Problems of English Education in Japan

I see quite many foreigners complaining about this. Why do Japanese suck at English? Of course, you could say that's no surprise. Because it's a completely foreign language here, and we don't really need that. Almost no problem whatsoever, even if we don't speak any English in daily life. So maybe it's only natural. Most Japanese are not good at English. But on the other hand, you could also say that it's really weird. Most people learn English more than 10 years. There are tons of textbooks in every bookstore in every city, and a lot of private English schools or lessons available everywhere. And yet, Japan is quite behind from other Asian countries like South Korea or China, for example. So today, let's talk about why. Let me share some of the big problems about English education here based on other people's experiences and my experience as well as a Japanese person grew up here. Let's start with textbooks. This conversation example is from a textbook that I actually used at my middle school. Probably any native English speakers find it really awkward. Even though grammatically, it's not incorrect. I'm sure they wouldn't actually speak like this. But that's the type of English we constantly get at school. So unpractical, unnatural, and quite often, uncontextual as well. But of course, we don't notice it. We think that's a natural conversation native speakers actually speak. The reason why I keep seeing these problems is because these English books for English study are written and edited by Japanese authors. I've checked so many books and I asked my teachers, I said, do you realize that there are no native English speakers who have either written or edited these books? And they were okay with that. The textbooks are made based on the university entrance exam. That means if the exam is not globalized, that means textbooks will be Japanese, nationalized. If you cannot change the exam, nothing will change. The priorities take a great score at this test, you know, past the test. So remember this, remember that. This is going to be on the test. Yes, that makes sense. But at the same time, it's so boring, not exciting at all. The focus of entrance exams with English is almost strictly grammar and vocabulary, which I understand. I mean, that makes sense academically. But there's no real focus on context or real world use. And that's a big problem. I remember listening to my kids who were taking a listening test. They were playing English examples on the PA system. I had to try really hard not to laugh because the English made no sense. The context was completely wrong. Either the conversation flow didn't make any sense or it was really, really stifled. English needs to be more about practicality and less about tests. Which brings us the next point. In the class, most focus is on grammar, reading or listening. And we spend much less time for speaking or practical conversation practice. Not just because of the importance of entrance exams or paper tests, but also as a teacher, it can be really difficult to introduce it in Japan. English is very much a language where you are constantly expressing your own thoughts and opinions. That can get tricky. There's the pressure for kids to not mess up. The problem is that there's too much pressure on kids individually to always be right in the classroom. And nobody's going to get this stuff the first time. With that, these kids are never going to develop any confidence in speaking up and saying just anything. A lot of students are so shy to speak English to each other. Like, yeah, let's practice the English conversation we just learned together. Like, let's practice with someone sitting next to you. And when that happens, we're very sick because we're so embarrassed about speaking English. Even though I wanted to try speaking English, but I didn't want to embarrass myself. I don't know if it's only in Japan. I think more in Japan, yeah. The mentality is when you try to raise your hand, when you try to be like Han Marioni, like Harry Potter, you kind of stand out in a bad way. But you are clearly good at English now. So how did you get over that? I used to be so, so shy. I had to overcome, but it takes some practice to get used to talking to people, like communication. It takes some practice. Communicating in another language, that's an extra step. Spanish doesn't help at all. I feel like Japanese class, regardless of the subject, it's always passive. In Japan, I feel like only the teacher speaks and no one else. So there's not much, like, engagement in class. It's just A equals B and that's it. That's all they end it with. And so if you just continue that for high school and college as well, then you're not really knowing how to use that information. I think the teaching is a bit outdated. I'd say. Because it's mainly just the teacher standing in front and talking for the whole lesson. And then people are just like sleeping or just not participating at all. In Germany, we have a lot of modern methods. And I actually, I hated those when I was still in Germany in school. But then after I came back from Japan, yeah, I learned to appreciate them more. There's more change to it. It doesn't get that boring so quickly, I think. So many Japanese companies praise high TOEIC scores, which is a Japanese exam, and that is only used within Asian region and only focus on passive skills like listening and reading. So from my perspective, students would gain more benefits in studying towards a globally recognized exam such as TOEFL and IELTS. There's actually a speaking version of TOEIC test, but much fewer people take it compared to South Korea. Most English exams in Japan are only about grammar, reading or listening. Speaking skills are not even required in school, company and the society. And even if Japanese people finally speak though, there's a big obstacle for us. Have you ever wondered why my pronunciation is quite bad? That's because we have a strong habit of pronouncing English words with katakana. And I think most people actually know that their pronunciation is far away from native speakers. That can be a big reason why many Japanese are not confident of speaking any English in front of anyone. Katakana English is detrimental to getting a good pronunciation, I guess. There are definitely