Ehime Entrance English common mistakes
Ehime Entrance English · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
On long reading passages, the candidate reads the questions first, then hunts for sentences containing the same words as the question, and answers from that single matching sentence without reading the surrounding paragraph.
Keyword matching feels efficient under time pressure and gives a quick confidence boost, and Japanese university-style exams often use paraphrased questions, so the candidate mistakes surface word overlap for actual comprehension. This produces answers that ignore contrast markers (however, rather than) and scope words (some, most, not all) that sit one sentence away.
What to do instead
Read the passage once at moderate speed before touching the questions, marking each paragraph's topic in the margin in three to five words. When answering, locate the relevant paragraph, then read from the previous sentence through the following sentence before choosing. Train by re-answering the same passage from memory of structure, not wording, and check every choice against the question's scope word.
On medium-length passages, the candidate answers 'what does the author imply/suggest' questions with a statement that is explicitly written in the text rather than an inference, or picks the choice that matches their own opinion about the topic.
Explicit statements are easier to verify, so they feel safer, and Japanese high-school training often rewards locating stated facts. Inference items are a small minority of practice, so the candidate has no procedure for distinguishing 'stated' from 'supported but unstated'.
What to do instead
Before answering, label the question type: stated fact, inference, or author's attitude. For inference items, eliminate any choice that is a verbatim or near-verbatim restatement of a sentence, and require the remaining choice to be supported by combining two pieces of text. Write the two supporting text locations next to the chosen answer as a self-check.
In English-to-Japanese translation, the candidate translates clause by clause in source order, producing Japanese that keeps English word order, leaves subjects and objects ambiguous, and renders pronouns as literal 彼/それ instead of omitting or restating the referent.
Word-by-word transfer is the default strategy when the candidate's reading speed is limited and time is short; producing natural Japanese requires first parsing the whole sentence, which feels slower. School translation practice often grades mainly on vocabulary, so structural naturalness was never trained.
What to do instead
Do a two-pass method: first pass, bracket the English into meaning units and identify each pronoun's referent and each verb's subject in the margin; second pass, write Japanese from the bracketed units, reordering to put the condition or reason before the main clause and dropping pronouns Japanese does not need. Finish by reading the Japanese aloud to catch unnatural word order.
When asked to paraphrase or explain an English sentence in Japanese, the candidate copies the original English words into the Japanese answer (katakana loanwords or quoted English) instead of expressing the meaning, or produces a translation that keeps the original's metaphor and idiom intact.
Loanword copying is fast and looks technical, and idiom-for-idiom transfer is the path of least resistance when the candidate recognizes the words but not the underlying meaning. Paraphrase tasks are rare in routine classes, so the candidate has not practised restating an idea in different words.
What to do instead
Practise a fixed routine: state the sentence's core proposition in plain Japanese in one short sentence, then add the modification (condition, reason, concession) as a separate clause. Ban loanwords that appear in the original from the answer. Build a small bank of common English idioms with their Japanese meaning equivalents and drill converting the idiom to its meaning, not its image.
In Japanese-to-English translation and sentence rewriting, the candidate writes a grammatically Japanese-flawed English sentence: missing articles, singular/plural mismatches, wrong tense sequence, and direct transfer of Japanese patterns such as 'because ... so ...' or 'although ... but ...'.
The candidate composes in Japanese first and then substitutes English words, so English structure is never generated. Article and number errors are also invisible to self-review because Japanese has no article system, so the candidate's internal monitor does not flag them.
What to do instead
Use a rewriting checklist applied to every produced sentence: subject-verb agreement, article before each singular countable noun, plural -s, tense consistency, and no double conjunction. Then do a back-translation check: translate your own English back into Japanese and confirm it matches the original Japanese meaning. Keep an error log of your five most frequent structural errors and check only those before submitting.
In sentence-rewriting items (rewrite using a given word, combine two sentences, change to passive or indirect speech), the candidate inserts the required word but changes the original meaning, drops a piece of information, or leaves the sentence with two main clauses joined incorrectly.
