Speaking English in Japan is very challenging. All my friends and family speak Japanese, and everything from social media to news is completely accessible in Japanese.
I'm an entrepreneur, and I use English when talking with international clients and overseas VCs. However, I lack confidence, and the communication tends to remain superficial, making it difficult to effectively do business internationally.
In this environment, it's hard to feel a real necessity to communicate in English.
Since elementary school, we've been told that being able to speak English is extremely important, and I studied hard. Yet in this environment, there are rarely opportunities to actually use English.
When foreigners tell us about the importance of English, they may not fully understand that it doesn't really matter much to most Japanese people.
Japanese people might start speaking English when they truly need it.
Rather than that, I'd be happier if AI could provide real-time translation for everything.
I have been a couple of times in Japan, have some Japanese friends here in Vietnam, where I live. I am spanish.
In my humble opinion, japanese society is very kind and well-behaved, but, if you cannot speak japanese and you live in one more-or-less big city, according to all the feedback I got, then, you are basically out.
And anyway, you will never be a japanese. I mean, there is much less difference between foreigners entering Spain, in general terms, and foreigners entering in Japan.
I love Japan, but I am not sure it would be a particularly comfortable place to live since Japanese have a very traditional culture and habits, so being part of the group is not an easy task. In fact, I think you will never be a part of the group as I would understand it in spanish terms, when, for example, an argentinian or a romanian becomes in Spain over time.
The japanese culture is one one of the cultures I admire the most in many aspects: disciplined, orderly... but one thing is that and a very different thing is living there and becoming fully integrated. I think that's tough.
This strong need to be accepted by a whole country is something I see mentioned a lot by a particular group of people that have never really been "othered" in their life. Coming to Japan is quite a shock for them because they experience being a minority for the first time in their lives. I was born in Canada and have dealt with micro-aggresions and blatant racism my whole life there. Living in Japan I can say I feel no strong desire or care to be accepted. I'm not here to win over the acceptance of a country. I live my own life quietly with the small group of strong friends and community that do accept me. I'm perfectly happy and would definitely be much less happy if my goal was to be seen as Japanese (with all the rules that this also entails). Integration to me is simply respecting everyone. There really is no big song and dance needed to be seen as the "accepted foreigner". Just live your life.
Well, yes, if you weren't born in Japan or born to Japanese parents, you will never be Japanese. And isn't that fine? I don't understand why somebody who has immigrated to a foreign country must be accepted like a native. Why can't one just peacefully integrate the best they can and accept their differences?
> if you cannot speak japanese and you live in one more-or-less big city, according to all the feedback I got, then, you are basically out.
> And anyway, you will never be a japanese.
I think you answered yourself that if you _can_ speak Japanese, things are different. The reality is that if you can speak Japanese, it's quite easy to be well integrated with the people. In your example, I don't know if the Romanian learned Spanish or everyone is speaking English but there is likely a common language. Making the reason "traditional culture and habits" and just not a lack of a shared language seems wrong to me, at least I feel quite integrated. Please stop telling people "they will never be Japanese" since it's blatantly wrong.
As a seed-stage VC who has had the chance to interact with a number of Japanese entrepreneurs spinning businesses out of research at Harvard or MIT, I haven't found the conversations more superficial than with American entrepreneurs.
Maybe there's large sums of money at stake, polite and superficial conversation is a way of mitigating risk? I won't pretend to know the answer, but as a deep technologist I find the fundraising conversations with entrepreneurs deeply dissatisfying on average. And as a multi-time entrepreneur myself, I have definitely felt the same way sitting on the other side of the table.
I work in various Japanese offices and I can say that some really dedicated Japanese bosses/leaders that spoke English as good as you if not better were great to do business with. I think a lot of the problem in doing business is that both sides think the other is playing by the same rules because of the language being used. Experience and time in Japan has taught me the rules of Japanese business that I didn't know (can't exactly list them all).
The secret my English teaching friends have tried to share with me when I ask them how do you get your students better is for the students to "try" more. All pro athletes never did their best initially and so language learning is the same thing.
The only thing I have against translation by AI is that it'll end up replacing thought if you're not careful. I think using it to double check your understanding is fine (like a calculator for math) but understanding nuance/culture is helpful.
Being that I am in Japan I wouldn't mind conversing in English (written or spoken) with you.
Your written English is excellent. You are underestimating your skills, I think. Is there a world in which you could simply pause and plan out your words before speaking? Westerners won’t mind. Elon Musk often pauses noticeably in interviews when he’s discussing something controversial or novel, for example. I retrained myself how to speak in my 20s and went through a similar process.
Which interestingly is illegal in Montreal / Quebec in Canada. (Signs must contain French text and the French text must be no smaller than other languages.)
This is extraneous to your comment, but as someone who speaks some Japanese, if you ever want someone to practice English with, I am more than happy to lend a hand.
I only speak English, but I have found and theorized that one's ability to learn and retain a L2 is heavily affected by your society's "need" to communicate outside of the national language. This article largely reinforces that theory.
If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle. People in Finland report higher levels of English competency than people in France (despite French being much closer to English than Finnish is) because there are so many fewer Finnish speakers. Finns wanting to experience warm beaches or global cities need to communicate when traveling to those places outside of Finland. France meanwhile has mountains, beaches, a big domestic market, ample media, and international reach.
Japan is much more like France than Finland - the geographic diversity allows one to ski or sunbathe within the same country. The domestic market for goods and services is huge. Japan creates and exports so much culture that English speakers wish to learn Japanese to consume more of it. When there is little "need" to learn another language, it is not only less enticing but actually harder to do so.
This culminates in anglophones being at a disadvantage in acquiring a L2 compared to nearly anyone else. A lot of people worldwide do want to practice their English with a native speaker. Many international institutions use English as the lingua franca. Even during a layover in Montreal, my (then) girlfriend ordered a smoothie in French and was replied to in English (this could be a commentary on Canadian bilingualism, but I'll leave that for another day) - it's hard for an anglophone to practice and perfect another language when the world around them already speaks better English than their L2.
