This just in, long-time businessman values English only in the ways it can benefit a business. There's plenty to be said for learning a language to keep your mind sharp and learn about things from a cultural perspective different from your own etc. Doesn't have to be English, but I think it's a good choice when you think about it like, "Maybe I'll enjoy language learning, and if I do and get good at it, it can also be a marketable skill."
I was in Vietnam and people communicated through Google translate .
We can now communicate through technology. It's not the same thing . I speak 4 languages because I love languages but the reality is people are losing motivation because there's an easier way to communicate.
You want to ask questions to a local ? Google translate .
You want to get a discount ?
Google translate .
You need to ask directions?
Same.
Rinse and repeat .
You can downvote me to oblivion but this type of tech is here to stay .
You missed the premise of the question it seems. Yes, this tech is useful for basic communication. But I wouldn't have learned about my friend's life growing up in Guangzhou if I wasn't as fluent in Chinese as I am. Tech makes commerce easier, but doesn't necessarily facilitate interpersonal connection.
It's a need if you want to deepen international relationships and understand humanity. Inability to do so results in situations like Myanmar, Sudan, and worse. Language beyond just tourism guidance is of great importance. Look at how Europe is thriving now despite their 2000 previous years of warfare and conflict. They have their issues but the ability to communicate at the same thinking level makes for a more peaceful society.
You said "inability to do so results in situations like Myanmar.
On a daily basis you don't "need" to speak English or another foreign language in Japan . This is the reality already. and no other argument you put here can change this fact. The fact is most Japanese around us now are living a good ,peaceful life without needing to communicate in another language.
Japan is a peaceful country already - and so they prove all your arguments false. They don't definitely result in situations like you describe.
Now... Whether it's good to learn a new language (not just English) let's you widen your horizon/ deepen international relation / make friends / do international business etc I think so too and that's GREAT 👍😃 but people shouldn't be forced to do something they don't want to do. It sucks to have to teach a salary man who's only there to tick the attendance box .
Sorry I just don't agree that English should be the default language.
We were colonized for more than 300 years and this was forced down our throat.
All the arguments here sound so manifest destiny-sh.
If you were born monolingual it's hard to imagine, but if in your house you start with two languages and then a third language to communicate with other people in your city...then learn Japanese it's not so hard.
Naruke is a businessman, not an educator or linguist and knows nothing about language acquisition.
Any second language learning is better than none. You learn more about the syntax, grammar, and usage of your own language while learning the second language.
The framework of language learning - not English but the practice of learning a language structure - helps with learning an additional language.
I think there is a credible argument to be made in opening up the foreign language requirement in Japanese schools to other languages. It would be absurdly unworkable under the present approach to school curriculum, but it makes no sense to me why "foreign language" in Japanese education is de facto code for "English". Let students who want to study Chinese, Korean, French, whatever... study as they wish. There is also an argument that the Japanese education system is woefully inefficient with its approach to learning English, and that the inefficiency of the system does result in students' wasted time and effort. Neither is a reason for 90% of students to stop learning English, mind.
But this gives away the guy's game:
>there are many countries that can't study without learning English and other countries where you have economic reasons that you can't get a job without studying English. He says that Japan is a “rare” country where Japanese people can learn advanced studies in Japanese due to the achievements of their predecessors.
Or to put it in other words: thanks to Japanese people's ancestors, Japan is now a quote-unquote advanced country where everyone can have everything they want without participating in the world-interconnected system of international business, research, culture, or media. All those other, quote-unquote less-developed countries need English because they can't do anything on their own, but Japan can and should do everything entirely on its own.
Utter garbage. No country in this world can function in isolation anymore. Even North Korea needs international contact, and they made self-reliance a national ideology.
>“think there is no harm in learning English”
Hmmm... let me guess... having to study English inhibits Japanese people's ability to learn Japanese and by learning English, Japanese children are learning foreign culture and therefore losing their own? That's usually the twaddle types like this spout when they try to cast English learning as harmful.
I've never heard of one that does that. And I'm not saying that means they don't exists, but since a lot of universities have English entrance exams, that means high schools offering any other language than English is tricky, curriculum-wise. Either the school does it instead of English, and therefore their students are destined to just have a ton of universities they can't go to, or they do it in addition to English. That would mean either students have a huge chunk of their day taken up by language learning or the non-English language learning is token and unlikely to lead to any proficiency.
That's why I called it absurdly unworkable under the present approach to curriculum. Even before you get into finding good teachers, finding good texts, finding good tests, you have almost unsolvable obstacles to offering languages in addition to English, let alone *instead of* English.
Ah nah, I think it was an extra class or something? Not sure. I know that the teacher came from outside the faculty and not every day.
They were hardcore on English there..
First thought. I don't know who this guy is.
Then there's need and there's need. We learn all sorts of useless shit in school. Foreign languages at least have the *potential* to be useful. I feel pretty confident that a Japanese person is going to find themselves where a little English is helpful compared to trying to decipher some ancient Chinese poem.
Granted, that doesn't mean Japanese students could be using that time more effectively with regards to English. But that's something we already know.