some words that just sound completely different, like baketsu or kohi. For someone who doesn't know Japanese, they think those are completely new words, even though it's, you know, bucket and coffee. My students do that for presentations. If they don't remember how to pronounce in English, they'll use the reading in katakana. And I understand in books and learning material, if you don't have like a CD or an mp3 to go with it, you might not know how to pronounce that word because English has a lot of screwy, like the ninths. People say like nainitsu. I'm like, no, ninths. And there are so many wrong English everywhere, which makes it worse. One of the greatest challenges that I had as a teacher was to just dig out all of the English and other bad English that my kids would use that they learned through media and things like that. Great example is sando. So like sandwich. I had to tell my kids, no, it's not sando. Because if you said sando, people will think sand, suna. Totally wrong thing. My kids actually thought that that was proper English. In Japan, English is cool. You see that not only on people's clothes, but also on signs, places of business, names of places of business, things like that. And this isn't everyone, but this feels like a national, kind of a national consensus, is that English is a tool of cool. It's not a way to communicate with people because it is a cool factor for Japan society. Bad English becomes addicting. I'm sure you've seen it before. There's a infamous picture of a sign of a store where it says effing sale. I don't want to actually swear for this video, but it uses the F word in it. And people there had said, well, we just thought that that meant like a really, really good sale for English. And it's like, yeah, maybe use huge or great, but not a huge swear word. Some people in Japan complain about foreigners, especially otaku, weeaboos, everything like that, who use extremely impolite Japanese when they don't mean to. But the thing is, is that this, it's really not that different. It's still using the wrong thing at the wrong time, even if the intentions are good. So what about teachers? Are they actually able to speak English well? In my experience, at least, definitely no. All my Japanese English teachers couldn't speak English so well. How would you feel, honestly, if your music teacher couldn't play any musical instruments? Wouldn't that be weird if your driving instructor couldn't actually drive? But somehow it's totally okay in Japan. English teachers can't speak English well. Many of them are actually not qualified yet. And if the teachers are like that, we can't expect the students can speak English well. Now, don't get me wrong. We can't just blame those teachers. All of those teachers are being made to teach English. Actually, they don't really want to teach English. And that's probably not why they signed up to be a teacher. Many of those people, I think, are actually really good teachers and really caring people. But they're just in an environment where they're doing a job that they don't know how to do. But it's really unfair to their students. And of course, it's really unfair to the teachers as well. One of the biggest issues is that teachers do not have enough time or resources. They also have to manage after-school activities. And they cannot focus solely on their teaching. And this means that teachers do not have the flexibility to participate in professional development. And they don't have time to give mutual feedback that is necessary to improve their teaching skills. I visit schools on a weekly basis. And I meet all the teachers in school. And they always complain about they are not given a support to teach proper English. There was one teacher in college that I really liked. She was so eloquent. And she was so passionate about teaching. And I really liked her. And I wrote some extra essays. You know, it wasn't even homework. So that I could talk to her more. It really helped. She was so motivational. Other teachers I didn't like or I didn't care because they're just doing their job to teach. But they're not motivating us. You know, it's like motivation is a secondary thing. I get to work with a few up-and-coming teachers. People who are studying education in university. And will eventually go on to become teachers in middle schools, high schools, etc. Some of them want to teach music or want to teach math or history. And they're really good at the subjects that they're interested in. Those teachers really will be able to teach those subjects probably better than any of the other subjects that they can teach. But sometimes they can't teach the things that they're best at. They have to teach English. Because everybody has to teach English. Because everybody has to learn English. For those who don't know yet, from 2020, English class starts from elementary school. Not middle school. As it's actually getting worse and worse. And our government really wants to improve our English. But we clearly don't have enough teachers yet. So many unqualified teachers have to teach English to the kids. And even aside from that, does this really work? If English is being taught the exact same way that's being taught at middle and high school, the problems are not going to change. They're only going to develop sooner. Unless English is taught with correct and practical use, it's just going to have the same problem. For every year that we add to basic English, we take away a year from the students' advanced Japanese. I think that's a real shame. You can't speak a foreign language better than you can speak your native language. The expectations that we have of these students, that they'll be able to converse fluently in English, be able to perform international negotiations, and things along those lines, don't really make sense when you think about their levels of Japanese. I was in a girls-only school, which was, of course, a private school. So they had their own rules. They let us study. They made us study, I should say, English from second grade, third grade. You know, I kept scoring so badly in middle school. My test score was so, so low. Which obviously, it didn't help. Although I had those ARI education, it didn't really help. Because of the fact that I wasn't interested, I thought I wouldn't use English at all in my