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.
Makes me wonder what America’s or England’s proficiency in Japanese is.
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.
Japan’s PM gas responded to the report “We are velly solly”
Rookie mistake. They should have surveyed the country’s Engrish proficiency.
tbf, the Japanese proficiency of English-speaking nations is probably lower.
I know Watashi ga kita!, Baaaka!, and Omae wa mou… shindeiru.
That seems like it should be enough to cover most conversations, according to my research.
NANI!?
It is a tricky language. Almost nothing in common with Indo-European languages except loan words. Completely different grammatical structure. Three different writing scripts.
At least the pronunciation isn’t too bad coming from English as all the usual sounds are represented within our phonology. Compared to Spanish rolling R’s, Russian and Arabic consonant clusters, Chinese tonality, and other difficult to pronounce languages.
as all the usual sounds are represented within our phonology
Is what you’d think, but nope. Their r, sh, j, ch and w and u sounds are slightly different from English (enough so that some languages have the English version and the Japanese version as independent sounds), the lone n consonant has a pronunciation not existent in English, and Japanese has a tone system but it’s simple enough a foreigner can get by without knowing it. That is to say, Japanese pronunciation is very different from English and decently hard to master, but if you just pronounce it like you would English (without stress of course, absolutely don’t add stress) you shouldn’t have a problem getting your point across.
Russian and Arabic consonant clusters
Wait Arabic consonant clusters? If anything Arabic has less consonant clusters than English. As a native Arabic speaker what I would think is a problem for English natives is the consonants themselves, because we have a lot of them and many don’t exist in English.
I’ve never been able to hear a difference with the ch, sh, j, or w. Is there anything that lays out the differences? I’ve basically given up on feeling like I’ll ever be totally comfortable in the language anyway.
Oh, and don’t forget the f sound is also different from English. At least the vowels are pretty easy to transition to
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_phonology
Go to the Consonants section. There are lots of useful notes there, and you can also click on the individual consonants for more information, including how to configure your mouth to make the sound. “ch” and “sh” are tɕ and ɕ, “j” is dʑ at the beginning of utterances or after ん and is ʑ after a vowel, “w” is w.
Compare to English under the Phonemes section. “ch” and “sh” are tʃ and ʃ, “j” is dʒ, “w” is w.
Is there anything that lays out the differences?
I’m not sure if they’re neatly explained somewhere, but the short of it is that sh, j and ch are “smoother” than the English versiond. They’re literally just s, z and t respectively, with an i next to them and smoothed over for ease of pronunciation because otherwise it’s a pain to say “si” (languages that do have this sound, like English, have ways of coping with this, but Japanese doesn’t). In English the equivalent of this is how drink is actually djrink and two becomes chuu, but anyway the point is that thinking of these three sounds as coping mechanisms rather than independent sounds should help. Listen carefully to a Japanese shi and you’ll hear the remnants of an s in it. You’ll probably have some luck looking these sounds up on YouTube.
W is a bit simpler; it’s just uw instead of a plain W, in the same way the English version lets out a bit of air before the W itself. Just insert a small u before watashi to make it uwatashi and you’ll get pretty close. Again YT should help. BTW to help appreciate the difference, when the Japanese try to emulate the English W sound they add a ho first, as in howaito (white).
I’ve basically given up on feeling like I’ll ever be totally comfortable in the language anyway.
My strategy is watch tons of anime (or your Japanese media of choice) with English subtitles. As long as you don’t depend completely on the subtitles and try to listen to the words being said it’s a pretty effective way of learning the language in my experience. Simple manga (or, again, your Japanese written media of choice) also does wonders.
Edit: A bunch of stuff here is wrong, see below.
The stuff about “w” is wrong, but there’s a good reason you would think this. The lip shape for the “w” sound in English and Japanese is different; in English the shape is like English “u”, and in Japanese the shape is like Japanese “u”, but you definitely shouldn’t have an actual “u” sound.
in the same way the English version lets out a bit of air before the W itself.
I think, especially considering your comment about ホワイト howaito, that you’re confusing two things. There are English dialects which have two separate “w”-like sounds, one of which is typically written “wh” and the other “w”. (To my ear, this distinctiln also sounds old-fashioned.) In these dialects, “w” as in “water” and “wood” is pronounced like you would expect, whereas “wh” as in “who” and “what” is pronounced somewhat like an “h” sound followed by just-“w” sound. I don’t think the “wh” sound is used for all instances of “w” in any dialect; in fact, most dialects have just the “w” sound.
BTW to help appreciate the difference, when the Japanese try to emulate the English W sound they add a ho first, as in howaito (white).
This is false, they only do this for “wh” sounds (and maybe not even for all of them). Counterexamples to your claim are easy: ウェイトレス weitoresu = waitress, ワット watto = watt, etc.
That… Is all true. I guess I was basically spreading misinformation.
