これと同様に、イギリス人なら涙を出して笑いそうな冗談でも、ロシア人なら全然おもしろくないと思うかも知れない。の英語

In the same way, a Russian might fail to see anything amusing in a joke which would make an Englishman laugh to tears.

Unfortunately, none of my Japanese friends are learning German, but one of them is learning Russian.

Our smile, which is understandable in the context of Japanese culture, sometimes causes a lot of confusion and is notorious among foreign people as a mysterious smile.

Foreigners in general don't need as many compliments as Japanese are required to give each other, and it is good to keep this in mind.

Another tendency of many Japanese that bothers foreigners is to make statements that are too general and too broad by using or implying words like "all" and "every".

"I am sorry for my odd Japanese. But I cannot speak English." "Hey, can I ask you something? Are you Japanese?" "No. I am an alien." "Ah, I gotcha! I'm a fox, and I'm still trying to learn human languages, so I get what you're going through. English is so friggin' hard, isn't it?"

Japanese speakers of English often have difficulty in dealing with informal conversation, such as at parties or in small informal groups.

There is a tendency for Japanese to want to know a certain amount of personal information about someone such as age, position and whether they are married or not, before they feel comfortable talking with a stranger.

Of course it's a good thing when someone learning a foreign language tries to use it without fear of making mistakes, but I don't think much of people without sufficient ability producing language learning material of poor quality.

Although most of the content and thought has not been dependent on any language, when focusing on Japanese, differences in syntactic structures or the fact that individual words are not written separately and distinctly then requires several points of consideration.

The Japanese watch Japan too much and don't know the situation overseas. Koreans watch Japan only and don't know the situation of their own country.

I worry that, because the Japanese lines in this site are written with furigana, they take up a lot of space, and the people who don't even care about them in the first place might find them annoying.

It was about the year 2000 when I remember doing my first trip to Korea. Using my limited Korean, I had lots of trouble asking for basic things like where the train or bus were, and even what the way was to places. I remember lots of people responding to me in English, and while I was pretty relieved at that, I’ve gotta say: people in the country right next to us, speaking a language from peoples on the other side of the world! It’s only when you look at it in that objective state of mind that you realize how strange that is.

Yet Japan is still not sufficiently understood by other countries, and the Japanese, likewise, find foreigners difficult to understand.

The average Japanese tends to assume that their deep interest in America is to some extent reciprocated, but this is not the case.

Does a foreigner understand, when he sees a Japanese wave his hand from side to side, that it means “No go” or “Mum is the word”?

Very soon after I entered the foreign affiliated company where I used to work, I misunderstood the instructions of my foreign boss because I was not accustomed to communicating in English.

If you truly want to upgrade your language skills, then translation might not be the best way to do it, but you're really just playing around, so I believe that if you find it fun, then more power to you.

No nation can exist completely isolated from others.

Don't be afraid to show yourself through speech and take every opportunity to speak to others in English and soon you will feel right at home in informal conversational situations.

Fundamentally, you're not practicing anything by translating, so even if you say that you can't do it, once you've set your sights on a similar sentence you've seen before that is more natural yet does not quite convey the original sentence's nuances, translation proves to be an act that is quite addicting.

No nation can exist completely isolated from others.

I am a native Japanese-speaking woman. But even though this is the case, I sometimes still make small mistakes when I am writing or speaking.

British say `it rained like billyo' where Americans say `it rained like all get out'

My English teacher in junior high school once said, "People outside Japan think that Japanese people have a poor sense of humor."

At first, I was only looking at the French sentences, but before I knew it, I was hooked into translating them.

There I realized that what Japanese think is natural is not always regarded as natural by people in other countries.

In the past, there were no oral English classes in high school. Now many schools have oral communication classes.

The parallel with English becomes even more striking when we realize that Latin continued to be used for many hundreds of years more as the world's first "international language."

The organizer said, "It's interesting to see the slight differences in the ways the two countries interpret the same compound."