Academic English for Japanese Native Speakers

I am a European (German) working as a researcher in Japan, and I sometimes get asked for advice on English orthography and grammar. Although my English is not perfect I have discovered a few common mistakes that native speakers of Japanese tend to make. They are listed below, together with some easy ways of avoiding them. If you notice that I’ve given some incorrect piece of information (or made a mistake myself), please let me know: mail [ät] matthiasmauch [döt] net.

Singular/Plural

Japanese does not have singular or plural forms for words, so it’s hard to learn where to use singular or plural forms in English. Some hints:

• It’s “Future Work”, not “Future Works”. In this context you can’t count “work”, and hence it’s like “freedom”, “love”, “jealousy” and “water” - all singular. The same goes for “research”. (In other contexts the plural does exist: “Beethoven’s later works show a Romantic influence”, one work is a piece of music, so you can count the works; “planned engineering works on the Central Line”)
• A “a cluster of stars” can also be described as a “star cluster” (but not a “stars cluster”). Though this may not be logical to you (or me), it’s just the way it is. Similarly, “the calculation of MFCCs” becomes “MFCC calculation” (not “MFCCs calculation”). And so on.

Backwards Thinking

Unlike English (and German, believe it or not) Japanese sentences almost always end in the verb, and subject and objects are posititioned in front of that. So, Japanese guys: try to think backwards.

• Whenever you want to write “As for …”, then think again and don’t write it. It can be used in English, but it is ugly in 90% of cases. Similar attention is advisable when using the following expressions at the beginning of a sentence: “Regarding the …”; “With respect to …” and “For …”. And here is why you’re tempted to write it (I think): A Japanese phrase, literally translated, may sound like this: “With respect to myself the car Mazda of made is” (taken from my Japanese lessons :) ). In English, the phrase “with respect to myself” would simply be translated by “my”, resulting in “my car is a Mazda”. Or the whole sentence could just go: “I drive a Mazda”. Some tips:
  • not so elegant: “As for matrix factorization, Sampleton et al. developed a new algorithm with inverse motorcycling.” better: “Sampleton et al. developed a new algorithm for matrix factorization using inverse motorcycling.”
  • not so elegant (notice the repetition!!): “For feature segmentation, the use of Hempel models increases the segmentation performance.” better: “The use of Hempel models increases the feature segmentation performance.”
  • Starting a sentence with “_ing ..” is often superfluous and sometimes even semantically wrong. Not so elegant: “Focusing our attention on the production of polymers, Chingu et al. have proposed …” Why not make two sentences like in this better example: “We focus our attention on the production of polymers. Chingu et al. have proposed ...

Repetition

If a word appears twice in a sentence, it’s probably not an elegant sentence (this one excluded)! AVOID the repetition of words (except for stop words like articles, etc.)!

Good Phrases

Phrases that can be used relatively often:

• In order to …, we …
• Since …, we …

Avoid “Nesting”

If you have a difficult concept, it often needs more than two words to be described appropriately. That can lead to confusion, for example:

• “an early music conference”: it’s not clear if you mean “an [early [music conference]]” (i.e. one of the first conferences on music) or “an [[early music] conference]” (a conference on early music).

My explanations given in round brackets separate the less related words from the more closely related ones. That tends to be much clearer and you should try to use this technique when the meaning could be confused. In English it’s generally not ok to infer the meaning from the context. Some more examples:

• “large database researchers” should be “researchers in the field of large databases”, or your readers may think you are writing about database researchers who are really fat! (You can write “large hadron collider” because everyone knows that hadrons are very very small :) )
• “immaculate conception theory”: I don’t think there is a theory of immaculate conception (some people believe in it though), but there may be an immaculate theory of conception (ask a biologist, if you care). Notice the use of the word “of”, and how it separates the words that don’t belong together.
• “mobile robot embedded microphone array” better: “a microphone array embedded in a mobile robot” (note that no more than two words of the original expression appear together.)

I hope you get the idea.

Inventing New Expressions

Try not to invent new expressions. If a good expression exists, then use it, and trust the literature written by native English speakers most. There is no need to invent new terms for “time complexity” etc..