I know long term the answer is “keep studying Japanese.” I am.
Now that that’s out of the way, I work in an all Japanese office that has a lot of international products. Everyone’s English level is about average for a Japanese person who went to a good school but isn’t particularly interested in English (though “fluent” was a requirement to be hired). I was hired as a backend engineer and put out English related fires when they come up as well.
I occasionally have an issue where my coworkers don’t completely understand my questions. When this happens they ask me to repeat the question in English since they technically should understand it, and it should technically be easier for me. Usually this just makes them more confused and out come the “英語わからない” emotions and either someone else has to help or I just drop it and get fussed at later for not understanding something that couldn’t be clarified to me.
This happens in meetings etc with other coworkers as well BUT when they aren’t understood, they get asked pointed questions about what parts they aren’t communicating clearly in Japanese.
Obviously I appreciate them trying to communicate in English, but it’s making my job harder and building a bigger and bigger “his lack of Japanese ability is hindering work” case when I haven’t been given a chance to properly communicate beyond the first question.
Has anyone else run into this? What should I do? I don’t know how to fix this without sounding like I’m telling my superiors how they should be talking to me. I also don’t want to ignore their request.
12 comments
Two things that you could try:
1. Breakdown the question into smaller parts and go piece by piece. This will let you figure out where the breakdown is happening: vocabulary, grammar, or just being a difficult concept. You can do this in either language/flip as needed. My colleagues have excellent English but we still have meetings flip to Japanese because they need to figure out a decent explanation in Japanese before figuring out the English version.
2. Try to get the conversation into an email or chat space so you can both use visual aids. You can more easily blend languages and use Google Translate a little bit.
Edit to add: for how to make it seem like you aren’t telling your superiors how to communicate, you can present the question breakdown as “Let me just confirm that I have all the pieces correct…”. This also helps to make sure that the miscommunication isn’t happening earlier in the conversation.
For getting things in writing or onto a white board for diagramming, “I’m a visual thinker/external processor. I do best when I have a visual aid. Do you mind if we do X so that I can understand the problem better?” Tbh, this can be a good thing to do in any language because system diagrams and functional diagrams are terrible audio books.
I’m not sure if this would help but speak slow (but not too slow) and clearly . Pronounce all parts of the words. Common problem when learning language in regular school is you don’t get to practice listening and speaking. Avoid slangs and passive voice. Keep it simple sentences. You can incorporate Japanese words here and there.
I would just say something like “I cannot explain it in english properly, which part is difficult to understand?” or “I don’t know how to say it in english, which part… ” whatever excuse to decline their english request. It’s clear that using english is a dead end so the mission is to find ways to not get to that point, and use responses that take it off the table as an option. You could even lie and say english is your second language, it is easier to explain in japanese. Whatever works. “I can’t…” usually goes a long way in shutting people down compared to “I don’t want to”
It has never happened to me, but in a way they are not wrong： it is much easier to understand a foreign language than to express oneself in it.
Ok, now the problem is that we dont know why they do not understand your question. Could be a pronunciation problem, a vocab problem, a grammar problem. And yes, practice is the only solution.
That being said, you can help your colleague understand your question by building up the context around it before asking it and by using short, simple sentences.
You already got very good advice here. I’d just add to make short sentences and use simple English; “explain like I’m 5” style. It will sound a bit ridiculous to you, but it may be helpful for the others. You can always up the ante in a one on one conversation, where you know that the other side can handle it.
It is the way, I started communicating in Japanese many moons ago. I translated a simple sentence into my own language for a 3-year-old and then translated that into Japanese and uttered it. “Nihongo jousu”, haha! The reverse should work as well.
Let me tell you something no one ever told me… Sometimes you could be speaking totally natural Japanese but the listener is just an idiot.
“English level is about average for a Japanese person who went to a good school but isn’t particularly interested in English ”
So, they don’t really speak English. Don’t expect people who don’t really speak English to understand a question spoken in natural English more complicated than “How are you today?”
If a language barrier is a problem, start using DeepL to translate your questions and say them in Japanese.
At the first Japanese company I ever worked at, I had similar issues. The biggest problem was that for a lot of technology that existed, the company I had worked for had created a branded name for that specific set of technology. So nobody knew what an API call was, but everyone knew what “[Company Name] linking tool” was.
Compound that with the fact that most people had only ever worked at that company, and it was a huge issue. It took me about a year to figure this all out, but my job became significantly easier once I realized that the normal lexicon for my industry didn’t apply internally.
I don’t know if this is what you’re encountering, but maybe keep an eye out for it.
Sometimes it’s all about the intonation. Even if your japanese isn’t perfect, if you have the right one and rhythm the native listener will fill in the blanks. Helps me anyways when I start speaking faster than my brain can accurately translate. Hope it helps, good luck.
General idea for communication breakdowns in general is to make it clear:
* you are asking a question
* you are asking a specific, unambiguous question
* you are avoiding nuance in the question
* you are providing the complete set of facts, and avoiding putting opinions or thought processes in the middle of those facts
* your question has an answer
Things that will cause breakdowns:
* lots of asides making the question too long
* questions that are actually asking people to make a decision for you
* questions that are outside their pay scale (“why is a policy like this” is a tough thing to answer if they did not make the policy)
* questions that are “more like comments”
* questions that are implicit instead of explicit
For the language stuff, beyond the obvious “dumb it down” for English… I cannot insist on making your Japanese _very short and to the point_.
* Make a list of vocabulary used often for your job. For example, learn “expenses”/”sales”/”revenue” instead of just using “money” everywhere
* if your sentence is fully katakana-go, you’re probably missing way too much vocabulary
* Subject, Object, Verb. Do not leave your sentence incomplete! Yes, Japanese people do this all the time, but because you are probably using imprecise terms it’s harder for people to fill in the blanks
By far rambling sentences filled with katakana and imprecise verbs is where I stop understanding foreign speakers’ Japanese in meetings and the like.
Of course you are probably not 100% at fault, you might be ~10% at fault, or 0%. But the open interpretation is that the reason your coworkers are asking you to repeat in English is because they actually do not understand your question.
For example, if I ask you “when do we squeeze the animals”, when you meant to ask “at what time do the cows get milked”, there’s so many question marks that, yes, people can sometimes guess via context, but sometimes don’t.
You are playing work in hard mode, and two layers of incomprehension exist. It sucks that your coworkers aren’t able to cleanly resolve stuff on their end, but I think there’s definitely a meeting point because at the end of the day y’all are all adults.
I found at a prior job my Japanese coworkers really wouldn’t get it unless I really started from the beginning. I’d back up and give them the full background first.
Like waaay more background than my american colleagues wanted. Actually silicon valley engineers if you give them too much detail up front they get annoyed and tell you to get to the point. But the Japanese engineer colleagues are not like that. You might try another couple minutes of background first and see if that works?
Personally, I’ve developed a habit of never asking yes-or-no questions.
Sometimes Japanese people are afraid/shy of saying they don’t understand, especially in meetings, and they answer “yes” just to make the thing go away.
So, when I ask something like: “should be we do it this way or the other way?” and I get a “yes” I know they didn’t understand what I asked.
If you cannot talk in Japanese (and you should), try to talk to them using the same grammatical structure they use. I know it’s bad but if your goal is simply being understood you’ll get the job done.