Summary
Japan’s English proficiency ranking dropped to 92nd out of 116 countries, the lowest ever recorded.
The decline is attributed to stagnant English proficiency among young people, particularly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Netherlands ranked first, followed by European countries, while the Philippines and Malaysia ranked 22nd and 26th, respectively.
tbf, the Japanese proficiency of English-speaking nations is probably lower.
It is a tricky language. Almost nothing in common with Indo-European languages except loan words. Completely different grammatical structure. Three different writing scripts.
At least the pronunciation isn’t too bad coming from English as all the usual sounds are represented within our phonology. Compared to Spanish rolling R’s, Russian and Arabic consonant clusters, Chinese tonality, and other difficult to pronounce languages.
Is what you’d think, but nope. Their r, sh, j, ch and w and u sounds are slightly different from English (enough so that some languages have the English version and the Japanese version as independent sounds), the lone n consonant has a pronunciation not existent in English, and Japanese has a tone system but it’s simple enough a foreigner can get by without knowing it. That is to say, Japanese pronunciation is very different from English and decently hard to master, but if you just pronounce it like you would English (without stress of course, absolutely don’t add stress) you shouldn’t have a problem getting your point across.
Wait Arabic consonant clusters? If anything Arabic has less consonant clusters than English. As a native Arabic speaker what I would think is a problem for English natives is the consonants themselves, because we have a lot of them and many don’t exist in English.
Thanks for that.
Isn’t this just learning each word’s tonic syllable? Or if you mean the flow of a sentence, the general waving tone structure like in Spanish or French?
I am not an Arabic speaker at all, but one of the few amusing points of the Iraq war was that absolutely no one in the U.S. media could agree on how to pronounce Qatar. There were even segments on how to pronounce it. They didn’t agree with each other.
Of course, they never actually put someone who spoke Arabic on TV to get them to pronounce it properly. They probably couldn’t anyway considering the intelligence level of news anchors I’ve worked with.
This was in line with my immediate thoughts too.
It seems grossly unfair to judge Japanese people on their ability to speak English.
That’s a very idealistic position. English is either useful or necessary in many situations and fields, and having a population that doesn’t know English can and will cause problems. How well people in a country speak English is an important metric for that country’s development, otherwise nobody would care about it.
What are you on about? This is a survey of every country where English isn’t their primary language. This article is from Japan about Japanese proficiency in the English language.