Declining English in the Land of the Rising Sun
« previous post | next post »
Shocking (to me) news:
"Japan’s English Proficiency Continues to Drop Among Non-English-Speaking Countries"
nippon.com (Dec 4, 2023)
A survey found that Japan currently ranks eighty-seventh out of 113 non-English-speaking countries and regions for English language abilities. This is a fall of seven places from last year and relatively low among Asian countries.
I'm dubious that English proficiency would be so low in Japan, which overall has such a high level of education and which has such a large number of loanwords from English. Is this a case of lies, damned lies and [polling-generated] statistics"?
A 2023 survey by the Swiss international education company EF Education First, which measures the English proficiency of people in 113 non-English speaking countries and regions, found that Japan ranked eighty-seventh overall and was fifteenth among the 23 Asian countries and regions. Japan is at the fourth level out of five set by the company, equating to “low proficiency” (64–90).
The survey gathered and analyzed data from free tests taken online by a total of 2.2 million people worldwide for EF’s English Proficiency Index. By region, 34% of test takers were from Europe, 23% each from Asia and Africa, 20% from Central and South America, and 13% from the Middle East. The median age was 26.
…
The country with the highest English proficiency was the Netherlands and the majority of countries classed as having “very high” (1–12) or “high” (13–30) proficiency were in Europe.
Singapore was the highest ranked Asian country in second place. The Philippines was twentieth, Malaysia twenty-fifth, and Hong Kong twenty-ninth. South Korea placed forty-ninth and China eighty-second. All these countries scored higher than Japan. EF noted that “adults’ English language skills in East Asia have continued to decline over the past four years” due to a drop in the skill levels in Japan and China.
2023 Ranking of English Proficiency in Major Countries
| 1 | Netherlands |
| 2 | Singapore |
| 3 | Austria |
| 4 | Denmark |
| 5 | Norway |
| 6 | Sweden |
| 7 | Belgium |
| 8 | Portugal |
| 9 | South Africa |
| 10 | Germany |
| 11 | Croatia |
| 12 | Greece |
| 13 | Poland |
| 14 | Finland |
| 15 | Romania |
| 20 | Philippines |
| 25 | Malaysia |
| 29 | Hong Kong |
| 49 | South Korea |
| 57 | Nepal |
| 58 | Vietnam |
| 60 | Bangladesh |
| 60 | India |
| 64 | Pakistan |
| 67 | Sri Lanka |
| 73 | Mongolia |
| 79 | Indonesia |
| 82 | China |
| 87 | Japan |
| (Lower rankings omitted) | |
I'm wondering how they did the actual testing.
I also wonder how India is ranked so low, where there are so many people who have native English fluency and where English is a de facto second national language.
China has universal elementary and middle school education, and all students are required to learn English from first grade, and many begin in kindergarten.
If Taiwan (where there have been, and still are, serious proposals to make English a / the national language) were recognized as a country, it would surely by very high on the list.
I'm not surprised that Singapore is ranked so very high in the world. English truly is the functional official language of the country.
Selected readings
- "Mental anguish from having too many English words in Japanese" (10/2/23)
- "'Are': Japanese word of the year" (12/2/23)
- "English and Science in China and Japan" (3/11/09)
- "Speaking Taiwanese as a Second Language in Taiwan" (9/28/21)
- "English as an official language in Taiwan" (12/8/18)
- "English as a prestige language in Taiwan" (11/29/20)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
Chester Draws said,
December 25, 2023 @ 4:32 pm
Our school in NZ has started getting back the international students we lost due to shutting our borders during Covid. Many of them are Japanese doing a short stint largely to improve their English.
One thing I have noticed, on our small set of students only of course, is that the Japanese are often much less confident about their English than other nations. Even those with quite a lot of English can be hard to drag out to actually speak it.
Stephen Goranson said,
December 25, 2023 @ 4:38 pm
The supposed drop from 55th place to 78th in just one year–2020 to 2021–is enough to suggest the rankings are not reliable.
