Learning English provides opportunities for travel, friendships and work, but unfortunately, and especially for Japanese, it can be a difficult language to learn.

Today, however, the process is much easier, and especially for young children, by learning with phonics.  The old ways of memorising words is being replaced by learning to read words from the letter sounds.  This gives much better results for children who have English as their first language, but it makes even more difference for children learning English as a foreign language. 

The foundation of phonics is to teach all the letter sounds.  In English there are 44 letter sounds – but only 26 letters of the alphabet.  So some sounds have to be written with two letters, such as the ‘sh’ in ‘ship’.  There are only three letter sounds in ‘ship’: sh-i-p.  We need to use the letter sounds as our building blocks, not the names of the letters of the alphabet.  Some of these sounds do not occur in Japanese, such as the ‘th’ in ‘three’.  For adults it can be hard to say these sounds but young children learn them relatively easily.  It is best to teach English to children when they are young, when they can learn the new sounds more easily.

For Japanese children there is the additional difficulty that Japanese, or at least kana, is syllabic.  The syllables usually end in a vowel (or an ‘n’).  So the word ‘dog’ may be pronounced ‘dogu’ by a Japanese speaker.  Again, learning with phonics will make a difference.  From learning each letter sounds, so ‘d’ and ‘o’ and ‘g’, a child is taught to blend them together to make the spoken word ‘dog’.  This blending of the sounds to read a new word is a vital part of phonics.

Over the years I have seen teachers use our program, Jolly Phonics, to enable young children to learn English swiftly, and I am very pleased that the same is happening at SeedLing English School  I am sure you will be delighted and amazed at how well the children do.

Jolly Learning 

Christopher Jolly