Ah, your point about English has got to be very important, it's significant that Japan is the world's worst at teaching English as a second language, and that has to be fatal for this domain.
Indeed, Japan consistently ranks dead last in terms of English proficiency among OECD countries. Heck, it’s even last among Asian economies including developing ones.
There’s hardly any i18n for apps/services/portals implemented in Japan barring very few exceptions with minimum and rough execution. The few times I tried to hire Japanese engineering talent, I was shocked by the extreme lack of English aptitude for those out of CS curriculums and we are talking about top universities such as Tokyo University (Todai) and other prestigious institutes of technology. I can’t help but think that Japan will sink deeper into mediocrity if they don’t fix their language problem.
In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks. Japan recognizes the problem, but doesn't know what to do about it. Basically, English education has yet to succeed. [1][2]
This is the thing about Japan. They can make these moves that are incredibly progressive and ambitious -- visionary even, yet, they really have no idea how to go about doing it.
As it stands, they don't have enough teachers that can program, so teachers from other subjects will be filling in picking up the material from textbooks as they go along.
From what I've witnessed from my school years, I guarantee you the smarter students will be correcting their teachers and making a mockery of them. It happens whenever there is an English native speaker in a Japanese English class (guilty as charged), and it will happen whenever there is a real programmer in one of these "programming" classes -- at least for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, English ability in Japan is really limited overall. My mom (who's a Japanese national) was surprised/disappointed at my cousins' English ability after taking six years of English classes (the norm, I think).
From what I understand, part of it is just English being vastly different from Japanese, and the other part is the Japanese school system being really terrible at language teaching.
He also just described English education in Japan. Students just complete problems, and even those that do well never learn to speak English just through these classes.
How about their excellence at using English, by the way? Their attention to detail when it comes to using other languages? I hope you realize how wrong it is to make blanket statements. "
As crazy as it sounds, the horrible English is because their fanatic adherence to pedagogical grammar and vocabulary cramming along with the fact that English's utility is mainly for university entrance exams. If you interact with any Japanese person from an elite university they will surprise you with their knowledge of English despite being unable to fluently communicate with English.
It is more an issue of conservatism than this so-called "culture of excellence".
The level of English in Japan is very low generally. Among engineers it is higher but mainly for reading and writing, and even then it's generally not fluency or anywhere near good enough to read or write comments on HN and (probably) not attract downvotes, more of the level to be able to get just enough from technical documentation so that you can get on with your day.
That's not true for all but the vast majority. I don't mean any of that as a slight - my Japanese is terrible, you wouldn't find me on whatever Japan's version of HN is. (That the level is so low is perhaps a valid criticism of the education system or society in general but certainly not valid against any individual).
Source: I'm a partner of an East Asian folkperson, living in Japan, giving a spousal perspective whilst reading a site in my native language. I save struggling with a foreign language for study and finding the login button on Japanese websites (harder than it should be[1]), I can understand why a Japanese engineer would be doing similar.
Japanese is a terrible language. I tried speaking it for a while, but I can just get my ideas across so much more easily in English. It's just easier. This must be because Japanese is terrible.
That seems to be the basic reasoning at work here.
It seems that he is serious. You knew that already. Perhaps you disagree? Perhaps you can present your own findings and contribute to the discussion?
Based on my own fairly limited experience in Japan, English as learned in school doesn't seem to translate (a ha ha) into effective English conversation. It seems that an academic rigor is taught (no bad thing, of course) but practical conversation skills are neglected.
"Englishnization" (which itself sounds like it was made up by a non-native speaker) is a nice thought, but it's going to be downright impossible to correct years of failures on the part of the Japanese educational system. In fact, unofficial reports from employees suggest that it has been a failure - people are still using Japanese pretty much everywhere.
You are correct that almost everybody is familiar with English, but that's not speaking it, let alone being fluent. To a degree, English already is part of the Japanese culture and language. But it's a different English. Some of it is compatible, but native speakers are the one's graciously degrading (to use a web programming term) to meet their level, and not them meeting you at a level you're accustomed to speaking.
Of course general familiarity is not a bad thing but is to be expected when they're taking classes everyday. The goal is for fluency, competency, and the capacity to be competitive at a global level. They're far from it, and that is why the system has yet to succeed.
In Japan people learn English as a part of mandatory public education without targetting any practical use, and many companies mandate good exam score or certificate about English, even if they don't need English skills on the job.
This leaves Japanese in a strange parallel world of learning English, where the goal is scoring good and getting a nice job, not communicating with others.
Hence people without real incentive are forced to take globally standard English tests such as TOEFL or TOEIC, resulting in that low average score.
I think a big big part of this is that English is hard and Japan is just large enough that they get away with doing everything in Japanese (compared to something like.. Estonia). They have their own Physics and Engineering journals, their own textbooks on everything, their own programming world. In the tech sphere they basically don't really have to learn English at all to be successful and so they end up being incredibly disconnected from the rest of the world. They put in a lot of resources in getting people to learn English and yet it doesn't seem to pay off (I don't know what the solution is)
The horrible web design to me can only be partly explained by that though. As a people with an special eye to detail and design this is simply incomprehensible to me...
Your comments on schools and Japanese strike me as extremely ironic. As someone who has been sitting in a Japanese school for the better part of a year, I'll take the average American school, any day, any time. Japanese teachers' first love is unquestioning obedience. Their second love is robotic memorization. Creative, effective education is somewhere around the bottom of the priority list.
(I realize that your broader point is that learning the language made you able to learn, but it's still situationally ironic. Also, from the parent comment, I suspect that you believe that "schools in the US" are somehow inherently worse than other places.)
Yeah, Japanese people are shockingly bad at English. The idea is for Japanese users that CAN read English to provide short summaries of interesting English articles. While the Japanese media is pretty open and liberal, there are still some topics of (possible)importance that never make it into the headlines there. The US media isn't necessarily great, but if you can read English, you have access to A LOT of info to form your own opinion.
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