So considering Japan's strong domestic market, culture, and the stark differences between the languages, it was never a shock to me that their English proficiency isn't where one would immediately expect it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and the deep experience behind them.
Suomi mainittu. As an English speaker who moved to Finland and has been steadily learning Finnish over the last few years, I definitely have to agree: My progress would probably be faster (and more painful) if I actually had any immediate need to speak Finnish.
Don't twist my words here, I am still extremely grateful that Finns speak such excellent English. It's the only reason I felt like I could make it finding a job here after moving right after completing college. And it's definitely a cornerstone of Finnish success in international markets. I would very, very gladly take this tradeoff again. But, yes, trial by fire usually sets learning alight.
I have a somewhat related theory about English in Europe: The smaller countries are better at English partly because they subtitle rather than dubbing. That means that when they see English-language movies or watch English-language television, they're hearing English rather than their native language. I think this helps people maintain some level of English proficiency years after they leave school.
AIUI the available evidence is that that doesn't help (and that matches my experience of watching a lot of Japanese content with subtitles in my younger years). What goes into memory is the semantics you understood, and when you're taking in translated content you take in the version in your native language and discard the foreign sounds that didn't contribute to the part you understood.
I felt this from working in the Netherlands. One thing that may change it in larger countries is digital TV, the broadcast can have both original and dubbed soundtracks available.
That's probably most of it, but the way Japan typically teaches English is sort of notoriously bad. That probably doesn't help either.
> If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle.
You do see some Japanese companies talking up the need for English competency; I suppose if more and more companies there use English competency as one thing they're looking for in job applicants, that might cause a shift elsewhere, as suddenly there's a 'need' (and thus a motivation).
That is my experience with Brazil as well, it is very uncommon to find people who speak good english there in part because nobody ever travels outside the country.
French is widely spoken throughout the world. If you speak French you can travel to Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and parts of South America without needing to speak another language. Also French is an official language in Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg as well as being widely spoken and taught as a second language in contentental Europe. Japan is spoken mostly in Japan and expat communities.
You're right that the simile starts falling apart when you look at it deeper, but on the whole I think it does provide a reasonable example: when you can experience international travel and business opportunities in your mother tongue it is less appealing and more difficult to learn another language. And this is what we see from French-speakers vs Finnish-speakers. Yes, French is much more global than Japanese is, but the end result is the same: if you speak French or Japanese, there are many more economic, cultural, and travel opportunities available without needing to learn a L2 than if you speak Finnish or Dutch or Hungarian. That's part of speaking a language with 100+ million speakers compared to 5 million speakers.
Ok, but what difference does that make in practice? Japanese people do not feel any compelling need to go outside Japan (many do not have passports) - they go on holiday within Japan (which has ski resorts, tropical islands, and everything in between) and consume entertainment in Japanese. I suspect many French people would still content speaking only French even if it wasn't spoken outside France, for the same reasons.
I think you're greatly overstating the usefulness of French; I've noticed that French-speaking people seem to have this misconception about the importance of their language, not grasping that it's no longer the late 1800s or early 1900s. French is only widely spoken in former French colonies, which are all generally economic backwaters (which probably has a lot to do with how poorly France treated its colonies). I'm not aware of any significant parts of South America where you can speak French, outside French Guyana: anywhere else, and you need to speak Spanish or Portuguese, though you might be able to get by with English just due to its popularity as an international language (which French is not).
French might be "official" in Belgium and Switzerland, but that's about as useful as it also being "official" in Canada. Good luck speaking French to people in British Columbia or Alberta; only people in Quebec speak it. The same is largely true in Belgium or Switzerland: go outside the French-speaking area and you're going to have trouble. Luxembourg is a micronation.
That's an interesting observation, and entirely correct from my experience in the Netherlands and other countries. Thank you for making me think!
In a more general case: it is hard to do hard things without a true need, and people consistently underestimate this. Learning a language is a great example; virtually everyone that moves to the Netherlands does not learn Dutch, because there is no need, but the Dutch speak English, because as a society we must. Many people that get rich, particularly in sales or banking or business, do it because they "have to" - socially or even financially. Plenty of people in relationships have problems and promise change to their partners - but don't really change until they must, when the divorce or breakup looms - and by then it's too late. Or, people wait until right before a deadline to do things; for more mundane daily things like work or cleaning, until it's late at night.
If you really want to do something, you need to be conscious about the doing. Routine and desire are important, but the best is to structure your life such that you must have the thing. You want to start a business? Schedule meetings, sign deals, find a cofounder that will get on your ass. You want to learn French, move to rural France and you simply will learn because you must. You want to get in shape? Join the military or the fire department. Extreme, yes - or not extreme enough? Shackleton, Grant's memoirs, Apollo 13 - Time and time again we as a species see that man rises to the challenge. One must only put the challenge in front of the man.
I've lived in Japan for over a decade and I think this article summarizes some aspects of English education well. I'd like to share a few of my thoughts and experiences too.
English is often put on a very high pedestal. Speaking fluent English is associated with being "elite". A tech company in my city is slowly moving to doing all development work in English. I went to a casual tech talk event they held. Every talk was given in Japanese and most of them started with a joke along the lines of "[In English] Hello everyone, good evening! [In Japanese] Hahah, of course I'm not going to give the whole talk in English" It makes sense to give all the talks in Japanese to a Japanese speaking audience, but the whole vibe was that English was so impossible that the idea of giving a talk in English was absurd.
Some of my friends have kids with mixed-roots. They have grown up speaking English and Japanese. They sometimes modify their English pronunciation to sound "more Japanese" when they start English classes in school. They don't want to stand out amongst their peers.