Thomas said,
December 25, 2023 @ 4:38 pm
Austria above Denmark, Norway, Sweden: this goes against any intuition and seems to be an artefact of these particular statistics. In no way can this reflect general English language abilities. Anyways, how would one even define these nebulous English language abilities? There will be high variation with respect to age and formal education in any society. Do you take the mean ability over all people of all ages?
Philip Taylor said,
December 25, 2023 @ 4:43 pm
Chester — "the Japanese are often much less confident about their English than other nations. Even those with quite a lot of English can be hard to drag out to actually speak it" — I wonder whether you might find a similar reluctance to speak were you to ask the class to describe a typical day at home in their own first language. In other words, is there a national trait which makes young Japanese reluctant to speak in public, regardless of the language in which they are asked to speak ?
Philip Taylor said,
December 25, 2023 @ 4:58 pm
Thomas — "Do you take the mean ability over all people of all ages ?" — Perhaps not, but they may well take the mean of all people of a given group who take the test , which seems not quite the same thing to my mind.
Metaphrastes said,
December 25, 2023 @ 5:10 pm
Yes, something about these rankings doesn't make much sense to me, either. Could India really rank below Vietnam and Nepal, and FAR below the Philippines? Is each country assigned an overall score determined by a formula that takes into account several factors, and does the formula give much more weight to some language skills than to others?
Philip Anderson’ said,
December 25, 2023 @ 6:31 pm
Although English is spoken by many people in India, and other South Asian countries, this is specifically Indian English, rather than the British or American English which I assume is used as the yardstick, there are some differences.
AntC said,
December 25, 2023 @ 6:33 pm
I'm wondering how they did the actual testing.
And to echo many other similar comments … I think this so-called survey is what statisticians would rate 'self-serving bollox'. In which of those countries is the commissioning company trying to gain customers?
stephen said,
December 25, 2023 @ 6:44 pm
This was done by a Swiss company, and Switzerland isn't in the top 15. I wonder about the English proficiency of those who administered the test. And maybe the difference in scores was extremely small. Maybe those in the Netherlands scored 99/100 and those in Japan scored 98/100.
AG said,
December 25, 2023 @ 7:04 pm
Japanese people tend to be extraordinarily reticent, self-effacing, and easily tongue-tied (not just) about speaking English. They also often have close to zero practical opportunities to practice speaking it, aside from being hesitant to. I also think their instruction in school might be a bit rote. Add those up and I assume they'd tend to score terribly on tests of proficiency where grammatical subtleties were involved, regardless of how many English loanwords are used in everyday contexts.
AG said,
December 25, 2023 @ 7:10 pm
(sorry if that sounded like i'm just casually repeating ancient stereotypes – writing in a hurry. My impressions (and they are just that) are based on 5 years living in Japan and also on having taught several mixed-nationality classes where the lone Japanese student spoke the least out of anyone all year.)
Jerry Packard said,
December 25, 2023 @ 8:25 pm
That lack of English proficiency didn’t get in the way of me getting a coffee and sticky bun at a Tokyo Starbucks this morning. Also, my son informs me that their Chinese L2 ability is among the worst, which implies a general L2 learning deficit.
cameron said,
December 25, 2023 @ 11:12 pm
The number of proficient English speakers in India is enormous. But there is still a huge mass of Indian people who really only speak the local language of their home towns and villages. I'm not surprised that India doesn't score as high as you might expect based on interactions with Indians in Europe and North America.
But I still wonder if the test takers that these rankings reflect are really representative samples of the various populations. In a place like Singapore, I imagine they likely are. But in India and Bangladesh, are their sample populations really reaching into the the villages?
Also, how much self-reporting is involved in the test? Do the respondents rank themselves at all? And if so, to what degree?
Ethan said,
December 26, 2023 @ 12:23 am
The 10-page PDF version of the full report is here:
https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/WIBIwq6RdJvcD9bc8RMd/cefcom-epi-site/reports/2023/ef-epi-2023-english.pdf
There is some description of methodology in Appendix A.
