I have found that, in general, Japanese students tend to make the same mistakes when they are writing in English. Of these mistakes, the majority of them are grammatical in nature, but there are other types of mistakes, as well. One of the more common types of mistakes is that Japanese students will attempt to write in English in the same way that they would write the same sentence in Japanese; this can sometimes be acceptable, but there are often times when using such an approach results in the English sentence sounding quite strange or unnatural.

Another major difficulty that Japanese students face is that many of them struggle with format and structure in their essays. Although students can write simple sentences without much effort, some students generally have difficulty writing longer, more complex sentences, and they also struggle to format their essays in ways that make them easy to read. This can result in the student writing many short, simple sentences when combining those sentences together to make something more complex would be a much better choice. Writing short, simple sentences is fine when appropriate, but students should attempt to write more complex sentences. For essay structure, I have seen many students have difficulty with proper formatting. Rather than write proper paragraphs, students tend to write perhaps one sentence and then immediately start a new paragraph instead of continuing with their current paragraph. In such a case, the student will generally tend to not write any additional information related to the topic that they were writing about, leaving out additional details.

Some students also struggle with articles, as well; because articles such as “a” and “the” do not exist at all in Japanese, it can be difficult to understand how they are supposed to work, as Japanese has no true equivalent. Students sometimes will use these articles incorrectly, which results in the sentences becoming rather awkward to read.

One additional writing mistake that I sometimes see students make is that they occasionally attempt to translate what they want to say directly from Japanese into English. There are times when this is acceptable, but there are also times when doing this can cause the results to be awkward or unnatural. Translation tools such as Google Translate can also occasionally give translations that are not optimal or do not make sense, so it is best to not rely on such translators or translations if possible.

I think that most of these problems can be solved through a combination of observation and practice. Students should first study how properly written essays are constructed and then use the formatting that they have learned in their own writing. By comparing what they have written to the essays that are properly formatted, students will be able to learn what it is that their essays are lacking. After identifying what it is that their essays are lacking in, the student should then attempt to practice writing as much as they can.