English Teaching in Japan

I`m glad you bought this up, at the time i figured his pronounciation of coupon was an American accent and thought it was totally unfair.

Even the guys attempt at asking for Margorine … the sketch they did in the supermarket made it look like the guy said “marry me” just because he pronounced it with a G not a J, i mean come on!

I was appalled at most of it to be honest with you.

Wow. You really get worked up over little things, huh?

If kyoo or ku are both acceptable pronunciations then doesn’t it make sense that he would favor the one that he’s most familiar/comfortable with? And also, even aside from that, pan is MUCH more accurate than pon. I’ve noticed this same thing myself (as I’m sure any English speaker has) that Japanese people often mangle English when they really don’t have to. Some sounds Japanese phonetics (correct term?) are easily capable of pronouncing a word just like English.

For example, one kid I met a few years ago said “hoto chokoletto” (iirc). For the life of me I could not understand what he was trying to say. I finally figured it out after several repeats. If he had said “hato chakoletto” it would have been much easier.

Clearly, English words are being pronounced based on their spelling and not the way they are spoken. That’s understandable but it does often make it more difficult to understand.

he needs to return to the US for a good slap on the face. it must be awful to be a student of his english classes. what a fuckin douche…body search/check same thing bumbling idiot. and ive never heard anyone say coupon ‘kyoo pon’…its always ‘koo’ sounding. this guy is a disgrace

haha. talking about katakana -> english mistakes, you might want to double check how you spelt the tool’s name

and yeah as a native speaker i do say koo and probably would associate body checks more with airport checks than sport (coming from a non ice hockey playing country). but meh..

My Chinese students always call check ups, like at the doctor’s, body checks. I’ve told them a couple times that isn’t really English, but it’s hard to get them to believe me. They tend to take the words of their middle school English teachers, who have probably never studied from a native speaker, as sacrosanct.

But part of being a good English teacher is making yourself aware of the variations of English around the world. Sometimes this is a pain in the butt, and takes some studying on your part, like when dealing with British versus US punctuation in a writing class. But, we’re getting paid for what we do, so we can’t really complain about that, right? I don’t want to give my students a bum steer, telling them there is only one way to say something, when that actually isn’t true. People who blab without knowing what they’re talking about and mislead students really piss me off.

I’m from NYC and most people I know from the states pronounce coupon as “koo-pahn”, although I have heard some Americans say “kyoo-pahn” it’s unusual, at least where I grew up.

He sure chose some boring “katakana English”. What about the classics “cunning”, “mansion”, “don’t mind”, “follow” and “smart”. Then there’s the one I hear all the time from Japanese, “challenge”, as in “I will challenge English”. You can fill whole books with these things.

My favorite from a few years ago was “pay off”, which was almost the opposite in meaning! It was in the news as banks stopped insuring deposits, a phenomenon the Japanese media dubbed “pay off” as in the payment being “turned off”.

Who in their right mind would think that anyone (even if they are a tourist) is saying “cool pond”? Unless you own a pond of course. I live in a city where I see tons of people use coupons, and I have yet to hear someone pronounce it “kyoo-pon”.

Yeah. Someone had better slap him and tell him to pronounce his H’s, cos HERB is pronouced HERB, cos there’s a fucking H in it.

As a limey myself I say koo.pon so I think he’s over enforcising things. My personal bugbear of katakana-ised english is the word camera. Most native speakers say cam.ra where as my students would always say ca.meh.ra.

It’s beat if people learning a foreign language are exposed to as many regional accents as possible so they pick up on as many pronounciations as possible rather than just go by what Mr Leadbetter says.

Modern British Englishes and Modern American Englishes have evolved from the same sources–English. Much of this discussion about British and American English at JP is linguistically WRONG. Some NHK shows, btw, include British models, as does the recently re-vamped TOIEC. Moreover, if you get right down to the stats in internationals teaching English in Japan, you see that the UK is WELL REPRESENTED. For example, given the large population of the US, US representation on the JET Programme is UNDER that of some other anglophone countries. That is not a complaint, but the idea that English, such as it is, in Japan is American English really comes down to a few spelling and vocabulary choices, more than anything else.

Kyoo-pon, i’d say, is a very american pronounciation.
Koo-pon is how i pronounce it as does everyone i know.
Body Check? Wouldn’t have thought of hockey in a million years.
We say you get “frisked” at security in airports.

For someone claiming to teach “english”, he’s not doing a great job.