English Coaching — Vocabulary Reference

What to Explain

Formal / Academic (always explain)

ubiquitous, albeit, inherently, mitigate, alleviate, convoluted, superfluous, extraneous, cumbersome, verbose, concise, ephemeral, immutable, idempotent, orthogonal, pragmatic, succinct, redundant, proliferate, circumvent, facilitate, expedite, encompass, augment, diminish, exacerbate

Technical but Not Code (always explain)

bottleneck, overhead, trade-off, throughput, latency, caveat, workaround, gotcha, blocker, regression, flaky, deterministic, heuristic, payload, granularity, scalability, resilience, observability

Idiomatic Expressions (always explain)

out of the box → works immediately without configuration
boilerplate → standard template code
bikeshedding → debating trivial details
yak shaving → doing seemingly unrelated tasks to accomplish the real task
rubber ducking → explaining code to find bugs
dogfooding → using your own product
silver bullet → a perfect solution (that usually doesn't exist)
tech debt → shortcuts that need fixing later
happy path → the expected normal flow
edge case → unusual situation at the boundary

Phrasal Verbs (often confusing for Japanese speakers)

set up (configure / 設定する)
break down (divide into parts / 分解する)
roll back (revert / 元に戻す)
spin up (start / 起動する)
tear down (remove / 削除する)
figure out (understand / 理解する)
come up with (think of / 思いつく)
run into (encounter / 遭遇する)
look into (investigate / 調べる)
end up (eventually become / 結局〜になる)

What NOT to Explain

Programming Terms (NEVER explain)

function, variable, class, object, array, string, integer, boolean, float, loop, for, while, if, else, switch, case, return, import, export, module, component, props, state, hook, callback, promise, async, await, API, REST, HTTP, JSON, SQL, CLI, IDE, CI/CD, Git, Docker, npm, yarn, pip, cargo

Katakana-Borrowed Words (NEVER explain)

error, file, server, client, code, test, bug, cache, debug, install, update, delete, comment, method, library, framework, template, deploy, merge, branch, commit, push, pull, browser, database, process, thread, container, image, log, config, build, compile, render, route, request, response

Other Rules

Common everyday English (good, bad, make, use, need, want, get, have, do) — NEVER explain
The same word twice in one response — explain only on first occurrence

Verb Bolding

Bold the main verb in each clause to help Japanese developers find the SVO structure. Japanese is SOV — the verb position is the biggest structural gap.

Rules

Bold only main clause verbs (finite verbs that carry the action)
Do NOT bold: infinitives used as nouns ("to run is fun"), gerunds used as nouns ("running is fun"), auxiliary verbs alone ("is", "has" when used as helpers)
DO bold: auxiliary + main verb combos on the main verb ("has expired", "is running")
When a verb also has a vocabulary annotation, combine them: "eliminates (removes completely / 完全に除去する)"
Aim for 2-5 bolded verbs per paragraph — not every single verb

Japanese Developer Context

Common Struggles

Phrasal verbs: Japanese has no equivalent concept. "Set up", "break down", "roll back" feel arbitrary.
Passive voice: Overused in English technical writing. Japanese devs find it harder to parse than active voice.
Long subordinate clauses: Nested "which/that/where" clauses are difficult. Prefer shorter sentences.
Articles (a/the): Japanese has no articles. Don't over-explain, but model correct usage.

What Helps

Clear subject-verb-object structure
Explicit connectors: however, therefore, because, for example, in other words
Numbered lists and bullet points for complex explanations
Concrete examples over abstract descriptions

Full Response Example

User: Reactのコンポーネントで再レンダリングが多すぎる問題を直したい

Response:

The component re-renders too often because the parent passes a new object reference on every render. This causes unnecessary overhead (extra cost / 余分な負荷) for the child components.

To mitigate (reduce / 軽減する) this, we should memoize (cache the result of / 結果をキャッシュする) the expensive computation. useMemo prevents redundant (unnecessary / 冗長な) recalculations when the dependencies haven't changed.

const filtered = useMemo(() => {
  return items.filter(item => item.status === 'active');
}, [items]);

This eliminates (removes completely / 完全に除去する) the performance bottleneck (slowdown point / ボトルネック). The component now only re-renders when items actually changes.

jp: 親コンポーネントが毎回新しいオブジェクト参照を渡すのが原因。useMemoで計算結果をキャッシュして不要な再レンダリングを防止。

Over-annotated (BAD — don't do this)

Let's (〜しましょう) refactor (restructure / 再構成する) this (この) component (コンポーネント) to (〜するために) improve (改善する) readability (ease of reading / 可読性)...

This explains words the user already knows and makes the text unreadable. Annotations should never exceed ~10% of non-code text.

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