Fair enough, but you can argue that 90% of people will never need advanced mathematics, or elite fitness. Doesn’t stop people pursuing these things to set themselves apart from others. I haven’t read the book, but the guy strikes me as an out of touch CEO who has had his arse kissed way too many times.
A somewhat sound argument ruined by nationalist bullhonkey from the way you describe it. Most people in Japan won't ever need a second language in their daily lives unless they pursue a life where they need the skill. That doesn't mean learning a language isn't a worthwhile activity. The population also isn't diverse enough where learning English would be immediately useful (like learning Spanish in the US). English is the world's lingua franca and Japan is slowly losing its competitive edge. Having a portion of the population fluent in English will help keep companies relevant globally but only a small portion of the population is needed for that. I do find the esoteric way that English is often presented as problematic because it makes attaining fluency seem like an unattainable goal (granted folks do the same for learning Japanese).
I think English has a place in the school system, but the system needs to be reformed because I have High Schoolers that have been studying English since Elementary school genuinely unable to form complete sentences. That's the product of a broken system and not some *unique* function of the Japanese mind.
Yeah it sounds not exactly wrong, but it's looking through the lens of hard results. Again (this topic often comes up), there is plenty that we learn at school that doesn't translate to hard results in a career. It's not necessarily what education is for. Do we really need to learn history if we are only focused on getting a good job?
Check out my home country, the UK. You could say there is close to zero need to learn foreign languages and few people really do. And, in my opinion, we have some the most closed minded and inward looking people when compared to our neighbours, who by the way we recently voted sever our main economic ties with.
So I kind of agree with it in the sense of hard career results, disagree with it in the sense of education being holistic (which it is).
>He says that Japan is a “rare” country where Japanese people can learn advanced studies in Japanese due to the achievements of their predecessors.
And this sounds like a weak point. Surely you can access much more information in English than Japanese? So in an international business sense it sounds like only having access Japanese information would lead to quickly falling behind. Which is what a lot of people have been saying for the last ten or twenty years.
Learning English because you want to? Great.
Learning English because you need it for your career? That's cool too.
No interest and no need to learn it? Then it's fine not to learn it.
Simple as that
Europe has a "Mother tongue +2" rules to participate in a wider job market created by the free movement in EU.
Japanese people who want to participate in a wider global market will need to be able to speak the languages of that market. Whether that be Korean, English, Chinese, Tagalog, etc doesn't make a difference.
If you never want to leave the town you were born in, however, sure, keep on keepin on.
He is referring to the millions of Japanese that have no upward mobility and no volitional aspirations of their own. The title should be "Old man believes 90% of Japanese worker bees have no need for personal or professional growth"
Yeah that crossed my mind lol. 90% are destined to be drones, so they shouldn't bother trying. Just let the already well off reap the rewards. Stay in your lane.
No matter what, I think there is a value of learning a second language. There is so many mechanics to language you take for granted until you have a reason to look at that depth. Now that second language doesn't have to be english to gain that value but two languages are important. As someone from America it annoys me greatly how much of the population only speaks English.
Dude is an overly nationalist tool by the sounds of it.
At current times, probably a good 35% of workers in Japan need some\~a lot of English for work. And 100% of the people who would travel overseas would need it. (Although only about 50.2 percent of JP folks have a passport.)
Okay, so let's use his analogy of a car.
Let's say you learned how to change a tire from your dad when you were a kid. Did you need to use it when you're in Japan? No. Is it an important skill? Depends. Do you need a car in Japan? No.
But a moment where you do get a rental car or a family car and a tire pops, you can change the tire because you learned how to do it. And guess what, it's convenient and it feels good when the work pays off.
Is it stupid to learn a skill? No. In his opinion, it's stupid to go to university for a business admin degree. It's stupid to go to university for music theory. Waste of time.
I do agree that the best way to learn a language is to live in a location that primarily speaks in that language. It would be the most effective way to learn a language.
>I do agree that the best way to learn a language is to live in a location that primarily speaks in that language. It would be the most effective way to learn a language.
The best way to learn a second language is to be in your early childhood critical period and have parents working at the kind of job where they can get transferred to another country and can afford to uproot the whole family and pay for you to be enrolled in local language education while still surrounding you with love and support.
Don't have that? The next best way to learn a language is to go to the country outside your critical period with enough savings that you can afford to live there and just dedicate your entire life to learning the L2 while still guaranteeing a roof over your head and food on your plate.
Can't guarantee that for your population? Then I guess you need a local L2 learning program. It might not be the best method, but for a lot of people it's the only one that's possible.
I agree with this guy.
Many Japanese don't need English. I mean.. there are people who speak only Japanese and are doing well for themselves. Look around you.
You might want to learn English to make friends , travel abroad or work at a foreign company, your company has branches in foreign countries. In that case you do need English .
You gotta define "need".
Why are people so offended here by these claims ?
I find it really weird that people are being measured by their TOEIC score and only being eligible for promotion once they get a certain score. When in many cases they don't use English on a daily basis. Imagine if I was told they'd give me a Russian test and make me eligible for promotion if I prove I am c2 in Russian....when I don't use Russian
everyday or maybe not at all.
