Wakayama Prefectural Public High School Entrance Examination - English common mistakes
Wakayama Prefectural Public High School Entrance Examination - English · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
On the listening section, the candidate writes nothing until the audio finishes, then tries to reconstruct the whole dialogue from memory and fills in answers that sound plausible rather than what was actually said.
Wakayama listening items play the audio a limited number of times, and candidates who have not been trained to take notes while listening freeze up, panic at the first unknown word, and lose the thread of the rest of the passage. They then default to guessing from the answer choices' wording.
What to do instead
Practise note-taking with a fixed shorthand: numbers, times, places, and who-did-what arrows, written in the margin while the audio plays. Before each play, read the question stems and underline the question word (who/what/when/where/why/how much). Accept that you will miss words; train yourself to rejoin the flow at the next recognizable keyword instead of stopping. Do ten short audio clips a week with only one listening, then check.
The candidate answers a listening question about what a speaker will do next or how they feel by matching a word they heard in the audio to the same word in an option, without checking whether the option's meaning fits.
Distractor options in Japanese entrance-exam listening are deliberately built by echoing vocabulary from the script. Candidates under time pressure treat word-matching as a shortcut, and they have often never been shown how distractors are constructed.
What to do instead
After choosing, force yourself to justify the answer in one Japanese sentence ('because the girl said she had already eaten, so she will not order'). If the only justification is 'I heard this word', reject the option. Study distractor patterns explicitly: same-word-different-meaning, partially true, true but not asked, and speaker-attribution swaps.
On short reading passages and dialogues, the candidate reads the questions first, then hunts for a sentence containing the same word as the question, and copies that sentence's content as the answer without reading the surrounding lines.
This is the fastest-feeling strategy and it works often enough on easy items to become a habit. But Japanese exam writers place the answer one or two sentences away from the keyword, or state it with a paraphrase, so keyword-hunting systematically selects the trap.
What to do instead
Read the passage once end-to-end first (it is short), state its main point in one line to yourself, then answer. For each option, locate the exact line that supports or contradicts it and mark it. If you cannot point to a supporting line, the option is wrong. Drill paraphrases: rewrite the passage's key sentence in simpler English and check which option matches the meaning, not the words.
On longer passages and information-retrieval tasks (posters, timetables, notices, email threads), the candidate reads every line at the same speed and runs out of time, or answers from general knowledge instead of the text.
These passages are designed so that not all information is needed and some details are deliberately irrelevant or conflicting. Candidates without a scanning routine either over-read or under-read, and they import assumptions (e.g. assuming a shop is open on a holiday because shops usually are) instead of checking the stated conditions.
What to do instead
Use a two-pass method: first pass, read only the title, headings, and the question stems to build a map; second pass, scan for the specific data each question needs. For retrieval tasks, convert conditions into a checklist (date, time, price, eligibility, deadline) and tick each against the text. Circle every condition word: 'only', 'except', 'not', 'free', 'must', 'by'-these decide the answer.
In grammar and vocabulary items, the candidate chooses the option that 'sounds right' in Japanese-translated form, producing errors such as 'I am interesting in music', 'I have been to Kyoto last year', or 'He said me that...'.
The candidate is translating from Japanese word order and Japanese verb semantics rather than applying English patterns. Classroom exposure has given recognition but not productive control of tense, aspect, prepositions, and verb complementation, and negative transfer from Japanese is never explicitly addressed.
What to do instead
Keep a personal error log organized by pattern (tense/aspect, prepositions after adjectives/verbs, verb + to/ -ing, reported speech, articles). For each pattern, memorize one model sentence and one contrast pair ('I am interested' vs 'It is interesting'; 'have been' vs 'went'). Before answering, say which pattern the blank is testing; if you cannot name it, flag the item and return later.
In sentence-reordering items, the candidate arranges the words into a sentence that is grammatical but does not match the Japanese prompt's meaning, or starts from the first word instead of the fixed anchor.
