Japan increasingly ‘out of sync’ with global market as people shun speaking English – the country now ranks between Afghanistan and Malawi for English proficiency
Japan increasingly ‘out of sync’ with global market as people shun speaking English – the country now ranks between Afghanistan and Malawi for English proficiency
17 comments
Nice
Looks like Japan is in a pinch.But pinch in Japanese is literally pinch.
Good for them. They can learn (or not learn) any language they want – doesn’t stop them from being a rich, developed country they are now.
Based.
I think technology is going to probably counteract the need for people to actually speak a language in the coming years.
Like live, highly accurate AI translation is surely not far off?
Maybe it is a good thing Japan has more language independence? A lot of countries like Philippines and Singapore-a lot of Europe-have been heavily influenced by English.
I’m not sure if it’s due to my Japanese improving and moving into circles where I can use Japanese 100%…..but it does feel like there’s less enthusiasm for English in general compared to 10 years ago. Feels like it peaked in 2019 just before the pandemic set in.
I found it refreshing when in Japan to hear Japanese everywhere even in touristy areas. Kind of tired of hearing English every other country I’ve been to. Japanese sounds beautiful and gentle, too.
Maybe they won’t need to learn English because of advancements in AI translation
Japan has a pretty robust entertainment industry. Reason many other countries speak English well is because movie and entertainment choice in their first language tend to be pretty slim pickings. Also feel they do fine enough with Japanese and do not really need English. Sure they have their issues but they are not as doomer as everyone tries to make it out to be.
China jumped on the billionaire “Japan won’t let me vulture invest, Japan bad” nonsense.
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Really, all these ‘Japan bad” stories are because Japan won’t let foreign billionaires run off with all the money like they do in other nations.
Haha so true.
It’s as if they more stale their economy has become, the less fast money there is, the less they want to know about the rest of the world (maybe in fear of competition and being embarrassed)
I feel like the national education system in any country should aim to teach everyone at least one second language, and they should do so from basically the first grade.
English *is* the most widely used language to communicate across borders, so it is an obvious choice. I don’t think we should rely on translation machines (i.e. AI based ones), to do that work for us.
Learning another language means learning to think in a different way. It is good for the brain, and it is not limited by ones ability to do math, so I think it is a very good thing to have in any public education system.
Also English is not my first language I learned two languages on top of my native one in school, then went on to study French and Japanese later – never got anywhere with French though…
So yeah I think Japan should step up their English game.
I think Covid created a lot of problems in this arena. The whole country was closed off for years. People got very used to it.
Thanks South china morning post.
As long as English is taught through Katakana English by local Japanese English language speakers, there will no significant improvement on the Japanese ability to speak English.
Good. High English proficiency destroys society’s collective intellectual capability. See what is happening in the Philippines and the Netherlands
This is the report they are citing if anyone is curious: https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/regions/asia/japan/
What’s rather concerning is if you look at the age trends you’ll see the 18-20yo scores basically falling off a cliff in the past few years and below 400 points this year.