Yamaguchi Prefectural Public High School Entrance Examination - English common mistakes
Yamaguchi Prefectural Public High School Entrance Examination - English · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
The candidate starts writing a full Japanese translation of an answer while the recording is still moving to the next question, and by the time they look up they have lost the thread of items 3 and 4 and answer them by guesswork.
The audio is played a fixed number of times with no pause control, and candidates treat the listening section as a dictation task rather than a selection task; the habit comes from classroom exercises where the teacher stops the CD after every item.
What to do instead
Before the audio starts, read the answer choices and mark the one or two words that differ between them. During the audio write only symbols, initials, or numbers, never full sentences. Use the interval after each item to choose an option and immediately pre-read the next item's choices, so the pen stops the moment the next narration begins.
The candidate hears a number or time and writes the wrong one (13 for 30, 15 for 50, 4:15 for 4:50), or picks the option that matches a Japanese loanword sound rather than the English word actually spoken.
Japanese listeners commonly neutralise the /f/–/h/ and /r/–/l/ contrasts and do not reliably distinguish -teen from -ty in fast speech; the candidate also recognises a katakana-familiar word such as 'table' instantly and stops listening for the rest of the sentence.
What to do instead
Drill minimal pairs (thirteen/thirty, fifteen/fifty, forty/fourteen) with stress placement: -teen is stressed and longer, -ty is unstressed. Train the habit of writing digits as soon as a number is heard, then confirming with the second playing. Practise shadowing short school-announcement scripts so that whole phrases, not single familiar words, are the unit of comprehension.
The candidate finds one word in a paragraph that also appears in an answer choice and selects it immediately, without checking the subject, negation, or the sentence that follows the keyword.
Keyword matching is the fastest strategy under time pressure and it works often enough in short items to become a habit; longer passages at this level deliberately place the exact word from the question in a sentence that says the opposite or refers to a different person.
What to do instead
Make the candidate underline the question's key element first, then find the matching line and read one sentence before and one sentence after it before choosing. Require them to state out loud who does what and whether the sentence is affirmative or negative. Any option whose only support is a repeated word should be marked as suspect until a paraphrase in the text confirms it.
The candidate misreads a pronoun or demonstrative (it, they, this, that, such) and attributes an action or opinion to the wrong person or thing, producing a plausible but wrong answer on inference and main-idea items.
English requires the referent to be resolved from context, whereas Japanese allows omission of the subject entirely; the candidate carries that tolerance over and simply reads past the pronoun without deciding what it points to.
What to do instead
During practice, circle every pronoun and draw an arrow to its referent in the previous sentence or two. For each paragraph, write a five-word Japanese or English summary of who did what. On main-idea items, check that the chosen option covers the whole passage, not just the paragraph containing the keyword.
The candidate reads every passage at the same slow speed, spends too long on the first long passage, and reaches the final passage or the writing section with only a few minutes left, leaving items blank or answered in a rush.
School tests usually allow generous time, so candidates have never practised allocating a fixed budget across sections; unfamiliar vocabulary also triggers repeated re-reading of the same sentence.
What to do instead
Set a per-section time budget in practice (for example, roughly one minute per short item and a fixed cap for each long passage) and use a watch. Read the questions before the passage, skim for the location of each answer, and skip any item that takes more than about ninety seconds, returning to it at the end. Never leave an item blank, because there is no penalty for a guess.
In a situational dialogue item, the candidate chooses the reply that is grammatically correct and logically consistent but socially wrong: replying 'Yes, please' to an apology, or answering a teacher's request with 'What?' instead of a deferential response.
The candidate translates the Japanese response they would give into English and checks only the grammar, ignoring the relationship between speakers (teacher–student, customer–clerk, friend–friend) and the function of the utterance (request, apology, invitation, offer).
What to do instead
Before looking at the options, identify three things: who is speaking to whom, where, and what the first speaker wants the other to do. Then classify each option by function and eliminate any that performs the wrong function or uses the wrong register. Memorise fixed pairs such as 'Would you like …?' – 'Yes, please' versus 'I'm sorry' – 'That's all right'.
The candidate misses the speaker's final decision or change of mind because they stop listening or reading at the first positive statement, ignoring a 'but', 'actually', 'I was going to, but …', or a trailing correction.
In Japanese, the conclusion usually comes at the end of the sentence and is signalled by the sentence-final form; in English the pivot is often mid-sentence and marked by a contrast connective, so the candidate's attention has already dropped by the time the reversal arrives.
What to do instead
Train the candidate to mark contrast and change markers (but, however, actually, instead, after all, I'd rather) every time they appear, and to treat the last statement by the decision-maker as the answer. In practice, have them retell the dialogue in one sentence: 'A invited B, B first said X, but in the end B decided Y.'
The candidate fills a grammar gap by choosing the option that 'sounds right' in Japanese, producing errors such as 'I enjoyed to talk', 'I have been to Kyoto last year', or 'He said me that …'.
The candidate is translating meaning rather than analysing the grammatical slot; they have not internalised which verbs take a gerund, which take an infinitive, which take a that-clause, or which time expressions exclude the present perfect.
What to do instead
Require the candidate to name the structure required before looking at the options - verb + -ing, verb + to-infinitive, present perfect with since/for versus past simple with last/ago/yesterday. Keep a personal error list of verb patterns and time-marker rules, and re-test only those items weekly rather than doing undirected gap-fill volume.
On word-order and sentence-construction items, the candidate places words in the order they would appear in Japanese, or ignores the first word or the punctuation already printed, producing scrambled answers such as 'I with my friend went to the park yesterday enjoyed' or a question with statement word order.
Japanese allows free constituent order with a fixed verb-final position, so Japanese learners often move the verb or its object freely; they also treat the numbered blanks as independent slots instead of parts of one fixed chunk.
What to do instead
Teach the candidate to find the fixed chunk first - 'as soon as', 'too … to', 'so … that', 'how to', 'look forward to -ing', indirect question order - and drop it in as a unit. Then build the frame: subject, verb, object, then place time and place adverbials in the standard order. Finally, check three things: the given first word is respected, a question has auxiliary-before-subject order, and the completed sentence reads without any word left over.
When writing a short composition, the candidate produces sentences with a missing subject or verb ('Because very hot today'), inconsistent tense within the same paragraph, and drops articles and plural -s; they also fail to meet the required word count or write far over it.
Japanese permits subject omission and has no articles or plural marking, so these features are simply not noticed during self-review; candidates also write in one continuous block and never count the words, so length requirements are missed by a few words.
What to do instead
Impose a fixed procedure: plan three points, write one idea per sentence using a subject-verb core, then add modifiers. Apply a self-check list before submission - every sentence has a subject and a finite verb, tense is consistent, articles and plurals are present, and the connectives (first, then, because, however) match the logic. Count the words on the draft and add or cut one concrete detail to land inside the required range.