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.
Which is ironic given how many English loanwords have infiltrated the language in recent times, to the point where sometimes I hear Japanese speak in a not overly formal context and half of the words they say are just English words with Japanese pronunciation.
Same in Pakistan. People tend to use a lot of English words in Urdu, even when an equivalent native word exists. For example, the proper way to say “What’s the time?” is “کیا وقت ہوا ہے؟” (“kiya waqat hawa hay?”). But a lot of people will say “کیا ٹائم ہے؟” (“kiya time hay?”) instead. But of course, there are also loanwords such as “واشنگ مشین” (washing machine) and “کمپیوٹر” (computer).
Loans from French (either old French or Norman French, some borrowed into/from Latin on either side) comprise a huge amount of English vocab. Does that mean we speak French?
(yes, I know there’s a video out there arguing that English is just bad/weird French and no I don’t agree with it).
Having learned both english and now in the process of learning Japanese, katakana English is so confusing sometimes. It’s kind of correct when you don’t think about what’s actually written, but you sometimes have to think long to understand that an エアコン (eakon) is just an air con(dition).
It gets easier and I agree with saying it aloud. Once you start getting used to patterns, you can decipher them more easily (at least the ones from a language you speak). Remember no diphthongs and each syllable gets one beat.
My pet theory is that it’s also how the infamous “No Smorking” Engrish came about in reverse. The ‘o’ in smoking tends to sound long and a lot of times words that sound like that to the Japanese from English will be (long-sounding vowel)+r.
I always found saying katakana out loud made me understand.
Just wait til you run into it for languages other than English. Froofy bakeries love throwing French words in as well, so you might be left wondering about the flavor of a ガトーフランボワーズ
True. Also doesn’t help when you sometimes mix up シ(shi) and ツ (tsu) because the font (or someone else’s handwriting) makes them look very similar.
Alignment/starting position is the key. The "-like strokes in shi are left-aligned, the "-like ones in tsu are top-aligned. Same for ‘so’ and ‘n’. This is why people talk about stroke order being important (although in this case it’s not simply the order).
Having lots of loaned words don’t mean much when English and Japanese have vastly different grammatical structures. There are also lots of non-English loaned words in Japanese, and from experience, the Japanese don’t always know which language a word is borrowed from, nor should the speakers of the language really need to care. In any case, grammar makes up an important part of a language, though it doesn’t come for free if you aren’t already exposed to the grammatical structure before.