French, a la Japanese

Of all the aspects of the French language it was the sentence structure that gave me the most problem. My fellow French speakers know that the sentence structure is basically identical to that of English. So why did I struggle so much? I struggled because when my brain would shift into foreign language mode I would summon Japanese, which I was 7 years familiar with. The Japanese sentence structure is nothing like that of English, or French.

You see, English (and French) look like this:

Subject + Verb + Object


Japanese looks like this:

Subject + Object + Verb


The verb in Japanese is always at the end of the sentence. So when presented with English text to translate into French I would do the following:

1. Take all the words and through them up in the air
2. Reorder the words to follow the Japanese sentence structure of S-O-V
3. Translate the rearranged words into Japanese
4. Attempt (attempting was the best I could do at this point) to translate the Japanese, jumbled up words into French


What the hell?!!? No wonder I struggled so much in the beginning. Additionally, I would throw Japanese words in my sentences all the time. I guess my brain was saying, “'Brother.' Go find a foreign word for brother. Ahh, here’s one, ‘onisan.’” Never thinking whether or not this was the correct foreign word or not.

The Japanese dominant brain power struggle soon came to an end. By the end of my fall semester with my Vietnamese teacher I was on my way to going straight from English to French and visa versa.