I remember one kid, who was tri-lingual. He told a story about being called upon in English class to translate the Japanese word for "great-grandfather". He translated it correctly but his teacher said "No, it's grand-grandfather". They teacher and the class laughed at him. Of course, there are bad teachers everywhere but one wonders if the teacher would have tried to take him down a peg so much if he fit in a bit better. He ended up moving to Germany with his family. It makes me feel quite sad that a kid born and raised here can end up feeling more at home in a place he has no connection to.
That sounds like a universal experience to be honest; a lot of English teachers (that aren't native English themselves) often over-estimate their own abilities.
And not just restricted to English; it's a very common experience in the U.S. for native speakers of, e.g. Spanish, to end up in Spanish-language courses with non-native Spanish teachers, with modest Spanish skills. I assume it's the case with all language teachers especially at a non-advanced level.
At least having English as an elite-signalling language is still quasi useful. Over here kids slave over ancient Latin or Greek to prove that their parents are elite.
As someone who enjoys languages, I observe with irony that in terms of proficiency per unit of effort spent, at least formal ancient language education isn't a such a waste of effort that formal language education is, in the sense that immersion will teach you language more painlessly, and with more velocity and distance than formal modern language education will; but immersion is quite inaccessible for ancient languages.
> They sometimes modify their English pronunciation to sound "more Japanese" when they start English classes in school
I saw a video where an American was trying to order a McFlurry at McDonalds in Japan and the worker couldn't understand "McFlurry" pronounced in English so they had to pronounce it in what (without context) would sound quite racist.
For the curious, it would be something like "makku-fu-ruri"
This was my experience in Japan as well. So many words we're used to saying in English use mouth shapes that the Japanese language does not, so you really have to tweak how you say things to align with what's available.
> It makes sense to give all the talks in Japanese to a Japanese speaking audience, but the whole vibe was that English was so impossible that the idea of giving a talk in English was absurd.
When I was a student I took some classes in English, and some in my native language. Having someone speak your native language makes things infinitely easier to understand and more engaging. Even if you're a fluent speaker it's still a foreign language, so it's a mental hurdle. I can compare it to talking to a friend in a casual setting vs having a work meeting.
> He translated it correctly but his teacher said "No, it's grand-grandfather".
It's a trait of hierarchical societies. Questioning your superior is a bigger threat to the society than saying things that are objectively wrong.
While it's a fair argument that English became the lingua franca and if you don't speak it, you will be left behind, I feel like most Americans are completely oblivious to the idea that other cultures might exist. I work for an American company in Europe, and most of Americans don't do any effort to learn the local language, and those who do, simply use local words to express their American thoughts.
> those who do, simply use local words to express their American thoughts.
I feel like there's almost the reverse stereotype of this for Americans living in Japan. Like, that they're weirdly obsessed with Japanese culture and try too hard to become more Japanese.
> Having someone speak your native language makes things infinitely easier to understand and more engaging.
I don't really disagree with this. However, it's only axiomatically true if you hold teaching skill constant. I once learned far more on Tuesdays and Thursdays from a brilliant teacher who spoke no English than I did on Mondays and Wednesdays from a perfectly bi-lingual instructor who was only meh.
When I taught ESL I held onto English-only except in extremis. Knowing (though only a bit of, in my case) the other language, could otherwise become unproductive. As the teacher, it was on me to find the four or five (or however many were necessary!) ways to get to the concept in English. Hearing all of them may have only been necessary for a few of the students, but hearing them was re-inforcing for the students who had 'got it' first time.
> I feel like most Americans are completely oblivious to the idea that other cultures might exist. I work for an American company in Europe, and most of Americans don't do any effort to learn the local language, and those who do, simply use local words to express their American thoughts.
Yeah. As a Brit living in Japan, the Americans are often a more foreign culture than the Japanese, and far less willing to work to bridge the distance and avoid misunderstandings.
Proficient English is just a “plus-alpha”, as they say.
You don’t need it, but it might open up a few more doors.
Then there’s certain topics, like science/medicine where English to some extent is absolutely necessary to keep up with research. Even then, I find some of these people still struggle with speaking and listening, but reading and writing can be pretty solid.
Ah, I thought your name sounded familiar! In 2008, I bought "Reading Japanese with a Smile" on a trip to Japan and loved it. It was very well done and perfect for me. I ended up buying two copies and for years I kept checking on Kinokuniya visits hoping it would become a series. No such luck, but my guess is it was just too much work for too little reward. But you should know that a HN reader still remembers your work fondly after 16 years.
Thank you for the kind words! I am glad to hear that you found that book useful.
The editor and I did discuss a sequel and I started collecting material for it, but I had changed careers by that point and no longer had the time or motivation to see it through to completion. And now I’m not sure if there’s a market for such books anymore. At least, if I were learning to read Japanese myself now, rather than buying a book of annotated readings I would choose my own texts and ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini about the parts I don’t understand.
I recently moved back to the US from Japan after living there for a year. My poor Japanese made life very difficult. Easy things like calling a restaurant for a reservation or visiting the ward office was always a major challenge. I second your point that Japanese is always useful regardless of official policies. What do you think Japan should do to encourage Japanese language learning among immigrants?
> What do you think Japan should do to encourage Japanese language learning among immigrants?
It really boggles my mind how many immigrants to a place (because it doesn't just happen in Japan) are fine not trying to learn the language, especially if the place doesn't even understand the languages you know. You'd think living in such a place would be enough encouragement (it certainly would be for me), but I keep seeing stories about immigrants in several places not bothering to learn a common language of where they live.
The government has been making efforts, such as trying to improve the training and certification of Japanese language teachers, making Japanese language ability a condition (or at least an advantage) for getting certain types of visas, and offering language support to immigrant children in public schools. They are also trying to promote the use of simplified Japanese—avoiding difficult vocabulary and indicating the readings of all kanji—in documents and services aimed at the general public, something that would help not only immigrants but also Japanese with lower literacy skills. I’m sure much more could be done, though.
