Do you usually divide words into elements?

Solution 1:

Three things make English very different from Japanese in relation to this issue. Firstly, Japanese syllable rules allow for just a single consonant at the beginning of a syllable (with the exception of plosives followed by /j/), and a vowel in the nucleus. Japanese syllables don't allow consonants at all at the end of the syllable, apart from /N/ and /K/. So even though Japanese has a phoneme /t/ and a vowel /u/, the word /tut/ would be impossible in Japanese. English, in contrast, allows for consonants at the end of the syllable. This automatically means that there are a far greater number of possible syllables in English than in Japanese.

The second point is that English also allows for broad variety of consonant clusters whereas Japanese only allows a glide /j/ after an initial plosive. So for example we see syllables beginning with /kw/, /pr/ or even with three consonants such as /spl/ in English. The ends of English syllables allow for even longer clusters than that. For example the plural of the word angst may be realised as /æŋksts/ which includes the five-consonant cluster /ŋksts/. So this potential for a wide variety of different types of cluster both at the beginning and ends of syllables exponentially increases the number of well-formed syllables in English.

Lastly, Japanese has a small number of vowels, whereas non-rhotic English has around twenty or so, depending on how you count them. So again, this further increases the number of possible syllables in English. To illustrate, the English equivalent of Japanese's /ta, ti, tu, te, to/ would be /ti: tɪ tæ tɑ: tɒ tɔ tʊ tu: tə tɜ: te tʌ teɪ taɪ tɔɪ təʊ taʊ tɪə teə/!

So, in short, the constraints on how Japanese syllables are formed means that there is a small number of possible syllables, and for that reason it is possible for students to learn all of them and even to be able to list them effortlessly. In contrast English has so many possible syllables that this would be almost impossible. It also means that there is no possibility of using a syllabary writing system for English. English speakers, therefore, do not recognise or name individual syllables in the same way that Japanese speakers do.