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The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
61–70 of 232 posts
Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
#62I don't think there is much to gain from intelligent Japanese people from becoming fluent in English, other than maybe leaving the country. They can already make a good living by climbing the ladder in a large firm. It is unrealistic for the average person in the country to become fluent in English reading/writing - lots of people are barely literate in their original language. Even if everyone became more skilled an…
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Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
#63I will get downvoted and hated for what I'm going to say. What's with the west's pathalogical obsession with Japan and Japanese? Is anime & JAV to blame here? Look, you have Chinese spoken by 1.35 billion people. Foreigners who speak Chinese are way more rare than those who speak Japanese, therefore making it a more valuable language to acquire for business, diplomacy and travel. China is the new emerging superpower.…
Japan was occupied by America and the society forcibly reconstructed and aligned with the west whereas china is culturally independent and harder to access? Just a thought.
Japan is also very small which makes it easy to "understand"
Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
#64I've lived in Japan for over a decade and I think this article summarizes some aspects of English education well. I'd like to share a few of my thoughts and experiences too.
English is often put on a very high pedestal. Speaking fluent English is associated with being "elite". A tech company in my city is slowly moving to doing all development work in English. I went to a casual tech talk event they held. Every talk was given in Japanese and most of them started with a joke along the lines of "[In English] Hello everyone, good evening! [In Japanese] Hahah, of course I'm not going to give the whole talk in English" It makes sense to give all the talks in Japanese to a Japanese speaking audience, but the whole vibe was that English was so impossible that the idea of giving a talk in English was absurd.
Some of my friends have kids with mixed-roots. They have grown up speaking English and Japanese. They sometimes modify their English pronunciation to sound "more Japanese" when they start English classes in school. They don't want to stand out amongst their peers.
I remember one kid, who was tri-lingual. He told a story about being called upon in English class to translate the Japanese word for "great-grandfather". He translated it correctly but his teacher said "No, it's grand-grandfather". They teacher and the class laughed at him. Of course, there are bad teachers everywhere but one wonders if the teacher would have tried to take him down a peg so much if he fit in a bit better. He ended up moving to Germany with his family. It makes me feel quite sad that a kid born and raised here can end up feeling more at home in a place he has no connection to.
Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
#65I 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 being much closer to English than Finnish is) because there are so many fewer Finnish speakers. Finns wanting to experience warm beaches or global cities need to communicate when traveling to those places outside of Finland. France meanwhile has mountains, beaches, a big domestic market, ample media, and international reach.
Japan is much more like France than Finland - the geographic diversity allows one to ski or sunbathe within the same country. The domestic market for goods and services is huge. Japan creates and exports so much culture that English speakers wish to learn Japanese to consume more of it. When there is little "need" to learn another language, it is not only less enticing but actually harder to do so.
This culminates in anglophones being at a disadvantage in acquiring a L2 compared to nearly anyone else. A lot of people worldwide do want to practice their English with a native speaker. Many international institutions use English as the lingua franca. Even during a layover in Montreal, my (then) girlfriend ordered a smoothie in French and was replied to in English (this could be a commentary on Canadian bilingualism, but I'll leave that for another day) - it's hard for an anglophone to practice and perfect another language when the world around them already speaks better English than their L2.
So considering Japan's strong domestic market, culture, and the stark differences between the languages, it was never a shock to me that their English proficiency isn't where one would immediately expect it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and the deep experience behind them.
Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
#66I will get downvoted and hated for what I'm going to say. What's with the west's pathalogical obsession with Japan and Japanese? Is anime & JAV to blame here? Look, you have Chinese spoken by 1.35 billion people. Foreigners who speak Chinese are way more rare than those who speak Japanese, therefore making it a more valuable language to acquire for business, diplomacy and travel. China is the new emerging superpower.…
People don't find authoritarian communism aspirational.
same will be said about conservative authoritarians in the US for next 20 years lol
Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Japan was occupied by America and the society forcibly reconstructed and aligned with the west whereas china is culturally independent and harder to access? Just a thought.
Japan is also very small which makes it easy to "understand"
Japan is actually quite large - its land area is about the same as Germany, and it's the 11th most populous country in the world.
Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
#68Earlier 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.
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Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
#69I will get downvoted and hated for what I'm going to say. What's with the west's pathalogical obsession with Japan and Japanese? Is anime & JAV to blame here? Look, you have Chinese spoken by 1.35 billion people. Foreigners who speak Chinese are way more rare than those who speak Japanese, therefore making it a more valuable language to acquire for business, diplomacy and travel. China is the new emerging superpower.…
> Is anime & JAV to blame here?
Why "blame"? Isn't it perfectly reasonable for people to take more interest in a country that's supplied them with interesting cultural exports than one that hasn't?
> Foreigners who speak Chinese are way more rare than those who speak Japanese, therefore making it a more valuable language to acquire for business, diplomacy and travel.
Only to the extent that you want to do business, diplomacy, or travel with China. More people are interested in Japan.
Re: The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
#70I will get downvoted and hated for what I'm going to say. What's with the west's pathalogical obsession with Japan and Japanese? Is anime & JAV to blame here? Look, you have Chinese spoken by 1.35 billion people. Foreigners who speak Chinese are way more rare than those who speak Japanese, therefore making it a more valuable language to acquire for business, diplomacy and travel. China is the new emerging superpower.…
> Is anime & JAV to blame here?
Yes, people are going to be interested in a culture based on its cultural exports and Japan punches way above its weight in terms of cultural exports. And it's not just anime and JAV, it's also literature and music. Having content that you want to consume will make it easier to get motivated and to stay motivated. On top of that intermediate and advanced language learning is, to a large extent, driven by media consumption so the availability of a large amount of interesting content simply makes Japanese easier to learn than many other languages.
This is also how nearly everyone learns English.
When China will start exporting interesting content more people will want to learn Chinese and succeed in learning it.