Do Japanese people know English?
Yeah. I'm not a native English speaker and I spent significant time and effort learning the damn language. It paid off.
What's preventing Japanese engineers from doing the same?
Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
31–40 of 111 posts
Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
#32As Someone who has spent decades working with teams around the world with varying levels of English from native to none, these are good guidelines. I would add to try and talk using the simplest and least ambiguous words you can. Breathe. And use shorter sentences.
I also have non English speaking family members so I get to improve everyday. And yes I make mistakes every day but 99% avoidable and the rest I just accept and move on. Multicultural and multilingual teams are a joy not a test so enjoy them when you have the chance. Might surprise yourself how much you will learn about people and communications and build a new level of self awareness in the process.
My 2c.
Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who the hell talks like this in the first place? I've worked in Japan for 7 years and majority of the time you will not be working with native English speakers, usually people who speak multiple languages at all times, if you're only language you know is English you are the minority and people will have to work with you to understand. I couldnt even finish the article after that insane ramble of gibberish I'm genuine…
> and majority of the time you will not be working with native English speakers, usually people who speak multiple languages at all times, if you're only language you know is English you are the minority and people will have to work with you to understand. This is pretty much life anywhere outside of North America and the UK (or colonies). In Norway, I don't think a single coworker of mine is a native English speaker…
Would you mind sharing some info on how you found a tech job in Norway?
I'm from another European country and looking for some first-hand knowledge on working in / moving to Norway.
Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
#34[dead]
Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds really nice! Do you have an example of the concise, high quality communciation the Japanese team used? It'd be interesing to see what they focused on to make it so clear.
Not the person you asked here, but my guess is that it mostly has to do with the need for asynchronous communications. You can't just quickly ask the guy from Japan and expect an answer right away. That means the text needs to cover all questions. I once worked in a job where each day of the week was covered by a different person. Meaning at the end of the day you had to leave everything in a state that another perso…
I’m forced to do this with claude code: documenting work for context management. Every new agent starts fresh, so everything better be recorded and explained.
Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
#36Lush, the bathbombs company, has an internal tech team that builds the apps, website, and point of sale systems. I worked there for a little while on some web-based tooling for payments which involved working with the Japanese team who did the tech for the Japanese site. They were really good. Everything was incredibly clear and easy to understand because they had to put a lot of effort into written comms due to both…
I have a similar experience.
Whenever I send message to my Japanese colleagues their response is always detailed and precise.
They might take time in replying as of course they use AI and auto translating tools but the reply will be accurate.
In fact, I find the worse level of English understanding the better the answer they provide, and it’s not only the work they put into it, there is a feeling of respect and importance towards other people work which I really appreciate.
Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
#37Do Japanese people know English?
Yeah. I'm not a native English speaker and I spent significant time and effort learning the damn language. It paid off. What's preventing Japanese engineers from doing the same?
> What's preventing Japanese engineers from doing the same?
The fact they don't really need it in their life (or job). English is definitely necessary if you work service jobs in Tokyo (to deal with tourists), but not much anywhere else.
Japanese is one of a handful of languages where one can complete a postdoc entirely within the language. Many languages are not like this. e.g. in the Phillipines, STEM subjects are almost entirely taught in English, since Tagalog simply doesn't have words to describe most of the concepts. The result is something like 90% of the coursework being in English, with random Tagalog words mixed in. The concept is called "Taglish" if I recall correctly.
This is unnecessary in countries like Japan, China, South Korea, etc. If you're applying to a graduate school in Japan (or China, or Korea), expecting to receive education in English is actually the edge-case, not the expectation.
Also, at least in my company, there is an interesting trend where people are deciding learning English isn't really necessary since AI translation has gotten "good enough" for most use cases.
Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
#38I worked in Japan for ~7 years. I don't think I can relate with any of this, for starters I think not speaking Japanese relatively fluently would completely shape your experience from the get go.
Granted, this was a long time ago and even seeing non-Japanese around in Tokyo was rare, unlike now. But in the office environment let alone in tech, I doubt you can really make it work without not just speaking Japanese, but being considerably adapted to their culture. I think the chances of the dev just moving to Japan to work in tech and be anything other than a total outcast are poor. Which is ok if you plan to just do a year or two maybe. Even the author himself first got well acquainted with the language and culture then moved into development. And even so, this is hardly for but a select few to just fit into this lifestyle.
For North Americans or Europeans, the intersection of people who can make it work and are also incentivised to make it work looks infinitesimally small to me, esp. if you can opt for jobs in the industry in America or even Europe. It's a totally different story for someone from say South Korea or Taiwan, or to a lesser extent other Asian countries. For starters, coming in as a junior dev in Japan or as a translator won't be a massive pay downgrade for them. For South Koreans and Taiwanese the culture will be a lot more familiar, although there will of course still be some friction. So imagine coming in as mid-manager or higher, wow it sounds like quite the experiment to me knowing the place well. CEO with capital, maybe. But good luck with that.
Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
#39Do Japanese people know English?
Yes, especially if people living in the city. I have known Japanese people who can’t speak English well but can read technical CS papers and understand well enough to give a summary and presentation in Japanese.
Just keep in mind they are usually very good in reading, okayish in listening, and kinda needs work on speaking. But that’s expected. If you live a daily life in Japan like the Japanese, you barely need to speak English, or hear it, if at all. Even the foreign staff at the convenience store speak Japanese good enough for them to carry on their duties.
Re: Working and Communicating with Japanese Engineers
#40"we really need to focus on user-facing touchpoints, because there’s too much sign-up friction. Like, we need to 10x the stickiness of the landing page but also keep it lean," Even as a native English speaker I find this type of language hard to understand, fluffy and ambiguous. We would all benefit from using plain language not just non native English speakers
This makes sense? User-facing touch points: everything a user can interact with Sign-up friction: self explanatory Stickiness: less bounce rate Lean: don't overload with touch points/bloat
You’re actually using jargon to explain jargon here. Try explaining all of this from the user’s perspective.