An Overall Study of English Education in Both Postwar Japan and China

Japan and China are close neighbors separated only bya strip of water.There has been a long history on the cultural exchanges between two countries.Chinese characters were grafted onto a non-cognate, syllabic indigenous language with subject-object-verb syntax. In the past, neither of the two countries had ever planted a colony,and noforeign language had ever replaced the native language for purposes of general education.We have no second language that is indispensable for communication within our community.Books written in Japanese and Chinese are available in the most advanced fields of learning without having to resort to other language as a means of instruCtion.As a result, to a great extent, it is very difficult for both countries' people to learn an entirely different language like English, though some aspects such as pronunciation and sentence structure of English are much easier for Chinese to remember than for Japanese. In contrast with the situation in most other school subjects, both Japanese and Chinese have to start to lean English at zero or very close to zero. For them, the spoken English sounds like a strange blur of noises. The writing system is at best confusing, at most frightening.So there are some common difficult problems for both Japanese and Chinese when they are learning English. Forexample, there is a grammatical distinction in English between singular and plural, where there is no such distinction in Japanese and Chines.