Contrastive analysis: English and Japanese syntactic, semantic, and grammatical differences

An error analysis of Japanese to English translation is presented with an introduction to the Japanese language as a framework for discussion of (1) the causative, (2) the passive, (3) prepositions and connectives, (4) tense and aspect, (5) articles, and (6) relative clauses. Possible causes of the errors are discussed, and suggestions are made for both curricular and methodological changes in the English language curriculum in Japan. Through contrastive analysis, the author argues that translation errors often reflect the learner's desire to encode L1 cultural information in L2. Many grammatical errors result from the learner's lack of understanding of how, when and why to use particular English structures, not because the learner does not understand how to form particular syntactic structures.