Two relevant extracts from that appendix:
The EF SET is an online, adaptive English test of reading and listening skills. It is a standardized, objectively scored test designed to classify test takers’ language abilities into one of the six levels established by the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The EF SET is available to any Internet user for free. For more information about the research and development of the EF SET, visit http://www.efset.org/about/.
The EF SET is free and online, so anyone with an Internet connection can participate. Almost all of our test takers are working adults or young adults finishing their studies. People without Internet access would be automatically excluded.
Christian Horn said,
December 26, 2023 @ 12:30 am
I'm a foreigner living in Japan, and I think the ranking is realistically expressing the proficiency of Japanese people to use English in every-day-situations. I have visited a Japanese school where students were reading English sentences, and I was barely able to understand what they spelled out.
Japanese are language wise quite focused on their own language, that results in English being taught in school with focus on reading/writing, not practical usage in every-day-situations. The focus on Japanese language is so strong that also my employer, who provides IT support services, needs to provide the service in Japanese instead of English – which would allow to use workers from countries with lower wages.
Jonathan Silk said,
December 26, 2023 @ 6:44 am
Let's start with India. The educated elite speak English at a very high level, of course, no one disputes that. But let's look at some numbers:
What Languages Are Spoken In India?
Rank Language Percentage First-Language Speakers (2011 India Census Data)
1 Hindi 41.10% 528,347,193
2 Bengali 8.11% 97,237,669
3 Marathi 6.99% 83,026,680
4 Telugu 7.19% 81,127,740
5 Tamil 5.91% 69,026,881
6 Gujarati 4.48% 55,492,554
7 Urdu 5.01% 50,772,631
8 Kannada 3.69% 43,706,512
9 Odia 3.21% 37,521,324
10 Malayalam 3.21% 34,838,819
11 Punjabi 2.83% 33,124,726
12 Assamese 1.28% 15,311,351
13 Maithili 1.18% 13,583,464
14 Bhili/Bhilodi 0.93% 10,413,637
15 Santali 0.63% 7,368,192
16 Kashmiri 0.54% 6,797,587
17 Gondi 0.26% 2,984,453
18 Nepali 0.28% 2,926,168
19 Sindhi 0.25% 2,772,264
20 Dogri 0.22% 2,596,767
21 Konkani 0.24% 2,256,502
22 Kurukh 0.17% 1,988,350
23 Khandeshi 0.21% 1,860,236
24 Tulu 0.17% 1,846,427
25 Meitei (Manipuri) 0.14% 1,761,079
26 Bodo 0.13% 1,482,929
27 Khasi 0.11% 1,431,344
28 Ho 0.10% 1,421,418
29 Garo 0.10% 1,145,323
30 Mundari 0.09% 1,128,228
31 Tripuri 0.08% 1,011,294
In light of this total accounting, is it any wonder that –statistically–the level of English is low, when seen across the entire population?
About Japan: yes, for me annecdotal, but I can attest that while, at least some years ago, Japanese study grammar rules,* they largely cannot understand spoken English, and can produce even less. Of course, those Japanese (scholars, diplomats, travellers…) many non-Japanese will meet will give a somewhat different impression, and students in the National Universities for instance speak often excellent English. But overall it is no surprise at all I think to see this statistic.
I did not read the report in detail, but I did look through it some months ago when it was released, and I think the only small surprise for me was the levels noted for Scandinavia, but this is also perhaps because of whom I meet and met there–I didn't meet rural farmers. In the Netherlands where I live the level of spoken English is astonishingly high, and very wide-spread, not limited to the highly educated.
*Grammar rules, yes, erm, well, rules of which as a fairly educated native speaker I am all too often entirely unaware. I clearly recall many years ago being asked to go over (in utmost secrecy) the English portion of a University entrance exam, before it was used. There were cases of four sentence of which only one was "correct." I could not tell for the life of me which sentences were meant to be wrong, since they all looked perfectly fine to me, but evidently someone with some archaic prescriptive grammar book as guide had created sentences which violated some memorized rule. If this is how you 'learn' English, of course you can't actually use it. As we all know, the only way to learn a language is to make mistakes–if you're trying to be correct, you'll never have a coherent conversation.