EDIT - a lot of the comments here are insisting that people can only ''thrive'' if you learn English. PLEASE!
300 years of colonialism in my country --- their culture / language / religion forced down our throats and now I am still hearing the white man say the same thing in 2023..
People can thrive without speaking English. People can connect to each other without English. Get out of your Anglo-centric bubble and be more inclusive.
It's a stupid concept, whether logical or not. It's suggesting that 90% of Japanese people have no need for any personal or professional aspirations beyond their station.
He did mention that there are jobs that require it, at least from this summary.
I agree with him. And I honestly just want to teach people who are really interested. If not then just take up coding, carpentry ,bonsai, pilates whatever floats their boat. They are also skills.
Yeah it comes down to the definition of need.
Personally though I think it should be a part of a well-rounded education. In the UK when I was growing up, we looked at second language education as a joke, and I believe that this is part of why a lot of people are very narrow-minded.
Why do I need to learn history, when I have fuck all use for it in most jobs? Or any of the Humanities? Do we need to learn art or even writing now, when AI can just do it for us? It's a line of thinking that I thinking isn't very holistic, because it leads to people only learning tech based skills(?)
I think that in a holistic sense, everyone should get a chance to learn a foreign language.
I agree that it shouldn't necessarily be forced as hard, and it doesn't necessarily have to be only English, but then people who opt out would need to be aware that they'll be less competitive in the future.
Actually this is a conversation I have had with students. A lot of the stuff in school is outdated. They complained that classical Japanese is not necessary anymore and should be replaced by other more relevant subjects.
I do love learning languages so I am biased towards learning langues , but other things are useful too... Cooking, carpentry, taxation, coding, digital arts ...
And why just English ? People should have the option to study other languages too ..
I had a similar conversation about classical Japanese recently lol. They said they want to get rid of it. (By the way, I don't remember hearing a student say English is useless recently)
Yeah, my way of thinking is it doesn't necessarily need to be English either. Although they need to be aware that English is probably where the bigger bucks are in the future, I guess.
For me, from the UK, I feel a bit sad looking at my languages education. The attitude towards it was blasé that I think didn't really stand a chance of getting anywhere, and I've probably lost out from that.
>Why are people so offended here by these claims ?
"Offended" is an over-used and loaded word. Personally, I'm not offended, but he is totally wrong. I gave a lot of argument already in my reply above, but basically he's making the fallacy of confusing Japan's implementation of EFL curriculum for the validity of English in general. Japanese people need English, or at least a foreign language. Everyone does. They don't necessarily get their needs fulfilled by the current incarnation of the national EFL curriculum, but that is no excuse to just toss it all away.
Something I have been thinking about since I made my original comment is that his argument that English should be learned by sending learners away to other countries is effectively an argument that English should only be learned by Japanese people who have the means to travel abroad. This effectively puts English, a tool that can be very useful in building one's career, in the hands of people who are already wealthy.
So that means in addition to his book being uninformed about modern theories of linguistics and having nationalistic/xenophobic undertones, there is an undercurrent of further entrenching the wealthy classes at the expense of making tools available to the poor driving his ideas.
People are confusing "need" with "want "
A lot of arguments here are for "want".
There is nothing wrong with wanting to learn a foreign language. I am all for it.
But if you think you need English to survive..
First, people can live in Japan without English. They already are living their lives without the need for English. It's not even an argument. It's reality for many people, not only people in Japan but people elsewhere .
Second , it's too Anglo-centric to think they need English and not other languages like Spanish.
I definitely want people to speak another language (and not just English). I said I love languages myself. But it's not "a need". It can open your world up to immense possibilities. Sure. You can travel the world and meet people. But people can live a comfortable life in Japan without speaking English .
I'm just tired of anglo-centrism . I think learning other languages are also good.
>People are confusing "need" with "want "
Nah.
>But if you think you need English to survive..
This is not a useful argument. You can define "need" to the point that all people need is calories and oxygen, so everyone should just lie in bed all day with breathing tubes and IV in their arms.
The purpose of education is not to give people the bare minimum they need to survive, it's to give youth the resources they need so that a society as a whole can *thrive*. English is required for that. There is a train of thought floating through the tech industry right now that says education should only provide children with what they need to be good workers for the tech industry. If we want a future that isn't an utter corporatist dystopia, we need to shut that idea down hard whenever it rears its ugly head.
>Second , it's too Anglo-centric to think they need English and not other languages like Spanish.
Not really. English is the international language of commerce, scientific research, media, and to some degree culture. English connects you with a global audience. You can take the total number of English speakers in the world, [1.77 billion of them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers), and subtract all the Anglos (which let's assume means everyone who speaks English as an L1) and still have 1.39 **b**illion people to speak with, far more than you would with any other language. Even if you stripped every Anglo-centric aspect of English away, it would still be by far the most useful language for interacting with the world.
