午夜剧场

I have been involved with English for a long time. I write emails and papers in English, and I speak with friends and collaborators over Zoom. Not a day goes by that I do not use English. However, I do not have the sense that I am "fluent" in English. English (and indeed all languages, including my native Japanese) is profound; the more I learn, the more I marvel at its complexity, precision, and richness, and the more I feel my own inadequacy. I love it, but it is difficult. I want to know more. I feel there must be better ways to express things. I spend every day thinking this way. There is no end to learning English (or learning Japanese).

However, in the world today, books and advertisements claiming that one can "master English quickly" are everywhere. If it were that easy, why would the Japanese people struggle so much? In the first place, what does it even mean to "be able to speak English" or to "master English"?

Broadly speaking, my specialty is cognitive science, and I research native language acquisition, conceptual development, and the formation of language and thought. From the perspective of cognitive science, there is always a cause for stumbling in learning. My own weaknesses are articles, countable and uncountable nouns, prepositions, and tenses. Why are these so difficult when native English-speaking children use them effortlessly? Yet, among the many English learning books available, I could not find any that answered that question. Most books explain how English should be—the norms of English—and point out how Japanese people get them wrong. However, I could not find anything written about why Japanese people make those mistakes.

As a learner myself, I want to answer this question. Utilizing insights from cognitive science, I want to write about why so many people find English difficult and stumble, and further, how one can study to overcome those difficulties. I actually first thought of this immediately after publishing "Language and Thought" in 2010. For ten years, although I had various pieces I wanted to write, I did not know how to assemble them into a single picture and could not start writing. During that time, I published a book on native language acquisition ("Solving the Mystery of Language Development") and a book on the cognitive processes of learning ("What is Learning?"). Since English learning lies at the intersection of the themes of these three books, I could not draw the overlapping part until I had drawn the three outer circles.

Mutsumi Imai

Iwanami Shinsho

288 pages, 880 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time this magazine was published.