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The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

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Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

#161

Post by bitwize »

svilen_dobrev wrote: post #101
bitwize wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spend enough time in Japan, and you realize that young to middle-aged Japanese people really do understand that competence in English will give them an edge -- but they don't know where or how to go about learning so they will try damn near anything, especially if they think it's easy or a "shortcut". There's potentially a big market for apps like Rosetta Stone or Duolingo over there, I don't know how things like tha…

> so they will try damn near anything 2012.. i am not a native english-speaker but white, in Tokyo for 2 weeks, staying in friend's apartment, not knowing a word except "Arigato". One day, In some very big shop, i was looking for some locally made hand cream, and after walking the shelves with hundreds of things only labelled in japanese hieroglyphs, i asked the lady on the cash-desk "Where are hand-creams?" and she…

Yeah, I went to a frozen yogurt place and scraped together enough Japanese to ask if there was an English speaker. They brought before me the store manager, a 22-year-old girl fresh out of college who'd spent a year in California as an exchange student and was super over the moon to be speaking to a real American once again. It was super cute, and we just stood there and talked about random stuff for several minutes before I realized I still wanted frozen yogurt and didn't know how to operate the machines or pay for my order.

I did the same thing and seized any opportunity to practice. I spent a lot of evenings that vacation in bars, just speaking to locals so I could git gud enough in Japanese to... function at a basic level there. I think I gained more Japanese language levels during those two weeks than I did my three semesters of collegiate study of the language.

It's lovely to visit, but unless Rakuten or Nintendo or somebody offered me a too-good-to-pass-up career opportunity, I couldn't foresee myself living in Japan. It's pricey, and as a white dude I would always be seen as an outsider (the literal translation of gaijin) with attendant social disadvantages: I couldn't live or work in certain places, more paperwork and bureaucratic hoops I'd need to jump through, the funny looks and people hiding from me (not so much a problem in Osaka but I hear it happens in Tokyo a lot).

Oh, you know those radio DJ booths in Splatoon where you can look through the plate glass and see the hostesses making their broadcast? Those are actual things in Japan. I passed by one in Doutonbori and the radio hosts started making remarks about the funny foreigner. Yay.

Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

#162

Post by sangnoir »

mapt wrote: post #139
helboi4 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you speak Japanese you will have a waaaaaay better time in Japan. But no they will not ever accept you in the same way you could be accepted in a European country. If you're Korean or Chinese you might get away with it with the younger generation. But ethnicity is still a big barrier there. Source - I speak Japanese.

That is the situation right now. It's not necessarily going to be the situation forever. Every demographic crisis involving low birthrates is an immigration melting pot waiting for the population to get desperate enough to change policies.

> Every demographic crisis involving low birthrates is an immigration melting pot waiting for the population to get desperate enough to change policies.

Unless people accept the reality that perpetual growth is impossible, and that the economy will shrink as the population does. The UK austerity years provides a decent example of such a "managed decline", albeit with more immigrants, but that's not assured when the next conservative government comes to power.

Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

#163

Post by Neonlicht »

famahar wrote: post #129
germandiago wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been a couple of times in Japan, have some Japanese friends here in Vietnam, where I live. I am spanish. In my humble opinion, japanese society is very kind and well-behaved, but, if you cannot speak japanese and you live in one more-or-less big city, according to all the feedback I got, then, you are basically out. And anyway, you will never be a japanese. I mean, there is much less difference between foreign…

This strong need to be accepted by a whole country is something I see mentioned a lot by a particular group of people that have never really been "othered" in their life. Coming to Japan is quite a shock for them because they experience being a minority for the first time in their lives. I was born in Canada and have dealt with micro-aggresions and blatant racism my whole life there. Living in Japan I can say I feel…

Tolerance sounds good on paper but it can so easily become complete and utter indifference. And you should never make the mistake of thinking that it implies respect. I know deeply unhappy expats in Amsterdam who are faced with such an English speaking but very cold and alien society. The globalisation lie is that the world is the same everywhere.

Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

#164

Post by ranger_danger »

tokinonagare wrote: post #131
expatjapan121 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you cannot speak japanese and you live in one more-or-less big city, according to all the feedback I got, then, you are basically out. > And anyway, you will never be a japanese. I think you answered yourself that if you _can_ speak Japanese, things are different. The reality is that if you can speak Japanese, it's quite easy to be well integrated with the people. In your example, I don't know if the Romanian le…

> Please stop telling people "they will never be Japanese" since it's blatantly wrong. You are wrong here. You will indeed never be Japanese if you haven't both 2 ethnic Japanese parents and raised in Japanese (second-generation raised abroad, for instance in South American are out). You can't rewrite all your DNA and go back in time to have a Japanese education in Japan. The real issue is why caring so much about "b…

> You are wrong here. You will indeed never be Japanese

I think you are assuming they share the same definition of "Japanese" as you. Even the Japanese government does not agree with your definition.

Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

#165

Post by Phrodo_00 »

sour-taste wrote: post #5
tkgally wrote: post #2

I am the author of this article and will be interested to read HNers’ thoughts and discussion about the topic. I will also be happy to respond to questions.

