I’ve got a grammatical problem: my son, who began Junior High School in April, has started learning formal English grammar in ernest, and suddenly I’m being called upon to explain the ins and outs of past perfect, present progressive, subjunctive mood, and tense agreement to him. Back in my ESL (English as a Second Language) days, I was quite adept at teaching the rules of grammar either in English or Japanese, but it’s been ten years since I was called sensei, and a lot of that knowledge escapes me now. The Japanese take English grammar seriously, and during Junior High and High School spend six years learning it in great detail, of course always discussing it in Japanese rather than, you know, English, since it’s mostly considered a test subject for university entrance examinations anyway. The biggest question students usually ask is why, why do sentences like “He will have been to Kyoto five times” or “If he had gotten the job, he would have been happy” need to exist. Due to the simpler construction of Japanese sentences, most of these linguistic twists aren’t needed and can’t even be easily expressed, which was a real boon to me, coming from the other direction.
