Last time I came up with some examples of strange approaches to language learning the Japanese take. There's another interesting tool the Japanese use to master English: a subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is a standard way of expressing sounds. In general, the "basic" level of Japanese are the two syllable systems hiragana and katakana, which can express, say, the sounds sa-shi-su-se-so but not the consonant "s" by itself, and no vowels in between the main five. Students will make katakana notes above English words to help themselves remember pronunciation, but this is catastrophic for them from the standpoint of ever learning to speak naturally. A better idea is to use special "pronunciation symbols" to help students wrestle with sounds that don't come naturally to them, like the above sentence. Can you read it?
