SVO Japanese: Rewriting Japanese Syntax

As reflected in familiar concerns such as “Japanese people struggle with English” or “Japanese is too difficult to learn as a foreign language,” there is a structural distance between SOV Japanese and SVO English that the living brain cannot easily cross. The SVO Japanese project is an attempt to explore a point of compromise between these two linguistic structures through the design and practice of a constructed language. Learning a foreign language means dealing with three difficulties at once: pronunciation, vocabulary, and word order. SVO Japanese proposes a constructed-language protocol that keeps Japanese vocabulary intact while reorganizing only the word order into an English-style SVO structure. By doing so, it isolates the difficulty of word order from the other two and allows speakers to experience it directly.