Japanese speaking English (and Priceguy)

Great Debates
1

Dang, just when I finished typing a brilliant and lengthy post, the darned thread gets closed. Here is what happened so far.

Now, my extensive and well-thought-out contribution:

Whoo-hoo! Finally some actual data! Thank you trabi!

I was, however, disappointed that the cross-reference function is not, well, functional. To see how the number of McDonald resturants correlates with the scores on an English test would be interesting, to say the least.

Priceguy (or perhaps you would prefer PrIcEgUy :)), your use of English is excellent. I suspect your frustration with some of the posts in this thread is because you pay attention to every word you use–most people don’t (much less to every word someone else uses). This comes under the heading “communication” rather than “language.”

Example: Reading quickly, most people will zip right over “However, everyone I know who has or does, says the same thing:” and focus in on “they don’t speak English” and start to lambaste you for your politically incorrect attack on Japanese speakers of English. That fact that you didn’t use “don’t speak English very well” is probably working against you also. Rephrasing later, as you did, is nice but won’t help much when people already have their dander up. (An attempt to answer your question: “Why does this seem to offend people?”)

IMHO, we have our (Priceguy’s) answer: English is taught differently in Japan. Passing an entrance exam is not the same as using the language.

As an aside, the numbers on the TOEFL chart need some clarification. If the test is given to everyone in each country who ever took an English lesson, that would be different from testing those who are currently studying or those who have had more than 1 year of training, etc. I tried to find some details on the site but failed. Don’t have time to do a more extensive search.

And finally, Hari Seldon says: “Now Japanese could hardly be more different from English and still be a human tongue.” I’ll have to respectfully disagree. Japanese is highly inflected, I’ll grant you, but I’m trying to learn Mandarin which is 4 toned. Then there’s Cantonese which is 7 toned. Yikes! Also, I know there are African languages with clicks and glottal stops and such in them. Egad! It’s amazing that anyone can learn a non-birth language.

Thank you for your patience. I just had to get all that out of my system.

2

I wanted to add my two cents too.

Background: I’m married to a Japanese man. I’ve lived here in Japan for nine years. I have three kids, one of whom is in public primary school. I met my husband when he was still in high school. I also attended high school for a year here as an exchange student. When we married, my brothers-in-law were still in high school.

From my experience, the Japanese population on the whole can get away with not learning English because its easy enough to get stuff translated. We have a number of books of which we own both the English version and the Japanese translation. Translators are available for business transactions, political trips, celebrity interviews. Movies are translated into Japanese, either using subtitles or dubbing.

The fact is that most of the population has no NEED to learn English. My husband works in his family’s bike shop. He would never have learned English if he hadn’t met me. The only Japanese people I know here who speak English fluently enough for my parents to understand are those who have lived overseas for a year or more, or enjoy English as a hobby so have studied intensely in their own time by going to specialist English schools. And the only ones who understand written English very well are kids who paid attention in school, and doctors who did all their training using English-written textbooks.

Maybe another reason why Japanese don’t need to learn English is because Japan has become such a power in the business world it can afford to be a bit arrogant? (that’s just a suggestion, please feel free to debunk it at will!).

3

Actually, Tsubaki, people in nearly all minimally civilised countries have no need to learn English. I can’t think of a single country that doesn’t translate English-language books, subtitle/dub movies, or have easily-available English translators for business transactions. I’ve lived in Brazil, Italy, France and Argentina and in none of these countries, or any other one I’ve visited, is English really a necessity.

I can’t get to the original thread, but I assume it’s got something to do with passing one’s English exams and still being unable to speak the language. In Brazil, in order to get into college you must pass an English part of the entrance exams (kinda like SATs). 80% of people who take the test speak no English whatsoever, and yet they still pass, largely because the standards are so low. shrug

Oh, and TOEFLs need to go. Seriously. Sitting at a chair for three hours during a fake Geology lesson and then correctly answering the difference between igneous and metamorphous rocks does not prove that you can speak English. It proves you have a long attention span.

4

I was suprised how often my name came up in the GQ thread, so I guess I should respond.

I should have expanded on my point a little better than I did. When I said that my students who had ten years of classroom English under their belts (jr. high, high school and college) were still stumped with “how are you doing?”, I didn’t mean that their knowledge of English was poor, but rather that what they’ve been taught under the heading of “English” is completely different from the English that you and I (as native speakers) use in our normal conversation.

In America, I’ve studied Spanish, French, German and Japanese under six different teachers, and in every case, the majority of the class time was spent practicing speaking and listening. Grammar drills and translations were to be done on our own as homework. Most Japanese public schools, however, use the grammar-translation method in the classroom, in which most of the the time is spent learning (downright obscure) points of grammar, most of the instruction is done in Japanese, and very little time (and even less of the final grade) is devoted to listening, pronunciation, or conversational skills. This makes a bigger difference than you may think. One thing that I realized after coming here and trying to teach my language while learning theirs was just how separate the skills of reading and speaking really are. Since all of my study had focused on face-to-face communication, it never dawned on me that doing all your study from a book could leave you versed enough in a language to read at a post-grad level, yet completely unable to use that knowledge in real-time. Many of my students were intelligent professionals who could read technical documents, but now had to struggle to learn the sounds and rhythms of spoken English, as well as get used to saying the same thing in different (but still correct) ways that aren’t mentioned in the textbooks and dictionaries (“how are you?”, “how are you doing?”, “how’s it going?”).

What I was teaching wasn’t English (eigo), but “English Conversation” (eikaiwa), where it’s generally assumed that the students have the grammar down solid, but need to learn how to communicate by listening to and speaking with a native. Even the low-level students knew passive voices and subjunctive cases, but situational exercises like having a phone conversation or ordering in a restaurant were a real challenge.