Victor Mair said,
December 26, 2023 @ 8:12 am
Thank you, Jonathan, for all of that data. For context, it may be useful to add the following:
I.
Officially, just 12%* of Indian people speak English, with many only speaking it as a second language. Nevertheless, the country has an extremely dense population, meaning that this 12% cross-section of society exceeds 100 million people.
——–
From Lingoda: What are the main English speaking countries?
English is the most spoken language in the world. But who speaks English exactly? Lingoda breaks it down for you.
https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=zh-TW&op=translate
*Another source says "just 6%", but that's still a lot.
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-english-and-where-1557814101428.html
II.
Wikipedia says:
2011 Census figures for population and first, second, and third languages. English as a first language is only spoken by 259,678 people, as a second language by 82,717,239 and as a third language by 45,562,173.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population
Philip Anderson said,
December 26, 2023 @ 11:51 am
Thanks for the link, Ethan. The full article gives more information, including trends over time, actual scores (Austria is only 1 point ahead of Denmark and 2 of Norway, so the difference is hardly significant), and range of proficiency for each region.
The survey says nothing about the general proficiency across each country, but evaluates those who took the test; the elite in every country will generally score very highly (I suspect not in Japan), but the average level will depend on who attempts it and after what level of education, on their self-confidence and their need for a certificate. Note that even the “very low” grade shows a basic competence and ability to communicate.
Michèle Sharik Pituley said,
December 26, 2023 @ 1:45 pm
I just took the 15-minute quiz and scored a 94% overall, with a listening score of 100% and a reading score of 88%. There were a few of the reading questions that I thought had more than one right answer and another few that I thought had no best answer because the prepositions were different from what I would have used.
Since it's using CEFR, it's probably using British English, which would explain the different preposition usage.
For example, the one question that said something like "Dr. Andrew's assistant wasn't able to _______ the hotel he wanted." I would have chosen "book him into" but then I though that sounded more like booking in to jail than a hotel, so I chose "make a reservation from" even though I wouldn't use "from", I'd use "at".
J.W. Brewer said,
December 26, 2023 @ 1:46 pm
1. Way back in the Seventies there were jokes to the effect that Japanese young adults who'd completed 8 or 10 years of mandatory school English classes could communicate in English with other Japanese who had had the same training, but could not actually communicate with non-Japanese Anglophones. One problem with making English a mandatory school subject from a young age is that there may not be an adequate supply of teachers who are themselves particularly fluent in English.
2. And other than for foreign travel and some specialized economic niches, why does it matter? Japan is a quite populous and wealthy country – they have plenty of Japanese-language pop culture and high literature and movies etc. The total range of human experience easily accessible in Japanese is probably at this point notably higher than for e.g. the Scandinavian languages, which have much smaller domestic markets and lack economies of scale. Mass English fluency in a non-Anglophone country is, frankly, an indicator of economic/cultural weakness and insecurity. Possibly quite rationally so given the country's objective circumstances, but if you are in an economic and cultural position to get away without most of your citizens developing much fluency in English, that seems a sign of cultural health and strength.
Chester Draws said,
December 26, 2023 @ 3:07 pm
And yet this does not apply to the Austrians, JWB. German is a widely spoken language, and they have a strong culture. Why do they then learn English? So as to speak to their neighbours, mostly.
The Japanese have made major strides since 1945, but they remain a strikingly isolated society. When they do visit other countries, they even manage to do that inside a very Japanese language and cultural bubble. The coach trips, even down to set food options, and trooping in packs behind a flag bearing guide are more than stereotypes.
It's not the language issue, because when New Zealanders visit Japan we have the language issue in reverse. Yet Kiwis will wander Japan in family groups and set out to try different food options etc.
