Yamagata Prefectural Public High School Entrance Examination - English common mistakes
Yamagata Prefectural Public High School Entrance Examination - English · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
During the listening section, the candidate writes a full Japanese translation of the previous item while the next question is already playing, then answers the next item from memory or guesses.
They treat listening as dictation. Writing consumes working memory, so they cannot hold the new question and its options while the audio continues at a fixed speed.
What to do instead
In practice, forbid writing during the first playback. Use only circling or check marks on options. Answer during the second playback. Do 10-minute number/date/name dictations to build automatic sound-to-symbol speed without full translation.
The candidate hears a negative contraction or a similar-sounding number and records the opposite: 'can't' as 'can', '13' as '30', 'won't' as 'want', or 'seventeen' as 'seventy'.
Reduced forms in connected speech are acoustically short and unstressed. Japanese learners often rely on spelling knowledge rather than the stressed syllable and final consonant.
What to do instead
Run minimal-pair drills: can/can't, 13/30, 14/40, walk/work, want/won't. Mark the stressed syllable and the /t/ or /n/ ending. In mock listening, write the number in digits and repeat it once mentally before choosing.
The candidate rejects the correct option because its words do not appear in the audio, and chooses an option that repeats a single heard word even when the action or speaker is wrong.
They wait for exact word matching instead of inferring the situation. Entrance listening items often paraphrase: 'return books' for 'library', 'take the day off' for 'absent'.
What to do instead
Before playback, predict two or three paraphrases for each option. After playback, require a reason for the chosen option that uses the situation, not a copied word. Practise matching sentence halves with synonyms, not identical words.
The candidate reads every passage word by word from the beginning at the same slow speed, reaches the final passage with only a few minutes left, and guesses the last three or four questions.
They treat reading as translation and do not adjust speed by purpose. They do not use the questions to decide which parts of the passage need close reading.
What to do instead
Read the questions first and underline the wh-word and key noun. Scan for names, numbers, and paragraph topic sentences. Set a per-passage time limit in mock tests, for example 8 minutes for a short passage, and leave 5 minutes for checking.
The candidate selects the option containing the most words copied from the passage, even when that option answers a different question, such as a 'why' option chosen for a 'what' question.
Surface lexical overlap feels safe. Distractors are often built by lifting a phrase from the text and attaching it to the wrong subject, time, or reason.
What to do instead
Underline the question word and the target subject before reading the options. For each option, point to the exact line and label it subject, action, time, or reason. Reject any option supported only by repeated words.
The candidate misreads pronouns and contrast markers. A sentence beginning 'However' is treated as support for the previous claim, or 'it' is assumed to refer to the nearest noun rather than the actual referent.
Japanese often omits subjects, so candidates do not track English pronouns. They also read 'however' as a simple conjunction meaning 'and'.
What to do instead
Annotate every pronoun with an arrow to its referent. Circle however, therefore, for example, and in contrast, and write the function in Japanese in the margin. Summarise each paragraph in one sentence before answering inference questions.
On grammar fill-in-the-blank items, the candidate chooses the verb form that 'sounds right' and ignores the subject or time adverb, producing errors such as 'He have lived here since 2020' or 'She go to school yesterday'.
They read the blank in isolation and trust familiarity. Japanese has no subject-verb agreement, and tense is often carried by context rather than verb form.
What to do instead
Bracket the subject and circle the time expression before choosing. Check three points in order: subject-verb agreement, tense, and active or passive voice. Keep a personal error list of the five forms you miss most.
The candidate builds English word order from Japanese and places the verb at the end or leaves a question word inside an embedded clause, as in 'Do you know where is the station?' or 'I asked him where did he live.'
Japanese word order is subject-object-verb, and indirect questions require statement order in English. Word-for-word conversion preserves Japanese order.
What to do instead
Use chunking: subject + verb + object as one unit. Drill indirect questions with the pattern 'Do you know + wh-word + subject + verb?' and compare 'Where is he?' with 'Do you know where he is?' Rewrite five Japanese sentences daily without looking at the Japanese word order.
The candidate supplies a word with the right meaning but the wrong part of speech or spelling in a vocabulary box: success/successful/succeed, difficult/difficulty, or misspellings such as becaus, enviroment, diffrent.
They memorise one form per meaning and do not connect word families. Japanese loanwords also distort spelling and syllable count.
What to do instead
Build word-family cards: noun, verb, adjective, adverb in one column and a short example sentence in another. Do a 5-minute spelling dictation of 20 high-frequency exam words daily, saying each syllable as you write.
The candidate writes a memorised paragraph that ignores the task conditions, such as 'give two reasons and one example' or a 25-word minimum, and produces fragments or run-ons by translating Japanese sentence by sentence.
They prepare templates but do not read the prompt carefully, and they compose in Japanese first. Japanese sentences often lack an explicit subject, so the English version becomes a fragment.
What to do instead
Underline every condition and the word count before writing. Spend three minutes on a three-line outline: topic sentence, reason 1, reason 2 or example. Use fixed patterns such as 'I think ... because ... For example, ...' Then check subject, verb, tense, plural, spelling, and word count with a checklist.