The Mystery of the Random “Be” Verb in Japan and Korea

The majority of my career as an ESL teacher has been spent teaching Japanese students. First, I spent twelve and a half years living and teaching in Japan. Then, after moving to Hawaii, I spent ten years teaching in an ESL program that usually had between eighty and ninety percent Japanese students.

For years I couldn’t figure out why the "be" verb would often find it’s way randomly into sentences, like:

• I am like sports.
• I was played soccer last weekend.
• They are study in the library.

Then, as I taught more Korean students in Hawaii, I began to see this mistake in their writing as well. Finally, one day a discussion in class led me to this discovery. The "be" verb is traditionally taught WRONG in Korea and Japan.

I don’t blame the teachers. I have met and worked with many dedicated hard-working Japanese teachers who only want the best for their students. I have also met enough Korean teachers to know that this is true for them as well. The problem is a monolithic education system that prescribes everything from what and how teachers teach to the size of desks and chairs in the classroom.

Although it is less true today than it used to be, when I was in Japan in the late 80s and 90s, it was said that you could go into any fourth grade classroom in Japan and they would be teaching the same lesson in the same way from the same textbook, down to the page. The English problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Japanese Ministry of Education has decided that all English language textbooks for Japanese students must be written by Japanese authors. A book written by a native-speaker cannot be used in a Japanese public school classroom. Furthermore, even the few books that are allowed all refer back to the same Ministry source on what and how to teach. It’s my understanding that this source has not been updated in perhaps 100 years.

Since the Korean education system is so similar to the Japanese education system and since both languages are so similar, my discovery leads me to think the educational root is the same in Korea. The linguistic root is definitely the same.

To understand the root of the problem, you need to understand a little about the two languages. English is an SVO language, meaning the standard clause structure first has a subject, followed by a verb and finally the direct object, if one is needed. Japanese and Korean, on the other hand, are SOV languages, meaning the verb comes last and the direct object goes in the middle. Look at these two sentences, the first in Japanese, the second in Korean.

• Watashi wa hon o arimasu.
• Na nun chek ul kajida.

If they were transcribed literally into English, without changing word order, they would read:

• I book have.

Both languages also have features not found in English. The original Japanese sentences has five parts whereas the English sentence only has three. There are two additional "words" in Japanese. The first is wa, which is called the subject marker. This is how the subject is connected to the sentence. The second is the object marker, which is o. There is a third marker, ga, which is extremely confusing to non-native speakers like me, that can be substituted for either the subject or object marker. Similarly, the Korean subject marker is a variant of nun, depending on the final consonant of the subject, and the object marker is ul.

Here is where the mistake comes from. In both countries, students are taught that the subject markers wa or nun indicate the use of the "be" verb. Therefore, students would translate these sentences as:

• I am have a book.

This is completely and totally WRONG. There is absolutely no correlation between wa/ga or nun and the "be" verb in English. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, they have no counterpart in English at all. Therefore, they are untranslatable and should just be ignored for acquisition purposes.

The "be" verb, does, however, have a fairly direct counterpart in both Japanese and Korean: the last word of the sentence.

Take for example the following sentences, first in English, then in Japanese and Korean.

• I am cold.
• Watashi wa samui desu.
• Na nun cha da.

Since the verb is the final word of the sentence in Japanese and Korean, then the "be" verb is indicated by the final word of these sentence, i.e. desu in Japanese and da in Korean.

Although this is not universally taught in Korea and Japan anymore, I still run across enough students who tell me they learned this way to think it still happens often enough to be an ongoing issue.
Any thoughts or comments?