Sanakreon

Of course Japanese make many mistakes when they speak English, as English is not their native language. But among those Japanese that are fluent in English, this mistake is the most widespread.

Basically, the mistake is that they use singular form of nouns where they should be using plural form. I guess this is because this concept of singular and plural forms does not exist in Japanese language. In Japanese, all nouns have only one form, which is used as both singular and plural. I first noticed it when talking with my Japanese ex-girlfriend, who can speak English very well. When saying that she likes something, she would say, for example, “I like orange”, instead of “I like oranges”. When I pointed this out to her, she said that she believes that this is the correct way. I then pointed her to this video with correct usage, and even though she says that she got scared, it seems that she learned her lesson.

This mistake is also widespread in Japanese academic environment, look for example here, it is a website for the department of creative informatics in Tokyo University. Look at the “Research Fields” in the “Faculty and Labs” table; it seems that they made this mistake in almost all the places that they possibly could.