If it’s like the situation in Korea, I imagine the Japanese instructors of English are using 90% Japanese in the classroom, and they’re teaching via lecture, rote memorization, choral repetition, unnatural conversational situations, and all the other useless teaching strategies that guarantee success on stupid multiple-choice college-entrance exams but not in real-world English-speaking situations. Until the basic emphasis changes to a more realistic approach to language education, we can expect more of the same
I finally found the 2024 English Proficiency Index and see that France (personally relevant to me) is #49, South Korea is #50, and Japan is indeed #92.
Now that I see the difference in ranking between South Korea and Japan, though, I have to wonder whether something else is going on. I’ll need to research how the EPI works. If they’re counting only performance on standardized tests, that paves the way for apples-to-oranges comparisons because every country has its own standardized tests (e.g., the CSAT English section in Korea, etc.) Maybe Japan has gone all-in with AI robots as English instructors. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about Japan, really. Come to think of it, this article means little to nothing since it didn’t report how the rankings were arrived at. What makes the EPI official and authoritative?
(As for why the French are ranked so low despite their reputation for snobbily speaking in English when they hear tourists attempt to speak in French… one of my French buddies assures me that, outside of Paris and other big cities, most French people generally let their English skills atrophy, and they’re too lazy to stay current.)
Ah—the main article does say this:
The rankings are based on data collected from online tests involving 2.1 million people in places where English is not the native language.
The phrase “online tests involving 2.1 million people” is still so vague as to be meaningless. The same online tests? If it’s different tests, we’re back to the apples-and-oranges problem. Whose tests? Can we see some sample questions? The journalist who wrote this piece really didn’t provide any crucial information.
Personal note: I was lucky enough to go through a pretty good intensive-Korean program at Korea University in 2002. Ten weeks, four hours a day in class, 100% in Korean (Level 4), 5 hours of daily homework (for me, anyway, because I was way behind my Japanese and Chinese classmates), and at the end, I only got a C, but my mother spoke to me in Korean and was shocked at how much I’d improved. Good language education is out there, and the intensive course has proved to be a good foundation for further learning.
Alas, I currently work at an English hagweon (textbook-publishing branch, i.e., not teaching but content creation) whose CEO is constantly lecturing about the need for innovation, but whose Korean instructors are still running their classes in Korean and doing the same, hackneyed, old-style nonsense. This really has to change, but in the language-teaching market, people are tradition-bound and scared to innovate.
The Koreans who do well with English have usually been exposed to the West for long periods, often by living overseas or by having Western friends in Korea. A rare few gain proficiency without ever leaving the country; I’ve met a few people like that.
Upshot: if I were Japan, how ashamed should I really feel about the low ranking when it’s not obvious how countries got ranked? Meanwhile, I’ll keep watching Sora the Troll videos on YouTube.
Kevin Kim
1 month ago
I left a comment that had two links in it, so it got shunted to the moderation queue.
@Kevin, thanks for the articulate run down. Having lived and traveled all over Korea and Japan I definitely feel Koreans have a better grasp of English than the Japanese. I think the US troop presence that was once spread out over a larger portion of Korea may contribute to better English. In Japan most US troops are on Okinawa and that is by far the most English friendly location in Japan as well as the most Americanized.
If it’s like the situation in Korea, I imagine the Japanese instructors of English are using 90% Japanese in the classroom, and they’re teaching via lecture, rote memorization, choral repetition, unnatural conversational situations, and all the other useless teaching strategies that guarantee success on stupid multiple-choice college-entrance exams but not in real-world English-speaking situations. Until the basic emphasis changes to a more realistic approach to language education, we can expect more of the same
I finally found the 2024 English Proficiency Index and see that France (personally relevant to me) is #49, South Korea is #50, and Japan is indeed #92.
Now that I see the difference in ranking between South Korea and Japan, though, I have to wonder whether something else is going on. I’ll need to research how the EPI works. If they’re counting only performance on standardized tests, that paves the way for apples-to-oranges comparisons because every country has its own standardized tests (e.g., the CSAT English section in Korea, etc.) Maybe Japan has gone all-in with AI robots as English instructors. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about Japan, really. Come to think of it, this article means little to nothing since it didn’t report how the rankings were arrived at. What makes the EPI official and authoritative?
(As for why the French are ranked so low despite their reputation for snobbily speaking in English when they hear tourists attempt to speak in French… one of my French buddies assures me that, outside of Paris and other big cities, most French people generally let their English skills atrophy, and they’re too lazy to stay current.)
Ah—the main article does say this:
The rankings are based on data collected from online tests involving 2.1 million people in places where English is not the native language.
The phrase “online tests involving 2.1 million people” is still so vague as to be meaningless. The same online tests? If it’s different tests, we’re back to the apples-and-oranges problem. Whose tests? Can we see some sample questions? The journalist who wrote this piece really didn’t provide any crucial information.
Personal note: I was lucky enough to go through a pretty good intensive-Korean program at Korea University in 2002. Ten weeks, four hours a day in class, 100% in Korean (Level 4), 5 hours of daily homework (for me, anyway, because I was way behind my Japanese and Chinese classmates), and at the end, I only got a C, but my mother spoke to me in Korean and was shocked at how much I’d improved. Good language education is out there, and the intensive course has proved to be a good foundation for further learning.
Alas, I currently work at an English hagweon (textbook-publishing branch, i.e., not teaching but content creation) whose CEO is constantly lecturing about the need for innovation, but whose Korean instructors are still running their classes in Korean and doing the same, hackneyed, old-style nonsense. This really has to change, but in the language-teaching market, people are tradition-bound and scared to innovate.
The Koreans who do well with English have usually been exposed to the West for long periods, often by living overseas or by having Western friends in Korea. A rare few gain proficiency without ever leaving the country; I’ve met a few people like that.
Upshot: if I were Japan, how ashamed should I really feel about the low ranking when it’s not obvious how countries got ranked? Meanwhile, I’ll keep watching Sora the Troll videos on YouTube.
I left a comment that had two links in it, so it got shunted to the moderation queue.
@Kevin, thanks for the articulate run down. Having lived and traveled all over Korea and Japan I definitely feel Koreans have a better grasp of English than the Japanese. I think the US troop presence that was once spread out over a larger portion of Korea may contribute to better English. In Japan most US troops are on Okinawa and that is by far the most English friendly location in Japan as well as the most Americanized.