto izu sukuea!" seddo To-odo. "Main izu raundo!" Hi-i patto itto in hizu poketto. 

"No, that is square!" said Toad.  "Mine is round!"  He put it in his pocket.

Some of them did pick it up, and for the rest, we have katakana.  And guess which fool has to sit down and do the soul-shredding donkeywork of transliterating the text through a meat-grinder?

Have you guessed yet?

Drag your mouse over the blue box to see the answer:
In Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap, the identity of the murderer is 

To-odo zen seddo in a raudo voisu, "Wi-i faundo meni-i batonzu, batto notto main!" 

Toad then said in a loud voice, "We found many buttons, but not mine!"

So we have a load of kids who can't read English.  How's their speaking?  Well, what do you expect from kids with English dictionaries written in katakana?

To-odo wento bakko ho-omu. Ando on za furo-o hi-i so-o hizu waito, fo-o ho-orudo, biggu, raundo baton. 

Toad went back home.  And on the floor he saw his white, four-holed, big, round button.

And their grammar?  Here's the secret.  We're not really teaching the kids English at all.  English is really taught as if it were a codified form of Japanese.  The highpoint of every unit of the textbook is The Translation.  They take a text in English and they translate it into Japanese.  That's what learning English is all about.

Which kind of made sense when English was first put on the curriculum.  It was part of the industrialisation programme: a shortcut to getting Western know-how into the heads of Japanese engineers.  But you try having a conversation with one of these kids.

"O-o, hia izu mai baton," seddo To-odo. "Ai me-edo a rotto ovu toraburu fo-o Furoggu." 

"Oh, here is my button," said Toad.  "I made a lot of trouble for Frog."

Oh, yes, they do a bit of translating Japanese into English, too, but it's highly, highly formalised.  There is a strict set of rules -- every word and every structure in Japanese has its precise equivalent in English.  For instance, a kid was set the exercise of translating this sentence into English:

晴れて[sunny and]　暑い[hot]　です[is]。

The approved translation is:

It's sunny and hot.

Now, that sentence may seem a little unnatural to you.  That's because, in English, we usually put the temperature before the weather condition.

Frequency of "hot sunny" and "sunny hot" in English texts from 1800 to 2000

So we prefer "It's hot and sunny" over "It's sunny and hot."  I made the mistake of actually telling a student about this.  In a test she duly went ahead and translated the above sentence as "It's hot and sunny." and got 0 marks.  Because, y'know, the way English is actually used has no part in an English exam.

Me and my big mouth.

To-odo haddo za batonzu in hizu poketto. Hi-i so-odo zemu o-oru o-ova hizu jaketto. 

Toad had the buttons in his pocket.  He sewed them all over his jacket.

But don't they teach communication?

I'm glad you asked me that.

Japanese kids are, indeed, taught how to communicate in English.  And the way they do this is by writing and delivering speeches.  Except they can't write them, so the teacher has to do most of the work.  And their delivery isn't so hot either.

Hi-i ge-evu hizu jaketto tsu Furoggu za nekusuto de-e. 

He gave his jacket to Frog the next day.

The high-point of the communicative year is the annual speech contest, where the best speechers from every school stand in front of an audience and recite a passage from The Tale of Peter Rabbit, or implore us to recycle plastic bags for World Peace.  The competition is pretty intense -- some of them are even comprehensible!

"Itto izu byu-utifaru. A rotto ovu batonzu!" 

"It is beautiful.  A lot of buttons!"

But, here's the thing I really don't get.  On most international tests, Japanese schools are excellent.  I mean, sure, they're run like bootcamps and some of the kids are bullied to death, but they get results.  The kids learn Maths.  They learn to read Japanese (which is no mean feat).  They learn science.  But, despite all of the effort that goes into it, they don't learn to use English!  And everyone knows there's a problem.  Has known for decades.  So why hasn't it been fixed?

Furoggu patto itto on ando janpudo fo-o joi. No-o batonzu feru ofu. To-odu so-odu zem on za jaketto veri-i weru. 

Frog put it on and jumped for joy.  No buttons fell off.  Toad sewed them on the jacket very well.

Here's my theory: the Japanese don't learn English because English is foreign.

The Japanese love foreign novelties, but they have to be just that: novelties.  Pretty trinkets.  Interesting foreign phrases and hula dancing.  When it comes to a real live foreigner -- or a living language -- they can't cope with it raw.  They have to domesticate somehow.  Like the way they eat hamburgers:

Mayonnaise on hamburgers -- yuck!

What they're leaning is a form of English rendered safe for Japanese consumption -- and unfit for purpose.