That said, the vocabulary transcience is an absolute necessity in modern languages as it permits us to adapt a communications medium for a given community. Without the ability to modify and bend, languages quickly go the way of the dinosaur and become spoken only in tight circles of the overly boring.

More on this in the next few days, though ….

My friend works at a company where the boss keeps coming around and telling them that it’s time for a ミーティング rather than the perfectly useful word 会議. Why do we eat セット instead of 定食? And don’t tell me that the Japanese had never heard of kissing until the English told them about it and provided a word.

Then again, if the Japanese education system gets serious about English, then perhaps it would be the Japanese that would find TOEIC and TOEFL to be too bland and basic, then demand something else.

Hmm … maybe not.

@Gus - Kanji is certainly a bit of a hassle to learn, and it does make the language seem much more difficult to new speakers, but I doubt this will disappear anytime soon. That said, you might be interested in this article on Ampontan’s site about Kanji and how technology has made it even more difficult for people to know what they’re saying.

It’s an interesting read, to say the least.

What I think is unecessary is Kanji. The need to follow the Koreans lead and phase out Chinese characters. Crunching Kanji is tough.

New Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s use of words written in katakana, a form of writing used mainly for scientific terms and words derived from other languages, stood out in his policy speech on Friday, as he apparently aimed to create a new image of himself as a leader.

Abe, at 52 the youngest Japanese prime minister in the post-war period, used a total of 109 katakana words in his speech, four times the number used by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who disliked katakana words and bureaucratese.

The prime minister is apparently trying to send out a new image with his use of fuzzy katakana words instead of concrete target figures.

The katakana terms Abe used included words such as “missairu” (missile), and “tero” (terrorism), which are hard to convert into Japanese, as well as with names of foreign countries and other proper nouns.

Other examples in phrases from Abe’s speech included “terewaaku (telework) enabling work to be done from home,” “the promotion of an Ajia geetouei (Asian gateway) concept with which Japan can become a bridge between Asia and the world,” and a “kantorii aidentitii (country identity) for a new Japan looking to the future.”

Many of the words failed to strike a chord among listeners and doubts appear to remain over whether using so many katakana words is actually effective. (Mainichi)

One way to address this problem is to change how English tests are put together. TOEIC, TOEFL and Eiken are very much multiple choice tests which tap into that passive knowledge students have, but don’t really get them producing the language. If you compare them to the Cambridge PET test for example, the difference is clear, e.g:

You will need to show you can use vocabulary and structure by completing tasks such as writing a short message, and a story or letter of around 100 words. You will also need to complete an exercise involving changing the meaning of sentences.

If companies like TOEIC stopped churning out multiple choice, “fast-food”, for-profit English tests that don’t require language production and are impossible to fail, we might see a change in attitude. If students really need to learn and produce the language for themselves, they’d probably find katakana English more of a hinderance than a help.