How is language perceived in your brain? Brain’s cognitive ability is now being researched so widely as a study called cognitive linguistics. I know the most famous specialist in this field is a person called Chomsky, but I have never read any of his works. However, from other author’s books, I learned that understanding of language is related to brain cells very deeply. For instance, there is even a possibility that one word is remembered by one cell. Thus, one kanji character (or Chinese character) is possibly remembered as its meaning or image in a Japanese speaker’s brain cell.
For example, the brain remembers the whole image of “country” in only one kanji character, “kuni (=country, described as one character).” Suppose this is true, you can read Japanese sentences much faster than reading in English.
In the 20’s of Showa period (1945-55), the government hammered out a policy that the nation should learn English as the second official language as well as Japanese. One 27 year-old well-educated young man, who had graduated Harvard, came back to Japan and conducted an experiment to replace all Japanese characters to the alphabet. He changed all the textbooks of a certain grade of one elementary school into the alphabet after teaching the alphabet to the students thoroughly, and compared their comprehension to the students in another grade, who had been educated with normal Japanese textbooks. However, the students educated in the alphabet marked tens of points lower than the average score. This result made the government give up the idea of adapting the alphabet to Japanese. Furthermore, the government sampled the intellectual standard of Japanese then randomly corresponding to the result of the experiment, and it found out that the average score was 85 to 90, regardless of their education level. The Japanese then were much smarter than us now.
These results showed the fact that the Japanese had a higher literate ratio and intellectual standard than the U.S. to the government, and the well-educated young man left away.
Unlike the alphabet that expresses sounds, kanji has one meaning for each character, so one brain cell can be said to remember one word in Japanese.
When a kanji character is input into a brain cell, it goes together with the background and image of the word, so the range you can perceive from one character is much wider than other languages. I can’t wait these things about cerebrum to be uncovered further.
From the point of view of development of cerebrum, a human listens first to learn a language, then imitate with mouth to speak, next start to read, and then finally became able to write. This is the process of learning a language in human brains.
However, Japanese English education is doing in the opposite order. Japanese junior-high schools first teach the students how to write the alphabet, and have them read next, then reading, and finally listening and speaking. In the English education of Japanese normal schools, listening and speaking is only around 4% of the entire curriculum. These schools can never really teach English to the students.
The mechanism of learning English in the brain is completely backwards. You have to listen to English as much as possible first to become able to imitate it, and eventually you will be able to speak much easier than going backwards. If Japan starts to do the English education based on the development of cerebrum, Japanese English education will be at least better than now.
