I wrote the title so just to make it short, so do not think that I’m taking the piss out of Japanese people or anything like that. Japanese people are quite embarrassed about the fact that they cannot speak English and they (well, many of them I guess) have begun to realize that they’re a bit behind compared to other countries including developing countries like Thailand or Vietnam. So you’ll probably never meet a Japanese who goes “Oh well you can’t blame me for not speaking English, because you can’t speak Japanese either”, or “you can’t make fun of my English, you sound terrible in Japanese too”, but you will see some foreigners appoint themselves as the defenders of the Japanese cultural pride and utter such nonsense.
Just the other day, I met one of those morons and it didn’t take too long to shut him up. The simple argument that I made to him was that it would be absurd to put the Japanese language on an equal footing with English. Why? Because the moment you fly out of Japan, the “de facto” language people use to talk with each other is English, not Japanese. “But that’s very arrogant for us to think…” Oh shut your pie hole you amateur! Look up the word “de facto” before you start rambling on you ignoranus! English is a fact, a reality, hence the term “de facto”, no one is talking about whether that is right or wrong, it’s just so. Deal with it. And if you absolutely can’t deal with it, and you are just so distraught about the fact that you were born in an English speaking country, then denounce your citizenship. Trust me, that’s better for both, you and the country.
Look, I’m sorry, but I’m an English teacher, and that’s what I do for a living. I’m not teaching English because that’s the ONLY thing that I can (allowed to actually not can) do, i’m teaching English because it’s the only thing i WANT to do. I’m sick and tired of talking to those so-called English teachers in Japan, they are so grateful that they are getting paid for doing nothing except speaking the language, they know nothing about the language, nothing about how to teach it and certainly nothing about what it takes the students to learn it.
I have met a different type of English teachers in Japan. Those ones are hilarious. They came to Japan and could not make friends, they were so emotionally shattered that they went ahead and studied the language thinking that once they’re fluent, they will magically find themselves surrounded by Japanese friends (and girls), but unfortunately, to their great disappointment, that did not happen. One of those poor wretched rats once told me “I don’t get it, first you think they’re shy, they don’t want to talk to you because they can’t speak English and you can’t speak Japanese that well, so they keep their distance, but then YOU go ahead and learn the language, and they still don’t want to talk to you!”. That person clearly does not understand the meaning of “culture”. How stupid and naive would you have to be to actually think that people just do not want to be your friends because of language. But I digress…
Where were we? Oh yeah, so do not try to compare Japanese to English because that would be plain ignorant. Japanese is a language only spoken by roughly 123 million people, English is spoken by 1200 million people, 800 million of them are non-native speakers. Get it? If I were to invest my time, energy and money into learning a second language, it would not be Japanese, it would either be Chinese, Spanish or Hindi. “Fair enough, but you are living in Japan now so you need to learn Japanese…” no no I’m WORKING in Japan, I love Japan but I would never LIVE in Japan, I came here because I wanted to teach Japanese people the English language.
It’s not normal that the third largest economy in the world is not able to communicate with the outside world in English. It’s not also normal that foreigners visiting the country or coming for work have to learn Japanese to survive. Japan needs to look at countries like Singapore and Malaysia and maybe take a leaf out of their book to save the economy, otherwise, the future is going to be very bleak.
What do YOU think? Is it fair to ask foreigners to learn Japanese if they’re coming here for work? Shouldn’t a country like Japan be like Singapore for example and use English as the first language at school while still teaching Japanese as a subject? Do you think that would affect the Japanese language skills of Japanese people? Share, comment or like this article.