Ebenezer Scrooge said,
December 26, 2023 @ 5:11 pm
Mark me down as another person who is not surprised by Japanese performance. I was seconded to the Bank of Japan a few decades ago, to an economics shop seeded with a few people with legal educations. Maybe a quarter of the people were very uncomfortable in English. Maybe only a third were fluent enough so I didn't have to be careful in speech. These are top economics Ph.Ds! The women, of course, were better than the men.
But then again, America is one of the few countries where a monoglot can be considered well-educated.
David Marjanović said,
December 26, 2023 @ 5:48 pm
That's what I thought. The exact order of at least the top 10 looks like random noise to me; I wouldn't bet it's reproducible.
Exactly. We're aware German is not widely spoken or understood on a global or even European scale, and there are enough qualified English teachers around.
Jonathan Silk said,
December 27, 2023 @ 6:51 am
@J.W. Brewer "Mass English fluency in a non-Anglophone country is, frankly, an indicator of economic/cultural weakness and insecurity"
I am not Dutch, and certainly not nationalistic, but … seriously? The GDP of the Netherlands is 18th worldwide, 11th GDP per capita. (Japan is 34, by the way). I'm not sure how one would measure cultural weakness (is that a thing?) or insecurity, but if you mean military insecurity, well…
So maybe the concept needs a rethink.
Terry Hunt said,
December 27, 2023 @ 7:55 am
Having (as a Brit) lived in Germany, visited Belgium quite often, and spent a week in Helsinki, I was surprised that Finland didn't rank somewhat higher than 14th.
I suspect that, since the results are based on tests taken by self-selected users of EF, they are greatly influenced by how well-known/popular EF is in the various countries: it seems unlikely that this would be internationally uniform.
Iacobescu Alexandru said,
December 27, 2023 @ 10:23 am
Hello. I have seen the video online and wanted to give you an example from my language.
I am a Romanian this example is something that me and my wife argue because we use a deferent term:
Câine sur la vânătoare
Câine surd la vânătoare
Translation:
Gray dog goes hunting
Deaf dog goes hunting
An example would be going to the shop without your wallet. Going to do an activity without the skill or equipment needed to achieve the activity. Because of this most people would say that "Deaf dog" is the correct form but the supporters of "gray dog" say that this is an old dog and for hunting running is more important than hearing, you could send a deaf dog to fetch a dead duck but not an old dog. I and most sites support the Deaf dog version.
Some other examples:
ÎNTORTOCHEAT sau ÎNTORTOCHIAT
A CONFERI și A OFERI
AȘIȘDEREA sau AȘIJDEREA
ȘARPANTĂ sau ȘERPANTĂ
A FI ÎN AL ȘAPTELEA/NOUĂLEA CER
„am înnoptat la o cabană” sau „am înoptat la o cabană”
SE ÎNFIRIPĂ sau SE ÎNFIRIPEAZĂ
VODCĂ sau VOTCĂ
„nelalocul ei” sau „ne la locul ei”
A-și pune PIROSTRIILE… sau PILOSTRIILE
„nou-nouță” sau „nouă-nouță”
A SE PRICOPSI sau A SE PROCOPSI
vizavi sau vis-a-vis
A PREVALA sau A PRELEVA
ÎNDEAPROAPE sau ÎN DE APROAPE
Deopotrivă sau De o potrivă
Philip Taylor said,
December 27, 2023 @ 12:11 pm
[Native speaker reporting] — took the 15-minute reading/listening test and scored 100% for both parts. I did not time myself but I am reasonably certain that it took me longer to select the correct answer (in the listening phase) when the speaker had a North American (as opposed to British) accent.
Philip Taylor said,
December 27, 2023 @ 12:22 pm
Then took the EFSET Speaking Test and scored only 16–20 / B2. I wonder why.