Reordering rewards structure, not word-by-word assembly. Candidates who place words in the order they occur in the Japanese sentence reproduce Japanese word order; those who start at the beginning often paint themselves into a corner because the anchor position (often the second or third slot) is fixed.
What to do instead
Work from the anchor blank outward: identify the fixed position, decide what grammatical chunk must sit there (e.g. a relative clause, an infinitive phrase, a prepositional phrase), then build the chunk. Write the Japanese meaning as a short paraphrase first and check the finished English sentence against it. Practise chunking: group words into noun phrases, verb phrases, and modifiers before ordering.
In structural-completion items (choosing or supplying the missing clause/connective), the candidate picks a connector by feel-using 'because' where 'so' is needed, 'although' where 'but' is needed, or 'when' where 'if' is needed-ignoring the logical relation between the two clauses.
Connectors are taught as vocabulary words with Japanese glosses, not as logic markers. Candidates also misread the second clause's polarity (whether it agrees or contrasts with the first), so they choose a connector that contradicts the sentence's logic.
What to do instead
Before choosing, label the relation between the clauses in Japanese: reason, result, contrast, condition, time, addition. Then select only from connectors in that category. Build a two-column table of contrast pairs (because/so, although/but, if/when, so that/in order to) with one example each, and drill 20 items where only the logic, not the vocabulary, decides.
On free-writing composition, the candidate writes a short, safe paragraph of simple sentences, or writes an ambitious paragraph with Japanese-style sentence structure and then cannot correct it, ending with under-length, off-topic, or ungrammatical output.
Composition is scored on task fulfilment, organization, and accuracy together, but candidates prepare only vocabulary. They have no planning step, no fixed sentence patterns to fall back on, and no time reserved for checking, so errors in tense and agreement survive to the final draft.
What to do instead
Use a five-minute plan: topic sentence, two supporting points with one example each, concluding sentence. Memorize six reusable frames (opinion + reason + example; comparison; experience; request; suggestion; prediction) and practise writing the same prompt in 8–10 sentences within a time limit. Reserve the last three minutes for a checklist pass: subject-verb agreement, tense consistency, articles, plurals, spelling of common words.
On Japanese-to-English transfer items, the candidate translates literally, keeping Japanese word order and using direct dictionary equivalents, producing sentences like 'I think that it is good to go to the library by bicycle with my friend yesterday.'
The candidate treats translation as word substitution. Japanese allows omitted subjects and flexible order; English requires explicit subjects, fixed order, and correct tense marking. Dictionary-first translation also selects the wrong sense of polysemous words and the wrong preposition.
What to do instead
Translate in three steps: (1) identify the core proposition-who does what to whom, and when; (2) choose the English sentence pattern (SV, SVO, SVOO, SVOC, there is, it is ... to ...) before choosing words; (3) fill vocabulary last, checking verb tense and preposition collocation. Keep a list of high-frequency Japanese-to-English traps: 'by/in/on' for transport, 'for/since' with time, 'say/tell', 'borrow/lend', 'come/go'.
On English-to-Japanese transfer items, the candidate writes a Japanese rendering that is word-for-word and ungrammatical in Japanese, or mistranslates a pronoun referent, a negation scope, or a comparative, because they translated clause by clause without reading the whole English sentence first.
Candidates assume this section is easy because it is 'their' language, so they skip the comprehension step. English pronouns, negation ('not all', 'I don't think'), and comparatives do not map one-to-one onto Japanese, and clause-by-clause rendering produces Japanese that no native reader would write.
What to do instead
Read the English sentence twice: first for the main clause and its subject, then for modifiers and their attachment. Identify pronoun referents and the scope of negation explicitly before writing. Draft the Japanese as natural Japanese (reordering clauses as Japanese requires), then compare back to the English to confirm nothing is added or dropped. Practise the specific traps: 'not all/every', 'I don't think that...', 'as ... as', 'the more ..., the more ...', and relative clauses attached to the far noun.