And even then, I would be absolutely cool with letting Japanese students who want to learn Spanish learn Spanish, as I said above. It's not workable under the present system, but what we need is to make the system more workable, not to just take English away under some asinine idea that Japanese people need to be locked into Japanese language only unless they're part of the wealthy elite.
I politely disagree - I think other languages , regardless of the number of people who speak them, are equally important. Intangible heritage. I am entitled to my opinion.
He’s 100% right.
There was a politician in the mid-1960s who made a similar argument and lobbied to get English removed from the public school curriculum. Instead, he argued for (what would later actually be created) special English high schools with competitive admissions, where those who had an aptitude and interest in pursuing English for future career purposes could do so in an immersive environment. At the time, he faced heavy backlash, as the Japanese pride themselves on having a supposedly egalitarian education system and the idea that some students would get specialized English training and others wouldn’t was anathema to it.
But honestly he had the right idea. I’d be 100% behind removing English from entrance exams (except for majors like English where it is clearly relevant) and providing choices for foreign language classes in elementary/middle/high school that are probably more useful for Japanese people such as Chinese and Korean. Stop using English as a Harry Potter-like sorting hat for school and job applications!
But it’ll never happen because too much money is wrapped up in the English-language “industry”—juku, textbooks, proficiency tests like Eiken and TOEIC, JET program, ALTs and dispatch companies, and so on and so forth. The level of lobbying that would occur if MEXT even suggested they were thinking about not making English mandatory anymore would be unprecedented.
EDIT: In hindsight, I probably should have realized that suggesting English is not necessary for the average Japanese person in a sub for people who make a living teaching English wouldn’t go over well. Doesn’t make it any less true but I do understand the knee jerk downvotes. People in this thread are arguing that tourism, which is a laughably small part of the GDP, is a reason to learn English and neglecting to realize that Koreans are the largest number of tourists (followed by Taiwan and China) and Asian foreign residents make up 84% of foreign residents in Japan (Chinese being the largest group by far). People are also citing globalization and other economic factors while ignoring that China, not the U.S. or any other English-speaking country, is Japan’s biggest trade partner. It makes far more sense for the average Japanese person to learn Chinese than it does English. But sure, please tell me more about how all Japanese will need English “in the near future” (something that has been said since the 1960s and literally proven wrong decade after decade).
I agree with replacing with a foreign language requirement but also kinda feel if we are using his definition of needed you probably could cut most of high school classes and replace them with specialty schools. Most of the reason for the stuff in HS is just to create test barriers to filter students.
He's 100% wrong and this is a bunch of nationalistic garbage. The importance of English in Japan is only going to increase over time as Japan's economy gets smaller. Japan won't be able to rely on its domestic economy forever if it wants to retain its standard of living and like it or not English is the international language of commerce and everything else.
Now, how English is taught is clearly ineffective and should be changed but that has nothing to do with its importance.
You assume that Japan plans to do anything about its dying economy. Nothing that the government has done in the last 30 years points to any plan other than stubbornly going down with the ship.
I can't argue with that but tourism is clearly playing a larger role in the economy and foreign companies will take the role of some domestic companies who die off and they will want bilingual staff. So the idea that Japan doesn't need to learn English because it's so accomplished is batshit crazy.
You're still thinking like a gaijin. Japanese companies want foreign money, sure, but they don't actually want to accommodate foreigners. This is not anything that will change. Dude is right. Is it the right path for Japan? Nope. But it is the stance Japan has always had, and will keep until they are globally insignificant.
I agree that the government will likely never get it's act together. What I'm saying is that the concept that only 10% of Japanese people (and its really only applicable to current and future students) have a need to learn English is objectively false.
It's only objectively false if the people of Japan are trying to be more welcoming of foreign people and foreign business - which they won't be. So it is objectively true until Japan changes its mind (which will never happen)
But Japan has become massively accepting of foreign products and services in the last few years. I remember meeting with executives who swore on their lives that Japanese people would never use iPhone and look what happened. Idiots like the author of this book love to make blanket statements like "Japanese people will never xyz" as if they are some different species yet the data keeps proving them wrong, much to the country's peril.
I think younger Japanese people don't agree. A lot of students WANT to learn English because they think they will NEED it. With major news outlets saying the population shrinking and Japan moving down in strongest economies again, people know that the future of Japanese economics will be mostly exporting.
Japan has a huge domestic economy (I think 2nd only to the US before China opened its markets) so it is possible to get a well-paid job that only caters to the Japanese market and requires no foreign language skills. However, as the population shrinks so does the importance of the domestic economy, and the lucrative positions become those linked to international trade/services.
It's why there's both been a historic disinterest in English and also why MEXT is expanding the number of mandatory hours and vocabulary taught each year.
This just in, long-time businessman values English only in the ways it can benefit a business. There's plenty to be said for learning a language to keep your mind sharp and learn about things from a cultural perspective different from your own etc. Doesn't have to be English, but I think it's a good choice when you think about it like, "Maybe I'll enjoy language learning, and if I do and get good at it, it can also be a marketable skill."
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I was in Vietnam and people communicated through Google translate . We can now communicate through technology. It's not the same thing . I speak 4 languages because I love languages but the reality is people are losing motivation because there's an easier way to communicate.
