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Japan has changed in important and visible ways

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Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#211

Post by blodkorv »

_benedict wrote: post #203
djtango wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about making the effort to assimilate with your host country. Embracing and empathising with their way of life which begins with learning their language. I've always found it frustrating whenever I meet people who don't try to integrate with the country they're living in - both when I've lived at home and in foreign countries...

Some people are really bad at language, and depending on the context it’s probably fine to let them off the hook. I once participated in a French class in Paris with a guy whose wife was French, and he was utterly hopeless. I’m not sure he was ever going to develop the skill, even though he tried. Though I hope I’m wrong about that. I think a journalist writing about a country is a special case though, that doesn’t g…

Yes, most people just assumes that learning a language is equaly easy for everyone.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#212

Post by Hamuko »

golemiprague wrote: post #36

What's so great about immigration and growing population? Japan is a small country without any resources, why would they want to share what they have with immigrants? What good did immigration do to western Europe? All I hear about are problems and all the good things happened even before immigration, otherwise immigrants wouldn't have come there in the first place.

>Japan is a small country

Small by what metric? By land area, it's comparable to Germany (with 5% more land) and it's the 11th most populous country in the world.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#213

Post by jahewson »

samtp wrote: post #46
jmole wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

replacement rate is steady-state, not exponential growth. when you have a country with 80 million homes, and 50 years later you only need 30 million of them, you're basically inviting decay to set in.

Why can you not repurpose the land used for those 20 million houses back into green space or better uses for the remaining 30 million? Not to mention that there is much less competition for resources when the population is 60% of what it used to be. You're acting like this is a major problem, but it seems like a great opportunity.

Who’s going to pay to repurpose the land? There’s zero economic value for anyone involved. Plus the workforce is half what it was, they have other things to do. That’s assuming they’re not already broke from spending 20 years supporting retirees that outnumber them 2:1 while watching their own businesses halve in size.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#214

Post by Aaronmacaron »

_benedict wrote: post #203
djtango wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about making the effort to assimilate with your host country. Embracing and empathising with their way of life which begins with learning their language. I've always found it frustrating whenever I meet people who don't try to integrate with the country they're living in - both when I've lived at home and in foreign countries...

Some people are really bad at language, and depending on the context it’s probably fine to let them off the hook. I once participated in a French class in Paris with a guy whose wife was French, and he was utterly hopeless. I’m not sure he was ever going to develop the skill, even though he tried. Though I hope I’m wrong about that. I think a journalist writing about a country is a special case though, that doesn’t g…

I don't really believe this. Of course some people have more of a tendency to be good at languages than others but I think the guy from you story probably didn't try hard enough or maybe had a completely wrong approach. There are many countries where virtually all people speak a foreign language which shows that it is possible for almost anybody to pick up another language.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#215

Post by petodo »

kleene_op wrote: post #154
hogepiyo wrote: post #92

It's difficult to take the author of the article being repudiated (Wingfield-Hayes) seriously when he has lived here for over 10 years and doesn't speak the language. Any other person who lived in a country for a decade and can't converse in the language would be (rightfully imo) shamed for it. Idk, say what you like about how journalists operate but living somewhere for a decade and not speaking the language doesn't…

Seems pretty weird to me as well. I don't understand how you could love a country enough to live and work there for a decade but not try to learn its language.

Let me introduce you to wild idea that language is just tool and has nothing to do really with the country/culture. I may loved China (at least first few years) where I lived for years without loving their politicians and learning language (beyond few useful phrase and numbers), same goes actually for many countries I travelled.

My kid is citizen of country A, was born in country B and lives in country C speaking languages B, C and D without actually speaking language of his citizenship country, because it's just language, you are not defined by your passport or mother language. I'm from country A, his mother from C and I speak to kid in B and D. The world is not black and white.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#216

Post by kerpotgh »

tstrimple wrote: post #26
Fordec wrote: post #16

A fertility rate of 1.3 is still a demographic crisis. Just because the neighbors degraded to the same level also isn't supposed to be a point of pride. Japan at 1.3 and China at 1.2 are both far below replacement rate of 2.1 and both are heavily detrimental to a nations economic and demographic outlook and on par with only the European with the worst outlooks like Spain, Italy and Ukraine.

I wonder how long it will take our societies to stop asking questions like how can we make people have more babies, and start asking questions like is it smart to plan our entire economy around continuous exponential population growth.

[dead]

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#217

Post by ManuelKiessling »

petodo wrote: post #174
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the one thing where I’m That Old White Man by now. My favorite is user groups meetups in Germany where there are one or two people who don’t speak German, and then request the talk to be held in English. Imagine me attending a meetup in London as the only German and requesting to have the talk held in German. It would be ridiculous.

German is not lingua franca spoken by people all around world, so yes, this comparison is ridiculous comparing lanugage taught everywhere in world with niche language, which is less popular than Chinese as foreign language.

English is spoken by people all around the world, but not all people around the world speak English.

Also, those expats living an English life in Berlin etc. are doing themselves a huge disservice — you learn a language if and only if you are forced to hear and speak it. By attending meetups and softly forcing your language onto the group, you are never going to break out of your bubble.

It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone involved, really. The German speaker is limited in what she or he can express, the German audience is limited in what they can understand, the English audience doesn’t progress in learning the language of their new home country.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#218

Post by abainbridge »

astrange wrote: post #119
danielscrubs wrote: post #54

> Hiring 6 people to do the job of 2 is sadly common in Japan, and it’s a big reason why Japanese people earn such low and stagnant wages. Median wealth in Japan is 119,999 USD whilst in USA it is 93,271 USD. I see way more misery in American cities than I ever seen here. I also had an ex (with a masters degree mind you) who was a cleaning lady for a short while, and they worked her to the bone, 12 hour shifts, and s…

> Median wealth in Japan is 119,999 USD whilst in USA it is 93,271 USD. Median Japanese person is 10 years older than median US person (48 vs 38).

But is also expected to life 7.5 years longer.

Re: Japan has changed in important and visible ways

#219

Post by commitpizza »

hogepiyo wrote: post #92

It's difficult to take the author of the article being repudiated (Wingfield-Hayes) seriously when he has lived here for over 10 years and doesn't speak the language. Any other person who lived in a country for a decade and can't converse in the language would be (rightfully imo) shamed for it. Idk, say what you like about how journalists operate but living somewhere for a decade and not speaking the language doesn't…

You should visit sweden, we have a lot of people that have lived here for like 20+ years and don't speak the language.

Although, some parts of cities nowadays you don't need to as other languages like arabic is more common.

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