The most common English words and their Japanese loanword equivalents.

What is it about?

This study shows that half of the most common 10,000 English words have a loanword equivalent in Japanese (e.g., table - テーブル /teeburu/), which illustrates the extent of borrowing of English into Japanese. However, around half of these loanwords are very low-frequency in the Japanese language, which means they are not commonly known and used by Japanese speakers. Taken together, these two facts tell us that while there are a lot of similar sounding and meaning words in English and Japanese, many of them are not widely known and used in Japanese. Nevertheless, the overlap between English and Japanese languages in terms of vocabulary is undoubtedly a benefit for language learners.

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Why is it important?

This paper calls for more substantial investigation into how the overlap between the English and Japanese lexicons may impact language learning. Particularly, as teachers, materials designers and language testers, we need to know which words are easier or more challenging to learn and use in each language so that we can design our teaching approaches, materials and assessments appropriately. This paper provides a basis from which to start investigations into 'Japanese-English cognates'.

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