Daniel Barkalow said,
December 27, 2023 @ 1:45 pm
I suspect there's a big difference between people with customer-facing jobs in areas reasonably accessible to international travel and the general population, and I suspect the survey would be heavily affected by how well they do at not getting a correlation between participating in the survey and speaking English better than average for the country.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 27, 2023 @ 3:11 pm
A distinctively Japanese culture and pride therein still exists. There is not much distinctively Dutch culture left (except cheese and cannabis to sell to tourists). There is not much distinctively Austrian culture left (except pastries mit Schlag to sell to tourists). The World Wars irrevocably destroyed most prior vestiges of human civilization in Continental Europe. There are no European nations left, merely dependent provinces of a post-nationalist, post-Christian, post-everything Brussels-ruled technocratic empire that has no coherent identity. That empire might as well use English as its common language even if Ireland and Malta are the only traditionally semi-Anglophone districts of the empire, because there isn't a good utilitarian argument for any specific non-English alternative, and non-utilitarian arguments no longer make sense to those in charge.
Consider Abba's 1974 victory in the Eurovision song contest as an exemplary demonstration of the financial rewards of abandoning any sort of coherent culture specific to a language community or national community for the better-paying option of participation in a trans-national economy of non-specificity and transience. For better or worse (and certainly sometimes for worse), the various civilizations of East Asia do not yet suffer from the same decadence to the same extent. Things may also differ out on the Slavic/Balkan fringes of Europe that have not yet been fully assimilated into the imperial vision.
Frans said,
December 27, 2023 @ 4:00 pm
I think it hasn't been explicitly stated yet that dropping in the ranking needn't mean the English is getting any worse, regardless of any potential concerns you might have about the measuring methods. Without evidence to the contrary I would be inclined to assume it means the other countries improved (more) rather than a decline in Japan.
Paul Garrett said,
December 27, 2023 @ 4:18 pm
JW Brewer, I think you are spot-on about cultures' non-adaptation of English (or whatever), when they have enough of their own stuff going on, with confidence. As an older U.S. mathematician, decades ago I definitely needed to be able to read French and German, to be professionaly competent. … in contrast to current conceptions wherein, supposedly, all math is written in English?!? No. For example, there are Japanese math institutes in which the language of instruction/discussion/everything is Japanese.
Thomas said,
December 27, 2023 @ 4:44 pm
@J.W.Brewer, I regularly read your comments here and usually they are quite reasonable but your last post contains so many outrageous claims and wild speculation on western decadence that would need backing up by some references. What even is this lost Austrian culture, as opposed to Swiss, Czech or Slovenian culture? What is it that makes a culture weak just because their elites use a lingua franca to communicate between different nations? Honestly, I tried to understand your reasoning and how connects to the original post but I failed.
ohwilleke said,
December 27, 2023 @ 5:25 pm
This seems plausible to me. Some key factors, in rough order of importance, in my experience are:
1. Japanese has a smaller phoneme set and more restrictive rules on how syllables can be formed than English does. It is extremely hard to learn how to make and hear new sounds when learning a new language at any remotely older age. This is much harder than learning new words or grammatical constructions. But learning a language without being able to hear the sounds correctly and without being able to mimic those sounds is dramatically less effective to the point of being almost futile. Relatedly, it is much easier for an English speaker first learning Japanese at any remotely older age to learn to pronounce Japanese well than it is for a Japanese speaker to learn English. (Something of the reverse applies for learning to read and write Japanese v. English as most Japanese speakers understand the Roman alphabet, while English speakers need to learn many kanji which can take years of memorization, and must also learn a couple of additional Japanese scripts. But speaking and hearing is more fundamental to language learning that reading and writing. If you master speaking and hearing Japanese, reading non-kanji Japanese scripts follows comparatively easily and even in the case of kanji you already know the words and just need to know what character to assign them to.)
2. Germanic and Romance language speakers have an edge since their language are inherently more similar to English and have stronger lexical and grammatical overlap.