Thank you for the article! I’m an American who’s lived on and off in Japan for around 10 years, currently in Tokyo working in game development. I related to many parts of your article, especially the later part about foreign devs working with Japanese executives.
My work environment aims to be multilingual (Japanese/English) but creative conversations are inevitably stymied by pauses for translation. Machine translation and AI is helpful but fails to capture nuance, and compounds normal, everyday communication woes. Japanese only speakers on our team feel lonely and left out despite best efforts. Japanese applicants are quite rare because of the stress of being in such an environment. It’s exhausting when people around you don’t share common cultural touchstones and every conversation is an unpredictable exchange.
On the other side, although many of my non-Japanese colleagues speak varying levels of Japanese, some have tried but are unable to (or don’t care to) improve further. Working proficiency is a high bar, and our “real work” is busy. You can get by in Tokyo with cursory Japanese, translation apps and online reservations. There is a large expat community, so you can ignore the “Japan for Japanese people” if you so choose.
I wonder how things will change as the native population continues to shrink over the years. Even in Tokyo, many businesses have responded to the tourist explosion by insulating themselves in various ways. There are recent incidents related to concentrated immigrant populations as well. I hope that we avoid the xenophobic trend that is sweeping the rest of the world but I do worry.
Thanks for the comments! I have been following developments in MT and AI as close as I can and have been interested in how well MT works—or doesn’t—in real-life situations, but I don’t get much opportunity to experience such situations myself. Your description of your work environment is really valuable to me.
Your report about some of your non-Japanese colleagues not making much progress with Japanese matches my own experience in academia. A few years after I started working at the university, we began hiring a steady stream of youngish academics from around the world to teach academic writing classes in English to undergraduates. Some of them already had good Japanese ability, and the others all started out wanting to learn. But being busy with teaching and research and being able to get by in Tokyo with just English meant that few of the latter group made much progress beyond basic conversation. The language is hard, adult life is busy, and acquiring languages gets steadily harder for most of us as we get older.
I also wonder about how Japan will change and adapt as the native population continues to decrease. At the government and business levels, the overall response to the growing foreign population seems to be a slow shift toward adaptation. Among the general population, it’s hard for me to tell.
> The notion of “fairness” dominates English education policy in Japan. Because of the importance of educational credentials in Japanese life, any policy that seems to favor one group or another—the rich, the urban, children with highly-educated parents, or children who happen to have acquired English fluency on their own—will attract popular opposition.
I teach ESL in Vietnam. The above quote boggles my mind. I've taught disadvantaged rural students and urban students with educated parents. Of course I tried my absolute best for the rural students, I worked a lot harder for them than for the privileged students. However, it would be madness to hamstring the students who happen to be privileged. Holding the whole country to the lowest common denominator doesn't benefit the country at all.
I thought Vietnam was very Confucian and uniform but Japan seems even more extreme. Maybe Vietnam also applies Marx's doctrine of "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" to offset it.
Thanks for your great write up on this topic. This was a very interesting read for me.
Partly it was the location: An upper floor of a building in a neighborhood full of bars and pachinko parlors, which seemed much sleazier to me then than it would now.
But more it was, I think, that I didn’t understand yet why Japanese college students and office workers would pay money to practice English with me and a few other recent foreign arrivals. The fact that much of the conversation consisted of the customers asking me personal questions—“Where are you from?” “Why did you come to Japan?” “Do you like Japanese women?”—made me suspicious, too.
In retrospect, the place was almost certainly not a front for anything sinister but just a way for the owner to try to make some money from the shortage of opportunities to speak English in Japan. And the focus on personal questions was just a sign of the customers’ limited repertoire of conversational English. But it took me a while to grasp all that.
A lot of english conversation in Japan functions as de-facto paid compansionship. It's not exactly a front for escorting, but it's not completely not that either. In the west there tends to be a clear sharp line between customer service and sex work, whereas in Japan there is much more of a sliding scale from paying by the hour to hang out in a bar with friendly bar staff, to having more flirty conversations with them, through clothed touching to what's essentially a strip club experience.
But unlike Japan, the education system is the antithesis of fair - as, if I understood correctly, your 4th grade teacher will decide which of the 3 tracks you will follow at 10(!) years of age. This obliterates the possibility of social elevator through education.
I wonder how it is in Japan?
Is it common to have class movement between generations?
I just visited Japan and found the language situation around tourists was frankly perplexing.
With some tourists, English was a lingua franca. I ran across some Chinese tourists asking some non-English speaking white tourists (French maybe?) a question in English and not being able to communicate.
With others, Japanese was the interchange language of choice, such as with some Taiwanese tourists.
For native Japanese people speaking English, it was invariably a huge relief for them to fall back to speaking in Japanese with me. Even those with excellent English pronunciation were like this too.
Only once did I feel weird speaking Japanese, with a hotel receptionist who turned out to be Korean.
Until Japanese have an economic reason to learn English, they will continue to participate in the educational equivalent of get-rich-quick schemes instead of actually getting good. It's a great example of the "Galapagos syndrome".
There is English education at school, but it is based entirely on rote repetition and exercises instead of y'know, understanding the language. There are "English Conversation Schools", but they are mostly scams whose goal is your continued participation, rather than having an end goal of comprehending English.
I was a teacher at an English Conversation School, more than 30 years ago, and I think that there is more to them -- or at least there was.
Where I lived, this was one of the few places to interact with a foreigner and practice English (often before going on an overseas holiday or work contract). Even better, it was a safe and controlled environment.
One of the crucial hurdles for Japanese people learning English has always been a lack of confidence and fear of looking foolish in public.
It didn't do much for English ability, because how could it when the class is only one hour a week?