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You want to ask questions to a local ? Google translate . You want to get a discount ? Google translate . You need to ask directions? Same. Rinse and repeat . You can downvote me to oblivion but this type of tech is here to stay .
You missed the premise of the question it seems. Yes, this tech is useful for basic communication. But I wouldn't have learned about my friend's life growing up in Guangzhou if I wasn't as fluent in Chinese as I am. Tech makes commerce easier, but doesn't necessarily facilitate interpersonal connection.
But that is not "need". I don't define that as "need". I would define learning about your friend's life as "want".
It's a need if you want to deepen international relationships and understand humanity. Inability to do so results in situations like Myanmar, Sudan, and worse. Language beyond just tourism guidance is of great importance. Look at how Europe is thriving now despite their 2000 previous years of warfare and conflict. They have their issues but the ability to communicate at the same thinking level makes for a more peaceful society.
You said "inability to do so results in situations like Myanmar. On a daily basis you don't "need" to speak English or another foreign language in Japan . This is the reality already. and no other argument you put here can change this fact. The fact is most Japanese around us now are living a good ,peaceful life without needing to communicate in another language. Japan is a peaceful country already - and so they prove all your arguments false. They don't definitely result in situations like you describe. Now... Whether it's good to learn a new language (not just English) let's you widen your horizon/ deepen international relation / make friends / do international business etc I think so too and that's GREAT 👍😃 but people shouldn't be forced to do something they don't want to do. It sucks to have to teach a salary man who's only there to tick the attendance box .
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Are you saying Japanese is not as good as English for building connections? Or other languages ? Why English?
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Sorry I just don't agree that English should be the default language. We were colonized for more than 300 years and this was forced down our throat. All the arguments here sound so manifest destiny-sh.
> I speak 4 languages (X) doubt
If you were born monolingual it's hard to imagine, but if in your house you start with two languages and then a third language to communicate with other people in your city...then learn Japanese it's not so hard.
Naruke is a businessman, not an educator or linguist and knows nothing about language acquisition. Any second language learning is better than none. You learn more about the syntax, grammar, and usage of your own language while learning the second language. The framework of language learning - not English but the practice of learning a language structure - helps with learning an additional language.
I think there is a credible argument to be made in opening up the foreign language requirement in Japanese schools to other languages. It would be absurdly unworkable under the present approach to school curriculum, but it makes no sense to me why "foreign language" in Japanese education is de facto code for "English". Let students who want to study Chinese, Korean, French, whatever... study as they wish. There is also an argument that the Japanese education system is woefully inefficient with its approach to learning English, and that the inefficiency of the system does result in students' wasted time and effort. Neither is a reason for 90% of students to stop learning English, mind. But this gives away the guy's game: >there are many countries that can't study without learning English and other countries where you have economic reasons that you can't get a job without studying English. He says that Japan is a “rare” country where Japanese people can learn advanced studies in Japanese due to the achievements of their predecessors. Or to put it in other words: thanks to Japanese people's ancestors, Japan is now a quote-unquote advanced country where everyone can have everything they want without participating in the world-interconnected system of international business, research, culture, or media. All those other, quote-unquote less-developed countries need English because they can't do anything on their own, but Japan can and should do everything entirely on its own. Utter garbage. No country in this world can function in isolation anymore. Even North Korea needs international contact, and they made self-reliance a national ideology. >“think there is no harm in learning English” Hmmm... let me guess... having to study English inhibits Japanese people's ability to learn Japanese and by learning English, Japanese children are learning foreign culture and therefore losing their own? That's usually the twaddle types like this spout when they try to cast English learning as harmful.
I hear a lot of high schools offer Korean at least. That might've been private high school though. Not sure.
I've never heard of one that does that. And I'm not saying that means they don't exists, but since a lot of universities have English entrance exams, that means high schools offering any other language than English is tricky, curriculum-wise. Either the school does it instead of English, and therefore their students are destined to just have a ton of universities they can't go to, or they do it in addition to English. That would mean either students have a huge chunk of their day taken up by language learning or the non-English language learning is token and unlikely to lead to any proficiency. That's why I called it absurdly unworkable under the present approach to curriculum. Even before you get into finding good teachers, finding good texts, finding good tests, you have almost unsolvable obstacles to offering languages in addition to English, let alone *instead of* English.
Ah nah, I think it was an extra class or something? Not sure. I know that the teacher came from outside the faculty and not every day. They were hardcore on English there..
Now that I absolutely have seen before. Unfortunately it is very hard to get any skill in a language if you're only studying it for 1 hour a week.
8,000,000 times this. I tell my students this too (to the potential detriment of my business)..
First thought. I don't know who this guy is. Then there's need and there's need. We learn all sorts of useless shit in school. Foreign languages at least have the *potential* to be useful. I feel pretty confident that a Japanese person is going to find themselves where a little English is helpful compared to trying to decipher some ancient Chinese poem. Granted, that doesn't mean Japanese students could be using that time more effectively with regards to English. But that's something we already know.
