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Title: JAPANESE ISN'T ENGLISH

Reference number: 13696

Date: 2016

Director: d. Yushin Toda

Production company: Japan Desk Scotland

Sound: sound

Original format: unknown

Colour: col

Fiction: non-fiction

Running time: 13.36 mins

Description: Documentary about linguistic differences between the Japanese and English languages, presented by a university and a school teacher.

Credits: p. Fumi Nakabachi and Yushin Toda, Japan Desk Scotland
comm. w. Yushin Toda
ph. Fumi Nakabachi
ed. Yushin Toda
m. the participants at Taiko Fun Workshops run by Japanese Matsuri for Glasgow (Brenda, Bryan, Carolyn, Claire, Fumi, Katie, Kyoka, Laura, Mariko and Susanna)

Shotlist: Filmmaker's synopsis:

Japanese isn’t English. This isn’t so obvious as it sounds. This is the starting point for this documentary. In Japanese language, any foreign sounds, such as English sounds, are represented in Japanese alphabets. Japanese writing system, however, fails to capture the difference between ‘L’ sound and ‘R’ sound. Both sounds are represented by the same letter. This defect is well known among people in Japan, but there is another less-known shortcoming of Japanese writing system in capturing English sounds. A Japanese letter, which is a phonetic symbol, consists of a consonant sound and a vowel sound. A pure consonant sound cannot be reproduced in Japanese writing system.

This is Japan Desk Scotland’s second documentary on ‘English for Japanese’, following ‘Teaching English in Japan - Carolyn Biggs’, and in this new documentary, Carolyn, who taught English at a primary school and two junior high schools in Japan, is joined by Sean Mahoney, who has taught English at Fukushima University since 1997.

Interviewees (in order of their first appearances):
Sean Mahoney and Carolyn Biggs