Many of the schools were get-rich-quick schemes, as you say, but that doesn't mean they didn't provide a valuable function, even if they didn't contribute directly to English ability.
There is a very strong economic incentive to do well on university entrance exams - they pretty much determine the course of a Japanese person's life - and thus both schools and outside tutoring focus on teaching students to score well on the English section of those exams, to the exclusion of learning to understand or speak English.
Similarly, it can be beneficial to one's someone's career to get a high score on TOEIC, so adult classes prioritise teaching people to get high scores on TOEIC. The "education" system is extremely well aligned with the economic incentives.
I spent 4 years in Istanbul and paid for Turkish classes at a popular English school chain. Their English was bad, and all the classes were full all day.
I believe that reason is increasing at a higher pace in the last few years and will only keep increasing. Japan continues to bring in more foreigners both for work and as tourists, and their usual tactics of dealing with foreigners and other "problems" by cutting off the nose to spite the face (Gion, Mt Fuji Lawson, Shibuya Halloween etc.) won't work forever.
Do you think English language conversational AI tutors could have a positive impact on a nation like Japan (which tends to be a little more introverted)?
Time will tell, maybe for the people that can create feedback loops for themselves where AI fills the gaps, but at the aggregate level I don’t think AI will move the needle. More likely people will use AI translation as a crutch, rather than learning to communicate without assistance.
Very interesting observations. My sister lives outside Tokyo and is an assistant English teacher under the JET Programme which is a government initiative to bring language teachers to schools. Her Japanese is very good - as part of being selected she was interviewed in Japanese by the local embassy so it had to be - and she reports a strong willingness in her students to learn at least some English for pragmatic reasons.
I’m struck by the uniformity described. I've known people with a knack for languages, and in the US system they can opt to take more courses or go further. What do exceptional English-learning students do?
They'll look for external options whether they're paid lessons somewhere, English-related events, or online chances to talk to native speakers. Many will also go on to look for jobs in companies that involve English.
It's also worth noting that most public schools have (short) study abroad programs that will allow excellent students to apply for a few weeks in Australia or New Zealand as well.
One other interesting part of the uniformity is that perhaps because of the English focus, there's no real exposure to other foreign languages in public schools before the high school level (and sometimes not even then). Whereas in the US, I think most people have the option to study something from middle school or junior high.
I'm excluding Mandarin from this discussion, which is sometimes touched on superficially in Classical Japanese.
I had access to the Internet. The whole thing was in English! Can you believe it? I had no choice but to learn English.
In hindsight, I'd say the most important for learning English was that I was an ignorant teenager. I just... typed completely broken sentences into forums that today I wouldn't even be able to fathom how could I get the grammar so wrong. I got banned several times from Freenode channels, for pestering people with unintelligible questions and then not being able to understand the answers.
I was unaware and shameless and that shamelessness allowed me to make progress. Were I to learn English today, I'd probably be too self-aware to embarrass myself trying to use a language I can't use, and that would make it far more difficult to learn anything.
I suppose that's a good life lesson in general. You can't get good at something without being embarrassingly bad at it at first. If there was a pill to make you unaware of your own embarrassing self, that would be a learning pill. In fact, I guess we should really be learning new things while drunk!
In my experience, exceptional English-learners almost exclusively learn independently, from consuming English media or interacting with native speakers, not from courses.
I think this tracks in most adults who learn a foreign language. Within six months of moving from the US to a Western European country, I could read and understand enough spoken language to get through the day (commuting, groceries, restaurant, etc) and since then I’ve met a lot of people who have been here for a decade and still struggle with those things. The difference I believe was that I was highly motivated.
Not to toot my own horn, but I moved solely on my own accord. Sure, I have a work visa, but that was for convenience, not necessity, whereas many immigrants come for a short term job that turns into something more or because they are fleeing from war or disaster. I entered with the mindset that I need to learn the language and putting it off is just hurting my future self.
When people ask me how I learned so fast, I told them the truth. I don’t have much else to do in my free time so I “study”. These days, I even browse Reddit in my target language. I believe people are really quite capable of learning language, especially adults! But it requires intentionality and practice be develop proficiency, like anything really. If you want to get good at languages, you have to speak, read, and write every day.
To bring it back around, many of the best English speakers I have met engage parts of their life in English that they don’t need. Leisure and entertainment are the top contributors but depending on your profession, it could be required to speak/read English at work as well. It goes to your point of how the excellent students learn and I think everyone can apply to these ideas to learning across a wide range of topics.
IMX, exceptional ${LANGUAGE}-learners almost exclusively learn independently, from consuming ${LANGUAGE} media or interacting with native speakers, not from courses.
I just went on vacation to Japan and it was fascinating how much relief even the competent English-speakers there seemed to show when I would speak with them in my semi-fluent (vocab-deficient though) Japanese.
There are translations everywhere, on signs and in museums (those are fascinating because the translations omit 80% of the detail since foreigners will lack historical contextual knowledge) but I got the feeling that with the exception of accommodating tourists, there's never any use for most natives to ever speak English.
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Speaking English in Japan is very challenging. All my friends and family speak Japanese, and everything from social media to news is completely accessible in Japanese.
I'm an entrepreneur, and I use English when talking with international clients and overseas VCs. However, I lack confidence, and the communication tends to remain superficial, making it difficult to effectively do business internationally. In this environment, it's hard to feel a real necessity to communicate in English. Since elementary school, we've been told that being able to speak English is extremely important, and I studied hard. Yet in this environment, there are rarely opportunities to actually use English.
When foreigners tell us about the importance of English, they may not fully understand that it doesn't really matter much to most Japanese people. Japanese people might start speaking English when they truly need it.
Rather than that, I'd be happier if AI could provide real-time translation for everything.
In my humble opinion, japanese society is very kind and well-behaved, but, if you cannot speak japanese and you live in one more-or-less big city, according to all the feedback I got, then, you are basically out.