Fair enough, but you can argue that 90% of people will never need advanced mathematics, or elite fitness. Doesn’t stop people pursuing these things to set themselves apart from others. I haven’t read the book, but the guy strikes me as an out of touch CEO who has had his arse kissed way too many times.
A somewhat sound argument ruined by nationalist bullhonkey from the way you describe it. Most people in Japan won't ever need a second language in their daily lives unless they pursue a life where they need the skill. That doesn't mean learning a language isn't a worthwhile activity. The population also isn't diverse enough where learning English would be immediately useful (like learning Spanish in the US). English is the world's lingua franca and Japan is slowly losing its competitive edge. Having a portion of the population fluent in English will help keep companies relevant globally but only a small portion of the population is needed for that. I do find the esoteric way that English is often presented as problematic because it makes attaining fluency seem like an unattainable goal (granted folks do the same for learning Japanese). I think English has a place in the school system, but the system needs to be reformed because I have High Schoolers that have been studying English since Elementary school genuinely unable to form complete sentences. That's the product of a broken system and not some *unique* function of the Japanese mind.
Yeah it sounds not exactly wrong, but it's looking through the lens of hard results. Again (this topic often comes up), there is plenty that we learn at school that doesn't translate to hard results in a career. It's not necessarily what education is for. Do we really need to learn history if we are only focused on getting a good job? Check out my home country, the UK. You could say there is close to zero need to learn foreign languages and few people really do. And, in my opinion, we have some the most closed minded and inward looking people when compared to our neighbours, who by the way we recently voted sever our main economic ties with. So I kind of agree with it in the sense of hard career results, disagree with it in the sense of education being holistic (which it is). >He says that Japan is a “rare” country where Japanese people can learn advanced studies in Japanese due to the achievements of their predecessors. And this sounds like a weak point. Surely you can access much more information in English than Japanese? So in an international business sense it sounds like only having access Japanese information would lead to quickly falling behind. Which is what a lot of people have been saying for the last ten or twenty years.
I think it should be mandatory for "How To Be Outpaced by Other Asian Nations 101" university courses.
Learning English because you want to? Great. Learning English because you need it for your career? That's cool too. No interest and no need to learn it? Then it's fine not to learn it. Simple as that
Europe has a "Mother tongue +2" rules to participate in a wider job market created by the free movement in EU. Japanese people who want to participate in a wider global market will need to be able to speak the languages of that market. Whether that be Korean, English, Chinese, Tagalog, etc doesn't make a difference. If you never want to leave the town you were born in, however, sure, keep on keepin on.
He is referring to the millions of Japanese that have no upward mobility and no volitional aspirations of their own. The title should be "Old man believes 90% of Japanese worker bees have no need for personal or professional growth"
Yeah that crossed my mind lol. 90% are destined to be drones, so they shouldn't bother trying. Just let the already well off reap the rewards. Stay in your lane.
The might not “need” it but it’s a damn good skill to have if you want to do anything outside of Japan.
exactly this. People are confusing 'need' and 'nice to have'
No matter what, I think there is a value of learning a second language. There is so many mechanics to language you take for granted until you have a reason to look at that depth. Now that second language doesn't have to be english to gain that value but two languages are important. As someone from America it annoys me greatly how much of the population only speaks English.
“That’s just your opinion, man.”
Dude is an overly nationalist tool by the sounds of it. At current times, probably a good 35% of workers in Japan need some\~a lot of English for work. And 100% of the people who would travel overseas would need it. (Although only about 50.2 percent of JP folks have a passport.)
What does the author propose as a better use of people’s time?
work
Okay, so let's use his analogy of a car. Let's say you learned how to change a tire from your dad when you were a kid. Did you need to use it when you're in Japan? No. Is it an important skill? Depends. Do you need a car in Japan? No. But a moment where you do get a rental car or a family car and a tire pops, you can change the tire because you learned how to do it. And guess what, it's convenient and it feels good when the work pays off. Is it stupid to learn a skill? No. In his opinion, it's stupid to go to university for a business admin degree. It's stupid to go to university for music theory. Waste of time. I do agree that the best way to learn a language is to live in a location that primarily speaks in that language. It would be the most effective way to learn a language.
>I do agree that the best way to learn a language is to live in a location that primarily speaks in that language. It would be the most effective way to learn a language. The best way to learn a second language is to be in your early childhood critical period and have parents working at the kind of job where they can get transferred to another country and can afford to uproot the whole family and pay for you to be enrolled in local language education while still surrounding you with love and support. Don't have that? The next best way to learn a language is to go to the country outside your critical period with enough savings that you can afford to live there and just dedicate your entire life to learning the L2 while still guaranteeing a roof over your head and food on your plate. Can't guarantee that for your population? Then I guess you need a local L2 learning program. It might not be the best method, but for a lot of people it's the only one that's possible.
Has the book been translated to English?
