LANGUAGE｜CULTURE
5 Things Both Native English Speakers and English Learners Need to Know
Duolingo’s grammar trolling stirs up controversy in Japan
The other day, a tweet with the hashtag #泣いちゃう英語 (English that makes me cry) went viral on Twitter. The creator of the tag—an American author—posted a photo of a notice that the Japanese MHLW (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare) had issued and she corrected grammatical errors in red. She wrote:
It’s obvious that no native English speakers have checked this document given the grammatical errors and unnatural phrases. They are not critical to cause major confusion, but it doesn’t give a good impression.
Japanese and English Are Linguistically and Culturally different
According to the author, she intended to raise awareness of the importance of accurate translation, especially in official documents issued by the Japanese government.
It is undeniable Japan has been failing at English. In an English proficiency survey conducted by Education First, Japan ranked 80th among 111 countries in 2022[1].
However, we shouldn’t forget that Japanese and English are two structurally very different languages. Take a look…