And anyway, you will never be a japanese. I mean, there is much less difference between foreigners entering Spain, in general terms, and foreigners entering in Japan.
I love Japan, but I am not sure it would be a particularly comfortable place to live since Japanese have a very traditional culture and habits, so being part of the group is not an easy task. In fact, I think you will never be a part of the group as I would understand it in spanish terms, when, for example, an argentinian or a romanian becomes in Spain over time.
The japanese culture is one one of the cultures I admire the most in many aspects: disciplined, orderly... but one thing is that and a very different thing is living there and becoming fully integrated. I think that's tough.
Well, yes, if you weren't born in Japan or born to Japanese parents, you will never be Japanese. And isn't that fine? I don't understand why somebody who has immigrated to a foreign country must be accepted like a native. Why can't one just peacefully integrate the best they can and accept their differences?
I think you answered yourself that if you _can_ speak Japanese, things are different. The reality is that if you can speak Japanese, it's quite easy to be well integrated with the people. In your example, I don't know if the Romanian learned Spanish or everyone is speaking English but there is likely a common language. Making the reason "traditional culture and habits" and just not a lack of a shared language seems wrong to me, at least I feel quite integrated. Please stop telling people "they will never be Japanese" since it's blatantly wrong.
That said, I can't wait for AI earbud / smartglasses Babel Fish [0] to become a reality.
[0] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Babel_Fish
Maybe there's large sums of money at stake, polite and superficial conversation is a way of mitigating risk? I won't pretend to know the answer, but as a deep technologist I find the fundraising conversations with entrepreneurs deeply dissatisfying on average. And as a multi-time entrepreneur myself, I have definitely felt the same way sitting on the other side of the table.
The secret my English teaching friends have tried to share with me when I ask them how do you get your students better is for the students to "try" more. All pro athletes never did their best initially and so language learning is the same thing.
The only thing I have against translation by AI is that it'll end up replacing thought if you're not careful. I think using it to double check your understanding is fine (like a calculator for math) but understanding nuance/culture is helpful.
Being that I am in Japan I wouldn't mind conversing in English (written or spoken) with you.
If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle. People in Finland report higher levels of English competency than people in France (despite French being much closer to English than Finnish is) because there are so many fewer Finnish speakers. Finns wanting to experience warm beaches or global cities need to communicate when traveling to those places outside of Finland. France meanwhile has mountains, beaches, a big domestic market, ample media, and international reach.
Japan is much more like France than Finland - the geographic diversity allows one to ski or sunbathe within the same country. The domestic market for goods and services is huge. Japan creates and exports so much culture that English speakers wish to learn Japanese to consume more of it. When there is little "need" to learn another language, it is not only less enticing but actually harder to do so.
This culminates in anglophones being at a disadvantage in acquiring a L2 compared to nearly anyone else. A lot of people worldwide do want to practice their English with a native speaker. Many international institutions use English as the lingua franca. Even during a layover in Montreal, my (then) girlfriend ordered a smoothie in French and was replied to in English (this could be a commentary on Canadian bilingualism, but I'll leave that for another day) - it's hard for an anglophone to practice and perfect another language when the world around them already speaks better English than their L2.
So considering Japan's strong domestic market, culture, and the stark differences between the languages, it was never a shock to me that their English proficiency isn't where one would immediately expect it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and the deep experience behind them.
Don't twist my words here, I am still extremely grateful that Finns speak such excellent English. It's the only reason I felt like I could make it finding a job here after moving right after completing college. And it's definitely a cornerstone of Finnish success in international markets. I would very, very gladly take this tradeoff again. But, yes, trial by fire usually sets learning alight.
I worked for Nokia for a while, but was lucky that everyone I spoke to in Finland spoke perfect English.
(I'm American, living in Stockholm, by the way.)
> If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle.
You do see some Japanese companies talking up the need for English competency; I suppose if more and more companies there use English competency as one thing they're looking for in job applicants, that might cause a shift elsewhere, as suddenly there's a 'need' (and thus a motivation).
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French might be "official" in Belgium and Switzerland, but that's about as useful as it also being "official" in Canada. Good luck speaking French to people in British Columbia or Alberta; only people in Quebec speak it. The same is largely true in Belgium or Switzerland: go outside the French-speaking area and you're going to have trouble. Luxembourg is a micronation.
In a more general case: it is hard to do hard things without a true need, and people consistently underestimate this. Learning a language is a great example; virtually everyone that moves to the Netherlands does not learn Dutch, because there is no need, but the Dutch speak English, because as a society we must. Many people that get rich, particularly in sales or banking or business, do it because they "have to" - socially or even financially. Plenty of people in relationships have problems and promise change to their partners - but don't really change until they must, when the divorce or breakup looms - and by then it's too late. Or, people wait until right before a deadline to do things; for more mundane daily things like work or cleaning, until it's late at night.
If you really want to do something, you need to be conscious about the doing. Routine and desire are important, but the best is to structure your life such that you must have the thing. You want to start a business? Schedule meetings, sign deals, find a cofounder that will get on your ass. You want to learn French, move to rural France and you simply will learn because you must. You want to get in shape? Join the military or the fire department. Extreme, yes - or not extreme enough? Shackleton, Grant's memoirs, Apollo 13 - Time and time again we as a species see that man rises to the challenge. One must only put the challenge in front of the man.
English is often put on a very high pedestal. Speaking fluent English is associated with being "elite". A tech company in my city is slowly moving to doing all development work in English. I went to a casual tech talk event they held. Every talk was given in Japanese and most of them started with a joke along the lines of "[In English] Hello everyone, good evening! [In Japanese] Hahah, of course I'm not going to give the whole talk in English" It makes sense to give all the talks in Japanese to a Japanese speaking audience, but the whole vibe was that English was so impossible that the idea of giving a talk in English was absurd.
