cribe the totality of linguistically significant features. Eventually, a direct relation between sound and symbol is substituted by a direct relation between structure and symbol. "The manipulation of the transcription is merely the outward expression of an analytic process which seeks to penetrate behind the acoustic or phonetic facts to the linguistic structure" (Gleason, 1955, p. 186).
One of the principal difficulties with transcription lies in the fact that there is hardly ever a one-to-one identity of sounds between languages. A "pure" a in Japanese is like a pure a in Italian, but is not exactly like it, if only because voice tones tend to vary with race and linguistic contexts. Some languages, such as Hungarian, are rich in sounds; others, such as Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, have significantly fewer sounds. The result is that Hungarians have greater facility to learn the sounds of most languages than do Spaniards, Italians, or Japanese. Therefore, when teaching English to Japanese, one must remember that most--if not all--English sounds demand an alien perception and physical ability to produce on the part of the Japanese student (Ask an American or Englishman to produce the glottal stop of Arabic, and you will understand the problem).
Many English words are incorporated in their original form in Japanese and are normally transcribed phonetically in katakana, but phonetic transcription cannot do justice to English sounds because the Japanese do not have English sounds in their language. There are well over one thousand loanwords (gairaigo) from English and other European languages in Japanese, plus the
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