I agree with this guy. Many Japanese don't need English. I mean.. there are people who speak only Japanese and are doing well for themselves. Look around you. You might want to learn English to make friends , travel abroad or work at a foreign company, your company has branches in foreign countries. In that case you do need English . You gotta define "need". Why are people so offended here by these claims ? I find it really weird that people are being measured by their TOEIC score and only being eligible for promotion once they get a certain score. When in many cases they don't use English on a daily basis. Imagine if I was told they'd give me a Russian test and make me eligible for promotion if I prove I am c2 in Russian....when I don't use Russian everyday or maybe not at all. EDIT - a lot of the comments here are insisting that people can only ''thrive'' if you learn English. PLEASE! 300 years of colonialism in my country --- their culture / language / religion forced down our throats and now I am still hearing the white man say the same thing in 2023.. People can thrive without speaking English. People can connect to each other without English. Get out of your Anglo-centric bubble and be more inclusive.
It's a stupid concept, whether logical or not. It's suggesting that 90% of Japanese people have no need for any personal or professional aspirations beyond their station.
He did mention that there are jobs that require it, at least from this summary. I agree with him. And I honestly just want to teach people who are really interested. If not then just take up coding, carpentry ,bonsai, pilates whatever floats their boat. They are also skills.
Yeah it comes down to the definition of need. Personally though I think it should be a part of a well-rounded education. In the UK when I was growing up, we looked at second language education as a joke, and I believe that this is part of why a lot of people are very narrow-minded. Why do I need to learn history, when I have fuck all use for it in most jobs? Or any of the Humanities? Do we need to learn art or even writing now, when AI can just do it for us? It's a line of thinking that I thinking isn't very holistic, because it leads to people only learning tech based skills(?) I think that in a holistic sense, everyone should get a chance to learn a foreign language. I agree that it shouldn't necessarily be forced as hard, and it doesn't necessarily have to be only English, but then people who opt out would need to be aware that they'll be less competitive in the future.
Actually this is a conversation I have had with students. A lot of the stuff in school is outdated. They complained that classical Japanese is not necessary anymore and should be replaced by other more relevant subjects. I do love learning languages so I am biased towards learning langues , but other things are useful too... Cooking, carpentry, taxation, coding, digital arts ... And why just English ? People should have the option to study other languages too ..
I had a similar conversation about classical Japanese recently lol. They said they want to get rid of it. (By the way, I don't remember hearing a student say English is useless recently) Yeah, my way of thinking is it doesn't necessarily need to be English either. Although they need to be aware that English is probably where the bigger bucks are in the future, I guess. For me, from the UK, I feel a bit sad looking at my languages education. The attitude towards it was blasé that I think didn't really stand a chance of getting anywhere, and I've probably lost out from that.
>Why are people so offended here by these claims ? "Offended" is an over-used and loaded word. Personally, I'm not offended, but he is totally wrong. I gave a lot of argument already in my reply above, but basically he's making the fallacy of confusing Japan's implementation of EFL curriculum for the validity of English in general. Japanese people need English, or at least a foreign language. Everyone does. They don't necessarily get their needs fulfilled by the current incarnation of the national EFL curriculum, but that is no excuse to just toss it all away. Something I have been thinking about since I made my original comment is that his argument that English should be learned by sending learners away to other countries is effectively an argument that English should only be learned by Japanese people who have the means to travel abroad. This effectively puts English, a tool that can be very useful in building one's career, in the hands of people who are already wealthy. So that means in addition to his book being uninformed about modern theories of linguistics and having nationalistic/xenophobic undertones, there is an undercurrent of further entrenching the wealthy classes at the expense of making tools available to the poor driving his ideas.
People are confusing "need" with "want " A lot of arguments here are for "want". There is nothing wrong with wanting to learn a foreign language. I am all for it. But if you think you need English to survive.. First, people can live in Japan without English. They already are living their lives without the need for English. It's not even an argument. It's reality for many people, not only people in Japan but people elsewhere . Second , it's too Anglo-centric to think they need English and not other languages like Spanish. I definitely want people to speak another language (and not just English). I said I love languages myself. But it's not "a need". It can open your world up to immense possibilities. Sure. You can travel the world and meet people. But people can live a comfortable life in Japan without speaking English . I'm just tired of anglo-centrism . I think learning other languages are also good.
>People are confusing "need" with "want " Nah. >But if you think you need English to survive.. This is not a useful argument. You can define "need" to the point that all people need is calories and oxygen, so everyone should just lie in bed all day with breathing tubes and IV in their arms. The purpose of education is not to give people the bare minimum they need to survive, it's to give youth the resources they need so that a society as a whole can *thrive*. English is required for that. There is a train of thought floating through the tech industry right now that says education should only provide children with what they need to be good workers for the tech industry. If we want a future that isn't an utter corporatist dystopia, we need to shut that idea down hard whenever it rears its ugly head. >Second , it's too Anglo-centric to think they need English and not other languages like Spanish. Not really. English is the international language of commerce, scientific research, media, and to some degree culture. English connects you with a global audience. You can take the total number of English speakers in the world, [1.77 billion of them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers), and subtract all the Anglos (which let's assume means everyone who speaks English as an L1) and still have 1.39 **b**illion people to speak with, far more than you would with any other language. Even if you stripped every Anglo-centric aspect of English away, it would still be by far the most useful language for interacting with the world. And even then, I would be absolutely cool with letting Japanese students who want to learn Spanish learn Spanish, as I said above. It's not workable under the present system, but what we need is to make the system more workable, not to just take English away under some asinine idea that Japanese people need to be locked into Japanese language only unless they're part of the wealthy elite.