Some of my friends have kids with mixed-roots. They have grown up speaking English and Japanese. They sometimes modify their English pronunciation to sound "more Japanese" when they start English classes in school. They don't want to stand out amongst their peers.
I remember one kid, who was tri-lingual. He told a story about being called upon in English class to translate the Japanese word for "great-grandfather". He translated it correctly but his teacher said "No, it's grand-grandfather". They teacher and the class laughed at him. Of course, there are bad teachers everywhere but one wonders if the teacher would have tried to take him down a peg so much if he fit in a bit better. He ended up moving to Germany with his family. It makes me feel quite sad that a kid born and raised here can end up feeling more at home in a place he has no connection to.
Very similar/relevant shimura ken skit. https://youtu.be/67KlmXYDom4
I saw a video where an American was trying to order a McFlurry at McDonalds in Japan and the worker couldn't understand "McFlurry" pronounced in English so they had to pronounce it in what (without context) would sound quite racist.
This was my experience in Japan as well. So many words we're used to saying in English use mouth shapes that the Japanese language does not, so you really have to tweak how you say things to align with what's available.
"Coffee" is a fun one for the tired westerner
When I was a student I took some classes in English, and some in my native language. Having someone speak your native language makes things infinitely easier to understand and more engaging. Even if you're a fluent speaker it's still a foreign language, so it's a mental hurdle. I can compare it to talking to a friend in a casual setting vs having a work meeting.
> He translated it correctly but his teacher said "No, it's grand-grandfather".
It's a trait of hierarchical societies. Questioning your superior is a bigger threat to the society than saying things that are objectively wrong.
While it's a fair argument that English became the lingua franca and if you don't speak it, you will be left behind, I feel like most Americans are completely oblivious to the idea that other cultures might exist. I work for an American company in Europe, and most of Americans don't do any effort to learn the local language, and those who do, simply use local words to express their American thoughts.
I feel like there's almost the reverse stereotype of this for Americans living in Japan. Like, that they're weirdly obsessed with Japanese culture and try too hard to become more Japanese.
I don't really disagree with this. However, it's only axiomatically true if you hold teaching skill constant. I once learned far more on Tuesdays and Thursdays from a brilliant teacher who spoke no English than I did on Mondays and Wednesdays from a perfectly bi-lingual instructor who was only meh.
When I taught ESL I held onto English-only except in extremis. Knowing (though only a bit of, in my case) the other language, could otherwise become unproductive. As the teacher, it was on me to find the four or five (or however many were necessary!) ways to get to the concept in English. Hearing all of them may have only been necessary for a few of the students, but hearing them was re-inforcing for the students who had 'got it' first time.
Yeah. As a Brit living in Japan, the Americans are often a more foreign culture than the Japanese, and far less willing to work to bridge the distance and avoid misunderstandings.
You need to do some development work in English. Programing language keywords are all English?
Like there isn't really a python in Japanese?
I will also be happy to respond to questions.
Proficient English is just a “plus-alpha”, as they say.
You don’t need it, but it might open up a few more doors.
Then there’s certain topics, like science/medicine where English to some extent is absolutely necessary to keep up with research. Even then, I find some of these people still struggle with speaking and listening, but reading and writing can be pretty solid.
The editor and I did discuss a sequel and I started collecting material for it, but I had changed careers by that point and no longer had the time or motivation to see it through to completion. And now I’m not sure if there’s a market for such books anymore. At least, if I were learning to read Japanese myself now, rather than buying a book of annotated readings I would choose my own texts and ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini about the parts I don’t understand.
I recently moved back to the US from Japan after living there for a year. My poor Japanese made life very difficult. Easy things like calling a restaurant for a reservation or visiting the ward office was always a major challenge. I second your point that Japanese is always useful regardless of official policies. What do you think Japan should do to encourage Japanese language learning among immigrants?
It really boggles my mind how many immigrants to a place (because it doesn't just happen in Japan) are fine not trying to learn the language, especially if the place doesn't even understand the languages you know. You'd think living in such a place would be enough encouragement (it certainly would be for me), but I keep seeing stories about immigrants in several places not bothering to learn a common language of where they live.
The government has been making efforts, such as trying to improve the training and certification of Japanese language teachers, making Japanese language ability a condition (or at least an advantage) for getting certain types of visas, and offering language support to immigrant children in public schools. They are also trying to promote the use of simplified Japanese—avoiding difficult vocabulary and indicating the readings of all kanji—in documents and services aimed at the general public, something that would help not only immigrants but also Japanese with lower literacy skills. I’m sure much more could be done, though.
My work environment aims to be multilingual (Japanese/English) but creative conversations are inevitably stymied by pauses for translation. Machine translation and AI is helpful but fails to capture nuance, and compounds normal, everyday communication woes. Japanese only speakers on our team feel lonely and left out despite best efforts. Japanese applicants are quite rare because of the stress of being in such an environment. It’s exhausting when people around you don’t share common cultural touchstones and every conversation is an unpredictable exchange.
On the other side, although many of my non-Japanese colleagues speak varying levels of Japanese, some have tried but are unable to (or don’t care to) improve further. Working proficiency is a high bar, and our “real work” is busy. You can get by in Tokyo with cursory Japanese, translation apps and online reservations. There is a large expat community, so you can ignore the “Japan for Japanese people” if you so choose.
I wonder how things will change as the native population continues to shrink over the years. Even in Tokyo, many businesses have responded to the tourist explosion by insulating themselves in various ways. There are recent incidents related to concentrated immigrant populations as well. I hope that we avoid the xenophobic trend that is sweeping the rest of the world but I do worry.
Your report about some of your non-Japanese colleagues not making much progress with Japanese matches my own experience in academia. A few years after I started working at the university, we began hiring a steady stream of youngish academics from around the world to teach academic writing classes in English to undergraduates. Some of them already had good Japanese ability, and the others all started out wanting to learn. But being busy with teaching and research and being able to get by in Tokyo with just English meant that few of the latter group made much progress beyond basic conversation. The language is hard, adult life is busy, and acquiring languages gets steadily harder for most of us as we get older.
