In this paper, Japanese and English dialogues used in the Japanese movie, My Neighbor Totoro (1988) are compared by quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative method looks at the number of turns spoken by main characters in the movie. The qualitative method considers moves, which consist of initiation, response, and feedback (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975) to see the discourse patterns of the dialogue. The results of both methods show that there are significant differences between the Japanese and English dialogues. This paper discusses the reasons of these differences considering cultural and linguistic features.