The candidate focuses on satisfying the required word as a slot-filling exercise and does not re-read the original meaning afterwards. Transformation rules (tense backshift in reported speech, subject-object inversion in passive) are memorized as forms without the meaning-preservation check.
What to do instead
For every transformation, list the information units in the original (who, what, when, where, negation, modality) and tick each one off in your rewritten sentence. For reported speech, apply backshift and pronoun/ time-word changes as a fixed sequence. Compare original and rewrite side by side and ask whether a reader would learn anything different.
In free composition, the candidate writes an introduction that restates the prompt at length, gives two or three opinions without support, and ends without a conclusion, all within one long paragraph of short, repetitive sentences.
Under timed conditions the candidate writes whatever comes first to fill space, and Japanese essay training often emphasizes length and polite framing over claim-evidence structure. Without a pre-writing plan, supporting reasons are generated after the thesis and tend to be vague.
What to do instead
Spend two minutes on a skeleton before writing: thesis in one sentence, two reasons, one concrete example or personal experience per reason, and a conclusion that restates the thesis in new words. Write one paragraph per reason with a topic sentence. Vary sentence length deliberately, and reserve three minutes to check verb tense, articles, and plurals.
On vocabulary and idiom items in context, the candidate chooses the option that fits the sentence's general topic rather than the option that fits the grammatical and collocational slot, and guesses idioms from the meaning of their individual words.
Topic-level plausibility is processed faster than collocation, and many idioms are transparent-looking but non-compositional (e.g. 'pull someone's leg'), so word-level guessing systematically misleads. Vocabulary is often studied as Japanese-English pairs without sentence context.
What to do instead
For each blank, first identify the part of speech and any required preposition or object, then eliminate options that fail grammatically before considering meaning. Study idioms as whole chunks with one example sentence each, and record collocations (verb + noun, adjective + preposition) rather than isolated words. Review errors by writing a new sentence using the correct item.
On grammar and error-correction items, the candidate relies on how a sentence sounds and picks the choice that is most common in casual speech, missing errors in agreement, tense, comparatives, and preposition use that do not affect comprehensibility.
Auditory familiarity is a weak substitute for rule knowledge, and Japanese learners often receive little explicit correction on articles and prepositions because these do not exist as separate categories in Japanese. The candidate therefore has no rule to apply when the ear is silent.
What to do instead
For error-correction items, run a fixed checklist over the underlined or bracketed parts: subject-verb agreement, tense and time markers, countable/uncountable and articles, comparative forms, preposition collocation, and parallel structure. Learn the ten highest-frequency preposition and article patterns as rules with examples, and re-test yourself on the same items after a week.
On listening sections, the candidate tries to write down words as they hear them, misses the next two sentences, and answers detail questions from a single remembered number or name without tracking who said what or whether the statement was later corrected.
Note-taking feels productive and reduces anxiety, but transcription competes with comprehension for attention, and Japanese listening practice often rewards catching keywords rather than following discourse. Speakers in these tests frequently revise or negate earlier statements, which keyword capture misses.
What to do instead
Take notes only in symbols and abbreviations: arrows for change, plus/minus for attitude, initials for speakers. Listen for discourse markers (actually, instead, the problem is) and mark corrections explicitly. Before the audio starts, read the question stems to know which information type to track, and answer from the overall exchange rather than a single heard word.
On integrated summary and ordering tasks, the candidate writes a summary by lifting sentences from the passage in original order, or orders events by the sequence in which they appear in the text rather than by chronological or logical sequence, and omits the passage's main claim.
Copying sentences is faster and safer than compressing, and ordering by text position works often enough in narrative passages that the candidate never develops a separate timeline check. Summary tasks are uncommon in routine study, so the distinction between main claim and supporting detail is untrained.
What to do instead
For summaries, first write the passage's main claim in one sentence without looking at the text, then select two or three supporting points and express each in your own words within a set word limit; never copy more than a short technical term. For ordering tasks, build an explicit timeline or cause-effect chain on scratch paper with the text closed, then match items to it rather than to their paragraph position.