Eigo’s Children

I think it is very tough for native English speakers to understand properly what I write here because it is written in the language something like English but not real English.
As some of you may be aware it is what we Japanese call “Eigo”, a modified variation of English, established by our ancestors more than a hundred years ago.
It has been only 140 years since our ancestors met English speakers first time. Before then Japan had been a closed and isolated country for more than 200 years.
When the four black ships came from the U.S. to a small port near Tokyo to ask our Shogun, the Samurai King, to open the country in 1850s, some of the selected students had to start English study, but unfortunately they had not enough knowledge on the syntax differences between Japanese and English. So they tried hard to translate everything directly without any syntax changes.
After then, although many students went abroad to acquire various kinds of knowledge, the tradition of direct translation without syntax change remained for some reason and gradually Eigo, “Japanized” English, was established.
Eigo, in a sense, might have been a very useful language system for early scholars. Although it is a kind of foreign language, its syntax is modified so much familiar to Japanese grammar that translation is very easy. It helped the students of 19th and early 20th century to translate literatures written in English into Japanese.
I believe that Japan is a rare country in which almost all the students can graduate from collage without any textbooks written in English. In the other Asian countries, since they don’t have enough collage-level textbooks translated into their own languages, they have to use the textbooks written in English.
Most of us study Eigo 3 years at junior high school as compulsory education and then more 3 years at high school, and for some of them farther 2 or 4 years at collage. Thanks to Eigo education, some of us become very good at reading real English and acquire enough ability to be accepted by famous domestic collages.
I think Eigo is great. I respect the scholars who established it. I believe that Eigo has supported not only Japan’s civilization but also its latest economic growth.
However, Eigo is always underfoot when we study hearing and speaking real English. Some face to the reality when they trip to foreign countries and the other when they talk with native English speakers first time. They realize, “Eigo is not English”.
Do you believe the fact that there are many people who read the articles from New York Times everyday but cannot speak English better than a five-years-old American boy?
It’s me.
I’m one of Eigo’s children.