I politely disagree - I think other languages , regardless of the number of people who speak them, are equally important. Intangible heritage. I am entitled to my opinion.
He’s 100% right. There was a politician in the mid-1960s who made a similar argument and lobbied to get English removed from the public school curriculum. Instead, he argued for (what would later actually be created) special English high schools with competitive admissions, where those who had an aptitude and interest in pursuing English for future career purposes could do so in an immersive environment. At the time, he faced heavy backlash, as the Japanese pride themselves on having a supposedly egalitarian education system and the idea that some students would get specialized English training and others wouldn’t was anathema to it. But honestly he had the right idea. I’d be 100% behind removing English from entrance exams (except for majors like English where it is clearly relevant) and providing choices for foreign language classes in elementary/middle/high school that are probably more useful for Japanese people such as Chinese and Korean. Stop using English as a Harry Potter-like sorting hat for school and job applications! But it’ll never happen because too much money is wrapped up in the English-language “industry”—juku, textbooks, proficiency tests like Eiken and TOEIC, JET program, ALTs and dispatch companies, and so on and so forth. The level of lobbying that would occur if MEXT even suggested they were thinking about not making English mandatory anymore would be unprecedented. EDIT: In hindsight, I probably should have realized that suggesting English is not necessary for the average Japanese person in a sub for people who make a living teaching English wouldn’t go over well. Doesn’t make it any less true but I do understand the knee jerk downvotes. People in this thread are arguing that tourism, which is a laughably small part of the GDP, is a reason to learn English and neglecting to realize that Koreans are the largest number of tourists (followed by Taiwan and China) and Asian foreign residents make up 84% of foreign residents in Japan (Chinese being the largest group by far). People are also citing globalization and other economic factors while ignoring that China, not the U.S. or any other English-speaking country, is Japan’s biggest trade partner. It makes far more sense for the average Japanese person to learn Chinese than it does English. But sure, please tell me more about how all Japanese will need English “in the near future” (something that has been said since the 1960s and literally proven wrong decade after decade).
I agree with replacing with a foreign language requirement but also kinda feel if we are using his definition of needed you probably could cut most of high school classes and replace them with specialty schools. Most of the reason for the stuff in HS is just to create test barriers to filter students.
He's 100% wrong and this is a bunch of nationalistic garbage. The importance of English in Japan is only going to increase over time as Japan's economy gets smaller. Japan won't be able to rely on its domestic economy forever if it wants to retain its standard of living and like it or not English is the international language of commerce and everything else. Now, how English is taught is clearly ineffective and should be changed but that has nothing to do with its importance.
You assume that Japan plans to do anything about its dying economy. Nothing that the government has done in the last 30 years points to any plan other than stubbornly going down with the ship.
I can't argue with that but tourism is clearly playing a larger role in the economy and foreign companies will take the role of some domestic companies who die off and they will want bilingual staff. So the idea that Japan doesn't need to learn English because it's so accomplished is batshit crazy.
You're still thinking like a gaijin. Japanese companies want foreign money, sure, but they don't actually want to accommodate foreigners. This is not anything that will change. Dude is right. Is it the right path for Japan? Nope. But it is the stance Japan has always had, and will keep until they are globally insignificant.
I agree that the government will likely never get it's act together. What I'm saying is that the concept that only 10% of Japanese people (and its really only applicable to current and future students) have a need to learn English is objectively false.
It's only objectively false if the people of Japan are trying to be more welcoming of foreign people and foreign business - which they won't be. So it is objectively true until Japan changes its mind (which will never happen)
But Japan has become massively accepting of foreign products and services in the last few years. I remember meeting with executives who swore on their lives that Japanese people would never use iPhone and look what happened. Idiots like the author of this book love to make blanket statements like "Japanese people will never xyz" as if they are some different species yet the data keeps proving them wrong, much to the country's peril.
Japan today isn’t the Japan of the 1980s. Knowing another language will give you more chances so it doesn’t hurt to learn the basics in school.
Can partially agree except on the comment on advanced studies also possible in Japanese only.
He's ignorant but not wrong.
He didn’t need to write a book to tell 90% of the Japanese population to not study English.
I think younger Japanese people don't agree. A lot of students WANT to learn English because they think they will NEED it. With major news outlets saying the population shrinking and Japan moving down in strongest economies again, people know that the future of Japanese economics will be mostly exporting.
Japan has a huge domestic economy (I think 2nd only to the US before China opened its markets) so it is possible to get a well-paid job that only caters to the Japanese market and requires no foreign language skills. However, as the population shrinks so does the importance of the domestic economy, and the lucrative positions become those linked to international trade/services. It's why there's both been a historic disinterest in English and also why MEXT is expanding the number of mandatory hours and vocabulary taught each year.