Summary
Japan’s English proficiency ranking dropped to 92nd out of 116 countries, the lowest ever recorded.
The decline is attributed to stagnant English proficiency among young people, particularly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Netherlands ranked first, followed by European countries, while the Philippines and Malaysia ranked 22nd and 26th, respectively.
I love that we have hundred people saying that English is the past and irrelevant… Needing to use English to share that though.
English classes are required (I think from elementary school as of a few years ago) but, from talking to a lot of teachers in my time here, the actual teachers just use the English speakers they bring over here to parrot phrases and won’t let them actually correct things like pronunciation in a lot of cases. I know many Japanese who think the whole program (JET) is a waste, and I’m inclined to agree in its current state.
Japan is like 98.5% Japanese the last time I looked it up. English is completely unnecessary in Japan outside of some very specific jobs and on certain entrance exams (which are also just there for the sake of the test). If a child doesn’t want to learn and the quality of the education is lacking, even with all the money dumped into it, it’s useless. Back during the bubble economy ending in the '90s it may have been different, but job prospects requiring English outside of hospitality, tourism, and some specific medical and government jobs are non-existent. Even then, it often makes more sense to use a translator or to keep one on staff.
Japan either needs to get serious about its English education or just stop wasting money on an ineffective program and focus resources into classes or schools to develop people who actually want to learn. I say this as someone whose taxes fund it.
I was reading the book by Chris Broad of the Travel Abroad YouTube about his experience teaching in Japan. You’re totally correct. It’s really a faux pas to correct a teacher as a foreigner teaching English. So the teacher would give say the wrong thing, and you’d just nod.
Not to mention, from Chris, the Japanese tests for English are really stupid. They’re teaching them with tests from the 80s, and using words that aren’t common in spoken language.
I’ve seen uni entrance exam tests and it’s definitely just there for the test – no one speaks the way they do in those. I was never a teacher, though, so I’m just going on what my friends say (my wife hated English class and never paid attention, so she doesn’t remember much).
To be fair, the JLPT also tends to include outdated Japanese, so there’s that as well.
Half the foreigners survive on the shitty education system though. No need to organize mass deportations in Japan. Just stop English education and 50% of white guys are gone instantly.
Which is ironic given how many English loanwords have infiltrated the language in recent times, to the point where sometimes I hear Japanese speak in a not overly formal context and half of the words they say are just English words with Japanese pronunciation.
Same in Pakistan. People tend to use a lot of English words in Urdu, even when an equivalent native word exists. For example, the proper way to say “What’s the time?” is “کیا وقت ہوا ہے؟” (“kiya waqat hawa hay?”). But a lot of people will say “کیا ٹائم ہے؟” (“kiya time hay?”) instead. But of course, there are also loanwords such as “واشنگ مشین” (washing machine) and “کمپیوٹر” (computer).
Loans from French (either old French or Norman French, some borrowed into/from Latin on either side) comprise a huge amount of English vocab. Does that mean we speak French?
(yes, I know there’s a video out there arguing that English is just bad/weird French and no I don’t agree with it).
Having learned both english and now in the process of learning Japanese, katakana English is so confusing sometimes. It’s kind of correct when you don’t think about what’s actually written, but you sometimes have to think long to understand that an エアコン (eakon) is just an air con(dition).
I always found saying katakana out loud made me understand.
Just wait til you run into it for languages other than English. Froofy bakeries love throwing French words in as well, so you might be left wondering about the flavor of a ガトーフランボワーズ
I lived in Japan for 3 years mate.
yah me too bud–not sure what you’re on aboutt
You’re telling me ‘wait until you see katakana for other languages’.
I’m saying I have many times over, it doesn’t change my opinion.
I wasn’t contradicting you, just adding a bit about how katakana sucks for French (and in general). Guess it could’ve been phrased better–I agree that saying stuff out loud helps.
True. Also doesn’t help when you sometimes mix up シ(shi) and ツ (tsu) because the font (or someone else’s handwriting) makes them look very similar.
Alignment/starting position is the key. The "-like strokes in shi are left-aligned, the "-like ones in tsu are top-aligned. Same for ‘so’ and ‘n’. This is why people talk about stroke order being important (although in this case it’s not simply the order).
It gets easier and I agree with saying it aloud. Once you start getting used to patterns, you can decipher them more easily (at least the ones from a language you speak). Remember no diphthongs and each syllable gets one beat.
My pet theory is that it’s also how the infamous “No Smorking” Engrish came about in reverse. The ‘o’ in smoking tends to sound long and a lot of times words that sound like that to the Japanese from English will be (long-sounding vowel)+r.
Having lots of loaned words don’t mean much when English and Japanese have vastly different grammatical structures. There are also lots of non-English loaned words in Japanese, and from experience, the Japanese don’t always know which language a word is borrowed from, nor should the speakers of the language really need to care. In any case, grammar makes up an important part of a language, though it doesn’t come for free if you aren’t already exposed to the grammatical structure before.