3. Despite the visibility of Japanese tourists, there are not a lot of opportunities for immersion based English language learning for Japanese people (hard to know how much of this a demand issue and how much of this is a supply issue, although the economic cost of longer distance travel is always an issue and was much more of an economic issue through Japanese people similar in age to American Gen X folks), and those that are available are comparatively expensive and cumbersome, while English language immersion opportunities are much easier to secure for Europeans and moderately easier to secure for Mesoamericans and South Americans. In addition to the direct effects that this has on language learners, this also constricts the availability of truly fluent English language instructors in Japan.
4. Even when a Japanese student of the English language secures an English language immersion opportunity, on average, those students don't gain quite as much as, for example, Northern European English language students, because the cultural barriers that have to be overcome by the Japanese students are greater. The strength of one's social connections to native speakers of a language during a language immersion experience greatly impacts how much language learning takes place. The anecdotal evidence that was widespread when I was a foreign exchange student was that exchange students with local girlfriends/boyfriends while they were exchange students were almost always the most successful at learning the local language because that romantic social bond created the motivation and opportunity to improve language learning that other exchange students didn't have with the same intensity. There are, of course, exceptions to the averages, but the averages add up over time.
Tom S. said,
December 27, 2023 @ 5:32 pm
[quote]I'm dubious that English proficiency would be so low in Japan[/quote]
Shocking news to me, an American professor is "dubious" when he probably meant "in doubt". The English skills of native speakers continue to drop, a blog-post reader discovered in a recent session on the Language Log.
[Ed.: See the comment by Philip Taylor below.]
Philip Taylor said,
December 27, 2023 @ 5:51 pm
The OED would appear to support the usage of said eminent American professor, Tom, giving examples dated 1632 "Though I beleeve..yet am I somewhat dubious in beleeving" and 1875 ">I followed them, dubious as to whether I should ultimately interfere".
/df said,
December 27, 2023 @ 6:53 pm
Surely, if the hard-to-measure phenomenon of declining English proficiency in Japan is real, one should look to generational turnover for an explanation. Many Japanese English speakers born between 1940 and 1945, who had a forced opportunity to learn US English at the age when children easily pick up languages, will have died over the last few years, and have not been replaced by more recently born members of the population as effective English speakers, for those reasons listed by @ohwilleke, I expect.
RAW said,
December 27, 2023 @ 8:18 pm
The only thing dubious here is the idea that one can quantify and rank language ability at all, but in any case English proficiency is astonishingly low in Japan.
Also, whatever one might say about Japanese education generally (producing a very literate society and innovative scientists, etc), foreign language instruction is excruciatingly poor quality. It's very easy to get a college degree majoring in a language you can't speak, and then get a job teaching it to small children who don't know any better. ALTs are hired simply to talk at children, in hopes they will somehow learn by mimicry, and I was actually forbidden from speaking Japanese to high school students who could not understand spoken English. When you have to break rules and whisper to explain simple concepts, you can imagine the level of education one is receiving. But in any case, no one who spends any significant amount of time in Japan could think English is widely spoken there. It is not.
AG said,
December 28, 2023 @ 1:28 am
I share Thomas' bafflement at the "culture war" assumptions which apparently underlay J.W. Brewer's comment. I will simply mention the possibly-unrelated fact that on Twitter, whenever someone gets very agitated about European religious or linguistic homogeneity and the dangers of abandonment thereof, it is almost always necessary for readers to be ready for the supposed benefits of racial homogeneity to be approvingly brought up in the next breath, with Japan and places like Poland being particular favorite examples.
AS said,
December 28, 2023 @ 6:51 am
This is purely anecdotal, of course, but one of my friends who spent several years teaching English in Japan told me that most English teachers at Japanese public schools do not speak or understand the language at the level required to teach it. Some seemed to not speak any English at all (they read all instructions from a book), and at least one actually had a habit of running away(!) whenever she encountered any of the assistant language teachers outside of the classroom to avoid having to talk to them.
