You want to live in Japan, but you want Japanese people to speak English to live comfortably, don’t you?
The day will not come when
we will be able to speak English.
Because English is
an unnecessary language
for most Japanese people.
The salary does not go up much even if we learn English.
Let’s start by thinking about why we want to learn English.
To be able to communicate with foreigners?
To learn about different cultures?
These are good reasons to learn the languages. But maybe most people have another one.
It’s to raise their salary, isn’t it?
For example the average annual salary in the Philippines costs $4,800, however if a person of this country seriously studies English and gets a job in Canada he can earn $48,000 a year. If I were a Filipino, I would go to study English with maximum effort.
But for Japanese there is no extreme advantage to learn English.
Except Japanese elites there is no need to study English.
We should study English, it is true. But there is no economic advantage for us. Now I will explain this reason to you.
Today I have searched the necessary English jobs to apply on an employment website, Rikunavi NEXT. As the proportion of the jobs like this is…
ONLY 7%
Although there are a lot of jobs on this page, the result was lower than I imagined. In addition, higher level jobs require English more than normal jobs, but their proportion was only 14%.
The population that can earn more than $70,000 a year is only 14% in Japan, as they are the Japanese elites, not normal Japanese.
“EHHH! So Japanese people don’t need
to study English to have a job in Japan!!!!”
Exactly
3000 hours, It’s the time to be able to speak English
I have already shown that English isn’t so important to have a job except that we want to have a very high paying job. So now I want to say that studying English is not easy for us.
Japanese people have to learn English for 3000 hours to reach C1. This is much time compared to Americans can have C1 of German certification for 800-1000hours. So English is not an easy skill for Japanese.
However the ways to raise our salary is not only learning English. For example “Oyo Jyoho Gijyutusya” is a national certification of high level programmer. If you have it, you can work in some IT companies, and the average study time to get it is 500 hours.
If you want to work in the accounting sector, there is another national certification, Boki. The highest level is Boki 1, and people can usually get this certification by studying 500 hours.
Well, there are many ways to raise your salary and economic situation for us. Compared to these the priority of English is not high.
English is really not necessary
to survive in Japan.
Do young people speak English?
“B-but it’s the age of globalization,
young Japanese people speak English, right?”
Hmmm… Yes. We can speak English more than Japanese 30 years ago. But most people don’t know the business level.
Only 5%, the young elites who know how to speak English.
In Japan there are about 10 prestigious universities for the elites, the population of these students is 5% of all young Japanese. Japanese at this level can speak English very well.
It is the video at Waseda University, a very prestigious private university.
Japanese at this level want to learn English to work in foreign companies such as P&G or BIG4.
*By the way I run this blog in Spanish too, but Spanish isn’t useful for work in Japan and it’s perfectly a hobby for me. Sometimes my friends call me “Crazy Español” because I study only Spanish and inform about Japan to you guys in Spanish too. Hah I studied it for 8 years, but that’s real.
Then you already feel that way, don’t you?
“Come on! Japanese young people speak English. I can live speaking only English in Japan!“
Ah well… Yes, they can speak English. But it’s only 5% of the population. Besides, even though we can speak English until when we are university students, they forget it when they start working in Japanese companies because we don’t use it.
When Japan will become poor, Japanese people will start to learn English seriously.
In the end English is not necessary to live in Japan.
That’s why they don’t know how to speak English, nor they want to study it seriously. But it is because Japan is a comfortable and relatively rich country compared to many countries. Many people can’t have very strong reason to leave the country.
If Japan will become poor, Japanese people will start to study English to leave the country. However it will not be able to maintain the current peace. Would you want to live in Japan that will lose peace?
Japan without peace is
like a hamburger without meat.
In the end if you like actual Japan, you have to learn Japanese to live in Japan although it is a very high barrier.
But what you study Japanese is correcter than what you expect Japanese people to study English.