Here is the link to the report. It wasn’t in the article.
I wonder what the methodology is. There’s no way Turkey is higher than Lebanon unless the metric is something specific that we have terrible data coverage for (which is very likely)
I also refuse to believe Hungary is in 17 when it feels like people here have a phobia of English (or a second language)
Isn’t this in European terms? Europe as a whole is extremely good at English compared to the rest of the world.
Why so? Remember that Lebanon’s preferred second language is French, not English.
I’ve been to both touristy and more “normal” parts of Turkey, and I was pretty shocked how few people understood English (or French, since you mention it). I actually mostly got by with a broken mix of English and Arabic loanwords I know they have in Turkey (or Turkish loanwords we have in Lebanese Arabic).
Drive down any road in Lebanon and you’ll see most signs, especially newer signs, are in English. When I was a kid it was mostly French and Arabic, now it’s mostly English and Arabic with some French sprinkled in. I’ve also been seeing a lot of municipal road and highway signs use “Beirut” instead of “Beyrouth”.
I think we still lean more heavily on French loanwords in our day to day Arabic, at least when not discussing something tech-related.
Also cinemas have consistently used the original English audio now, while we had a good 20% of these movies dubbed in French when I was a kid. A lot of companies’ business operations now are almost exclusively done in English (I’m talking about the documents - the conversations are naturally in Arabic).
I guess none of this is strictly true, there are areas and sectors (especially law) where French is still much more dominant. But people who are French-educated all eventually learn some English, the reverse (the category I’m in) is very rare. I still understand French, even rapid-fire French French, but speaking it or writing it has become so rare for me that it’s really atrophied over the past few years. My English is fine, because I’ve actually had to use it daily.
This is all just additional info, my point is just that Lebanon should probably be higher than Turkey on the list. Turkey has a massive domestic media machine, business is done in Turkish there, I’m pretty sure their schools teach everything in Turkish instead of having some subjects only done in foreign languages like we do. So just based on what I know in these two countries, the placements seem off, and it makes me question what else is going on with the data.
TIL… All of this.
It’s still higher than the United States.
Funny. Joking aside, I don’t think England, Ireland, the US, and Canada were tested.
A friend of mine went to “the states” a year, somewhere in the early nineties and she was accused of cheating because she came in top tier on the english test …
We were n°1 back then though, sweden has really lost it, plummeting off the podium to fourth place smh 😔
And, to be fair, there are millions of U.S. citizens who speak English as a second language.
About 1 in 10 according to the U.S. census do not speak English at home.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/12/languages-we-speak-in-united-states.html
Spanish is first, Chinese a distant second. I am guessing there are also plenty of indigenous people, especially in Alaska considering its isolation, who primarily speak native languages at home.
That’s interesting.
Makes sense that America does not have a national language. I’m pretty sure you can ask for any federal form in Spanish.
In California, you can ask for state forms in a huge number of languages. I was really surprised at the number when I went to get my California driver’s license after I moved.
In Canada too
Japan’s PM gas responded to the report “We are velly solly”
Brasil is higher than Japan?? It’s Japan that don’t care to learn English because they can do “everything” in their country without the need to know english?
Is it really that surprising? If you’ve ever played a video game before, you’d know that pretty much every Brazilian speaks English.
Rookie mistake. They should have surveyed the country’s Engrish proficiency.
the English proficiency of young people in the country is stagnant compared to other countries and regions.
Seems like my gut was right, that it’s less because they’re regressing, and more because other countries have been increasing theirs.
I’ve heard it characterized that Japan has been in the early 2000s since the 80s. At first ahead, but now behind with less than expected development economically, societally, and in some ways technologically.
I’m just a foreigner and do not understand the culture well enough to be writing this comment, but reading “stagnant” didn’t surprise me much.
It’s a common statement, but I think it’s a bit too generalized. Japan is still bleeding-edge in some very niche areas, but a lot of technology in daily life is behind. A lot of stuff still requires going in person, phone calls, faxes, and a seal stamp to get done. I was able to do something through the bloated, awful eTax software today after hours of fighting with it yesterday (need to run several things as admin, install plugins as admin, have Japanese as the main browser language, and have Japanese locale of PC and it’s still cludgy and unreliable).
So, for comparison, how do English speaking countries rank in ability to speak Japanese?
Japanese isn’t widely adopted across the Internet as the default language, so this comparison is irrelevant.
I’m only familiar with Western Internet, but if you don’t understand English, you’re isolating yourself from large parts of the world.
Would probably be more relevant to measure English-speaking countries’ ability to speak whatever the most commonly studied foreign language is, rather than Japanese. That would also probably need a caveat of eliminating native speakers and/or heritage speakers from the data set in some countries, as well.
“So…how long will you be staying?”
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My mother in law who is an english teacher in Japan says the social media the children are consuming is distracting from their studies 😂.
Those basterds!