I would think is a problem for English natives is the consonants themselves, because we have a lot of them and many don’t exist in English.
I am not an Arabic speaker at all, but one of the few amusing points of the Iraq war was that absolutely no one in the U.S. media could agree on how to pronounce Qatar. There were even segments on how to pronounce it. They didn’t agree with each other.
Of course, they never actually put someone who spoke Arabic on TV to get them to pronounce it properly. They probably couldn’t anyway considering the intelligence level of news anchors I’ve worked with.
Pitch accent isn’t a tone system, also ん can he pronounced in way too many ways.
also ん can he pronounced in way too many ways
If English speakers¹ can deal with oo being pronounced at least six different ways (moon, book, door, blood, cooperation, brooch) they should be able to deal with this…
1— Disclaimer: as a non native speaker, I not only can’t deal with it, but at this point have absolutely no intention to.
Thanks for that.
Japanese has a tone system but it’s simple enough a foreigner can get by without knowing it
Isn’t this just learning each word’s tonic syllable? Or if you mean the flow of a sentence, the general waving tone structure like in Spanish or French?
You are correct (for standard Japanese 標準語 hyoujungo; other dialects can be quite different). NoneOfUrBusiness’s response is not a great take. Every word has an accented syllable or no accent at all (and it really is based on syllables, not mora). The accent is realized as a relatively sudden drop in pitch after the accented syllable with no (necessary) change in length or loudness. The drop can complete within the next syllable or after. Usually at the beginning of an utterance you start low, climb up in pitch to a certain point, and then either hit an accent and drop suddenly or gradually drop across a longer period of time if there’s no accent.
The precise pitch does not matter, and it’s definitely possible to have two accents close together resulting in a high-mid-low kind of pitch pattern.
Things are also complicated by the fact that Japanese likes devoicing certain syllables. Devoiced syllables can still be accented even though they can’t carry pitch in the same way as voiced syllables.
(and it really is based on syllables, not mora)
It’s not though? Pitch can and does change (either rise or drop) mid-syllable no?
Pitch does, but accent placement counts mora but only assigns to syllables. For example, if an accent pattern will put an accent mid-syllable, the accent will move further back to the beginning of the syllable. This is also why accents only occur on the first mora of a long vowel. You can also see this in action in accent placement for compound nouns.
Another good thing to know is that adjacent vowels within the same morpheme (typically one kanji) are part of the same syllable. So 帰る is an accented verb, so the accent goes one mora back from the end like with all accented verbs. But this would put the accent on the え in かえる, and かえ is one syllable here, so in fact the か gets the accent.
Edit: I was looking over my main source[*] for this, and was reminded of one really good example of the role of syllables in accent assignment: genitive の. Nouns can lose their accent if followed by の, and when this occurs is exactly when (1) the noun is at least bisyllabic, and (2) the noun’s accent is on the final syllable. Thus monosyllabic 本 (ほ＼ん) stays accented ほ＼んの, but bisyllabic 日本 (にほ＼ん) becomes unaccented にほんの, and 男 (おとこ＼) becomes unaccented おとこの.
[*] The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics (1999), edited by Natsuko Tsujimura, published by Blackwell Publishers, Ltd.
TIL. I apparently picked it up naturally but I feel for people who have to actually learn this.
This was in line with my immediate thoughts too.
It seems grossly unfair to judge Japanese people on their ability to speak English.
That’s a very idealistic position. English is either useful or necessary in many situations and fields, and having a population that doesn’t know English can and will cause problems. How well people in a country speak English is an important metric for that country’s development, otherwise nobody would care about it.
What are you on about? This is a survey of every country where English isn’t their primary language. This article is from Japan about Japanese proficiency in the English language.
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)
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).
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).
I don’t know Japanese at all, but the way my phone renders those characters I can’t tell anything about stroke order, and can only tell them apart because they’re next to each other…
I imagine there might be larger differences with Japanese specific fonts, but with whatever this one is the difference seems about the same as using italics with Latin characters…
I can see the difference, but I think it takes practice. シ lines coming from left, line align with bottom left and ツ lines coming from top and all 3 roughly align at top.
Edit: maybe ctrl+f ‘Happy Lilac’ on this page and it may help: https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/katakana-chart/
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
America is the past, why learn the language? China is where the future is
Doesn’t matter if America is the past. English is the language the world has settled on as the lingua franca. Yes, there are advantages to dealing with China if you speak Mandarin, but good luck trying to raise your voice while dragging out every syllable and getting yourself understood anywhere outside of China.
Why conflate English with the US? And English being easy to learn makes it the equivalent of the “common” language in fantasy universes.
Lemmy users do not like this take!
Americans on Lemmy aren’t a reasonable bunch
My mother in law who is an english teacher in Japan says the social media the children are consuming is distracting from their studies 😂.