Lovely article. I recently moved back to the US from Japan after living there for a year. My poor Japanese made life very difficult. Easy things like calling a restaurant for a reservation or visiting the ward office was always a major challenge. I second your point that Japanese is always useful regardless of official policies. What do you think Japan should do to encourage Japanese language learning among immigrant…

> What do you think Japan should do to encourage Japanese language learning among immigrants?

It really boggles my mind how many immigrants to a place (because it doesn't just happen in Japan) are fine not trying to learn the language, especially if the place doesn't even understand the languages you know. You'd think living in such a place would be enough encouragement (it certainly would be for me), but I keep seeing stories about immigrants in several places not bothering to learn a common language of where they live.

Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

#166

Post by red-iron-pine »

mapt wrote: post #139
helboi4 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you speak Japanese you will have a waaaaaay better time in Japan. But no they will not ever accept you in the same way you could be accepted in a European country. If you're Korean or Chinese you might get away with it with the younger generation. But ethnicity is still a big barrier there. Source - I speak Japanese.

That is the situation right now. It's not necessarily going to be the situation forever. Every demographic crisis involving low birthrates is an immigration melting pot waiting for the population to get desperate enough to change policies.

maybe in the west, but asia is pretty racist, and the japanese have resisted until now pretty well. we'll have AI before they'll capitulate for any real migration

Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

#167

Post by mike50 »

SpecialistK wrote: post #65

I only speak English, but I have found and theorized that one's ability to learn and retain a L2 is heavily affected by your society's "need" to communicate outside of the national language. This article largely reinforces that theory. If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle. People in Finland report higher levels of English competency than people in France (despite French…

French is widely spoken throughout the world. If you speak French you can travel to Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and parts of South America without needing to speak another language. Also French is an official language in Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg as well as being widely spoken and taught as a second language in contentental Europe. Japan is spoken mostly in Japan and expat communities.

Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

#168

Post by eszed »

minebreaker wrote: post #30
sien wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think it compares to various European countries? Say, Germany, Spain, Italy (or any that you're familiar with). Northern Europeans seem to be fantastic at learning languages. It's surprising the rest of the world doesn't copy what they do.

To be fair, it's much easier to learn English if your mother tongue is a variant of Indo-European.

It is and it isn't, in my experience teaching ESL. The basics are incredibly easier, as students receive the benefit of cognates and (at least some) similar constructs. However, there's an interesting stage, right around the beginning of intermediate where students tend to become judgemental of the target language: there's a lot of frustrated "well, why doesn't English do it this way?" (It doesn't help at all that English is such a bastardized and inconsistent tongue that their native language's way of doing [whatever] often is more logical / concise / beautiful!) Some students get stuck there and never progress.

I recall very few, if any, Asian-language speakers hitting that particular speedbump. It's like they're prepared for English to be so different from the start that they've already made a psychological shift to English-mode that other learners may struggle to negotiate.

Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

#169

Post by eszed »

tkgally wrote: post #35
minebreaker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it's much easier to learn English if your mother tongue is a variant of Indo-European.

Yes, I was about to say the same thing. The similarities of vocabulary and grammar among those languages make it easier for speakers of one language to learn another. Also, it seems to be easier for people to learn another language when they already know two or three. As Europe is more multilingual than Japan, more Europeans have a head start at acquiring additional languages. There may be other factors—stronger atta…

> it seems to be easier for people to learn another language when they already know two or three.

Yes, that's empirically verified by multiple studies.

My pet theory about that is that a great deal of one's psychological sense of self is tied to one's ability to communicate with others. Learning a new language entails "letting go", to a great extent, of a linguistic sense of self. (Peter Hessler writes perceptively and humourously about this in one of his early books.) People who speak more than one language have either a) gone through this process (as adults) already, and can negotiate it more easily, or b) have (as dual-native speakers) a self-perception that is less-rigidly tied to a particular language context.

This is also why people who are highly articulate in their native tongue often progress more slowly than people who are not. I have more than once been humbled by someone who (natively) speaks what I'd (in my academic arrogance) judge to be "bad English" zooming ahead of me in foreign language acquisition. I'm concerned about being "correct", while they burble away unconcernedly and leave me far behind. Those experiences have been good for my character. :-)

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077992, down-thread a bit, who makes this point better than I did.

Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

#170

Post by qingcharles »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #85
SpecialistK wrote: post #65

I only speak English, but I have found and theorized that one's ability to learn and retain a L2 is heavily affected by your society's "need" to communicate outside of the national language. This article largely reinforces that theory. If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle. People in Finland report higher levels of English competency than people in France (despite French…

Suomi mainittu. As an English speaker who moved to Finland and has been steadily learning Finnish over the last few years, I definitely have to agree: My progress would probably be faster (and more painful) if I actually had any immediate need to speak Finnish. Don't twist my words here, I am still extremely grateful that Finns speak such excellent English. It's the only reason I felt like I could make it finding a j…

How hard have you found Finnish? As a language addict, I've always heard (and seen) that it is very hard. Hungarian hard.

I worked for Nokia for a while, but was lucky that everyone I spoke to in Finland spoke perfect English.

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