Philip Anderson said,
December 28, 2023 @ 8:00 am
Living on the edge of Europe, I don’t recognise the homogeneous, post-everything dystopia described above. Whenever I leave England, I see different countries, speaking different languages, with different food and culture, and plenty of ”vestiges” of both national history and our shared European civilisation.
Yes, many people speak English, but it’s as a second language; the languages under threat are the regional ones, and the threat comes from the state language in each case, wish varying degrees of official pressure. Yes, English is the língua franca of the EU, and business and international activity, but Europe has had a history of língua francas – Latin among clerics and scholars, French among the aristocracy – and of multilingualism.
Victor Mair said,
December 28, 2023 @ 10:42 am
Reading ohwilleke's point 1 made me think of something that has always amazed me, namely, how extremely well many / most foreigners who make an effort learn to speak Japanese (the converse of what we're discussing in this post).
I've often marvelled at how impressively many Americans speak Japanese and wondered why this is so. The number of Americans with native or near-native fluency in Japanese is astonishingly high. The same cannot be said of Americans who speak Mandarin with native or near-native fluency — except for those who were born in China and grew up there.
Curiously, the best speakers of Sinitic topolects that I know of are those who have acquired their fluency were immersed in Cantonese, Taiwanese, etc. and had the least exposure to Chinese characters, like Mormon missionaries.
Contrary to what you might be expecting, I'm not ascribing this discrepancy to the writing system. After all, Japanese have to struggle with the kanji the same as Chinese have to grapple with the hanzi. And, in some respects, as J. Marshall Unger has often reminded us, the Japanese writing system overall is quite formidable. Rather, I think that there are two main factors involved in making spoken Japanese inviting:
1. relatively easy phonology
2. encouraging social reactions on the part of native speakers when they hear foreigners speaking their language
V said,
December 28, 2023 @ 10:52 am
Thomas : I think J.W.Brewer was joking? I he was not, that's profoundly out character.
Jason M said,
December 28, 2023 @ 12:19 pm
Purely my anecdotal experience as a biomedical scientist (and linguistic hobbyist):
I think of English proficiency in 2 arenas for a non-native-anglophone country: 1) how well scientists speak English in that country among undergrad and graduate students (many more senior scientists have done postdocs or exchanges in English-speaking countries and also there is selection bias because career success depends in part on English proficiency so more senior folk are likely to skew the data); 2) how well people speak English in the service industry in that country (hotels, cabs, Lyfts, stores).
India is completely misranked based on my criteria, as I have traveled throughout west, south, and north of India and interacted with scientists from every part. I’ve never had issues in any store or hotel. Maybe some auto rickshaw drivers struggle with English, but that’s about it. Scientists are uniformly proficient, fluent in fact.
Japanese ranking seems about right. Even relatively English-fluent Japanese scientists are among the most difficult to understand and also seem to struggle the most when answering questions at posters and after talks. In my experience Chinese scientists are far better. I don’t have a good sense of Chinese fluency in services because I am well shepherded by my hosts everywhere I have traveled there, though hotels definitely seem more English-friendly than in Japan.
The other country with surprisingly poor English in my experience in both science and on the street: Brazil. It’s interesting Portugal ranked so high. I don’t have any experience there. Nicaragua was also bad though pidgin English was still more effective than in Japan or Brazil. Europe, even former Eastern bloc (Bulgaria, Czech Republic) all pretty good….
Philip Anderson said,
December 28, 2023 @ 2:16 pm
@Jason M
My experience of Brazil is that the highly educated, including those working in business and medicine, are generally fluent in English, and have often travelled or worked abroad. I don’t know about students, but I think people often learn English after a first degree.
While European and American tourists do visit, they tend to go to specific highlights, but most tourism in Brazil is internal, with many others coming from the rest of Latin America; Spanish is a more useful língua franca than English.
There’s no reason why Portugal and Brazil should have similar, skill levels, since their circumstances are different. It may be worth noting that the Japanese immigrants to Brazil had no trouble learning Portuguese, although I believe it’s the immigrant community that has kept its language to the greatest degree.