I also wonder about how Japan will change and adapt as the native population continues to decrease. At the government and business levels, the overall response to the growing foreign population seems to be a slow shift toward adaptation. Among the general population, it’s hard for me to tell.
I teach ESL in Vietnam. The above quote boggles my mind. I've taught disadvantaged rural students and urban students with educated parents. Of course I tried my absolute best for the rural students, I worked a lot harder for them than for the privileged students. However, it would be madness to hamstring the students who happen to be privileged. Holding the whole country to the lowest common denominator doesn't benefit the country at all.
I thought Vietnam was very Confucian and uniform but Japan seems even more extreme. Maybe Vietnam also applies Marx's doctrine of "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" to offset it.
Thanks for your great write up on this topic. This was a very interesting read for me.
From my experience, most Vietnamese students catch up quickly with extra-curricular English class during their 4 years university.
Just curious what your suspicions were at the English conversation lounge and why it made you uncomfortable?
But more it was, I think, that I didn’t understand yet why Japanese college students and office workers would pay money to practice English with me and a few other recent foreign arrivals. The fact that much of the conversation consisted of the customers asking me personal questions—“Where are you from?” “Why did you come to Japan?” “Do you like Japanese women?”—made me suspicious, too.
In retrospect, the place was almost certainly not a front for anything sinister but just a way for the owner to try to make some money from the shortage of opportunities to speak English in Japan. And the focus on personal questions was just a sign of the customers’ limited repertoire of conversational English. But it took me a while to grasp all that.
Say, Germany, Spain, Italy (or any that you're familiar with).
Northern Europeans seem to be fantastic at learning languages. It's surprising the rest of the world doesn't copy what they do.
But unlike Japan, the education system is the antithesis of fair - as, if I understood correctly, your 4th grade teacher will decide which of the 3 tracks you will follow at 10(!) years of age. This obliterates the possibility of social elevator through education.
I wonder how it is in Japan? Is it common to have class movement between generations?
With some tourists, English was a lingua franca. I ran across some Chinese tourists asking some non-English speaking white tourists (French maybe?) a question in English and not being able to communicate.
With others, Japanese was the interchange language of choice, such as with some Taiwanese tourists.
For native Japanese people speaking English, it was invariably a huge relief for them to fall back to speaking in Japanese with me. Even those with excellent English pronunciation were like this too.
Only once did I feel weird speaking Japanese, with a hotel receptionist who turned out to be Korean.
There is English education at school, but it is based entirely on rote repetition and exercises instead of y'know, understanding the language. There are "English Conversation Schools", but they are mostly scams whose goal is your continued participation, rather than having an end goal of comprehending English.
Where I lived, this was one of the few places to interact with a foreigner and practice English (often before going on an overseas holiday or work contract). Even better, it was a safe and controlled environment.
One of the crucial hurdles for Japanese people learning English has always been a lack of confidence and fear of looking foolish in public.
It didn't do much for English ability, because how could it when the class is only one hour a week?
Many of the schools were get-rich-quick schemes, as you say, but that doesn't mean they didn't provide a valuable function, even if they didn't contribute directly to English ability.
Similarly, it can be beneficial to one's someone's career to get a high score on TOEIC, so adult classes prioritise teaching people to get high scores on TOEIC. The "education" system is extremely well aligned with the economic incentives.
The elephant in the room is that 6/12 years school here are focused on rote remembering for the next entrance exam rather than learning.
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It's also worth noting that most public schools have (short) study abroad programs that will allow excellent students to apply for a few weeks in Australia or New Zealand as well.
One other interesting part of the uniformity is that perhaps because of the English focus, there's no real exposure to other foreign languages in public schools before the high school level (and sometimes not even then). Whereas in the US, I think most people have the option to study something from middle school or junior high.
I'm excluding Mandarin from this discussion, which is sometimes touched on superficially in Classical Japanese.
In hindsight, I'd say the most important for learning English was that I was an ignorant teenager. I just... typed completely broken sentences into forums that today I wouldn't even be able to fathom how could I get the grammar so wrong. I got banned several times from Freenode channels, for pestering people with unintelligible questions and then not being able to understand the answers.
I was unaware and shameless and that shamelessness allowed me to make progress. Were I to learn English today, I'd probably be too self-aware to embarrass myself trying to use a language I can't use, and that would make it far more difficult to learn anything.
I suppose that's a good life lesson in general. You can't get good at something without being embarrassingly bad at it at first. If there was a pill to make you unaware of your own embarrassing self, that would be a learning pill. In fact, I guess we should really be learning new things while drunk!
Not to toot my own horn, but I moved solely on my own accord. Sure, I have a work visa, but that was for convenience, not necessity, whereas many immigrants come for a short term job that turns into something more or because they are fleeing from war or disaster. I entered with the mindset that I need to learn the language and putting it off is just hurting my future self.
When people ask me how I learned so fast, I told them the truth. I don’t have much else to do in my free time so I “study”. These days, I even browse Reddit in my target language. I believe people are really quite capable of learning language, especially adults! But it requires intentionality and practice be develop proficiency, like anything really. If you want to get good at languages, you have to speak, read, and write every day.
To bring it back around, many of the best English speakers I have met engage parts of their life in English that they don’t need. Leisure and entertainment are the top contributors but depending on your profession, it could be required to speak/read English at work as well. It goes to your point of how the excellent students learn and I think everyone can apply to these ideas to learning across a wide range of topics.
There are translations everywhere, on signs and in museums (those are fascinating because the translations omit 80% of the detail since foreigners will lack historical contextual knowledge) but I got the feeling that with the exception of accommodating tourists, there's never any use for most natives to ever speak English.