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.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    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.