life, which turned out ironically wrong. If your parent could try to be bilingual from ARI stage, and if I had many English classes, and if at least one of my parents could speak English, that might be different. Maybe I had better notation. But a few classes in a week, it didn't really affect me at all. By the way, I actually see quite many foreigners quitting the job. So when it comes to the treatment of the teachers, do you think we should improve that more? Yes. English teachers absolutely need to have better treatment. They need longer expected periods of time to work and the increased salary that comes with it. I'm not saying that they should have a higher salary. But what I'm saying is that they need to have time, much more time in their positions. I've seen a lot of cases where native English teachers are expected to work at one school or job for only a couple of years. The teachers wanted to leave. The school may not like them. The kids may not like them. Or because they've lost their gaijin freshness. Like, that's a reason that I've heard from other teachers. There always seems to be a loss of employment only after a very short period of time. I understand why Japanese teachers jump around schools after a few years. I've been told it's because it's to keep seniority down. No teacher has more seniority over the other. In that Japanese context, I 100% understand. But a foreigner's job depends on their ability to stay in the country. So this is a nightmare scenario where after two years, you don't know if you're going to have a work visa anymore. It's really difficult to have to uproot every couple of years and move to a completely different part of Japan in order just to stay in Japan. Not only do you have to uproot, but your salary gets reset. Over a certain period of time, your salary as an English teacher will go up and up and up. But as soon as those couple years are done, it's back to entry level. So you're losing money as well. I think friends really helped me for conversational skills because they have jokes. They have irony. Speaking, definitely streaming helps, especially during quarantine. I started streaming on Twitch because of quarantine, which turned out to be really great. I really enjoyed it. All about the needs. I found the ones like I wanted to speak English because of professional wrestling. We just couldn't find the reason why we're studying English. But I think now it's changing. It's the world is becoming more and more international. So eventually our next generation, next next generation, we will get better eventually because we have to. Yeah, I think it's a matter of time because Japan is an isolated island. We focus more on inviting foreigners, not like going to different countries. It's more about bringing tourists into Japan. Japan is very, very dependent on tourism for money. Japan is still very functional without foreigners, but we make up a huge amount of the income. And when foreigners come in and like, say there's a foreigner who's extremely sick, a foreigner has a heart attack, a foreigner's in trouble. I'm not saying that it's every person's responsibility to help other people, but you could save someone's life if you have just a medium or light amount of knowledge when it comes to English. We didn't have to speak English since Japan has been quite successful in terms of economics and business. But the times have changed because of the coronavirus, COVID-19. These days, COVID-19 information is very important. Very important information comes in English. Today's world, information is published, first published in English. And Japanese people have to wait for this information to be translated, which means we fall behind. So yes, reading and writing is very important. But being able to speak English allows you to connect and discuss with people from diverse backgrounds. So I think that it's quite beneficial to be able to speak English. People say that Japan will need English because we've got foreign tourists coming, we've got the Olympics, we need people to do international negotiations with foreign companies, you know, these kinds of things. How many people need to do that? It's definitely not all people that need to do international negotiation. And it's not all people who will need to be interpreters or translators for foreign tourists, et cetera. The most fundamentally flawed thing about the system is the idea that everybody should go through it in the same way. Let's say just 1% of Japanese people were really interested in speaking English. If we provided great resources and great teachers to that 1%, that's an enormous number of people who have access to great teachers and great resources and a lot of time to study. That would actually be far more beneficial. There's also what I think is another important point. If you move to Japan and you interact with Japanese people, how about learning Japanese? Yeah, I think that's actually fair. But what about foreign workers? For example, foreign care workers. Many of them are struggling with language barrier. So some people say that we should make it easier for those workers. I'm really sympathetic to the difficulties of learning a foreign language. That being said, if it's difficult for foreigners to come to Japan and learn Japanese, how much more difficult would it be to teach 127 million Japanese people a foreign language? These are people in their native country who don't necessarily have any expectation of ever living or working abroad. Foreign care workers, for example. That is a really small population who could really benefit a lot from being able to speak Japanese. To the extent that I would love for those people to have the best teachers available to them. Resources should be directed to those people because for all of the progress that foreign care workers in Japan make, it benefits the communication of hundreds and hundreds of interactions. If one of those people becomes fluent in Japanese, then that one person might communicate with hundreds or thousands more Japanese people. Whereas if we put that much, that many resources into improving the English level of somebody who's never going to leave Japan and who doesn't want to talk to foreigners, what's the benefit? It would be more beneficial to apply good Japanese teachers to foreign care workers than good English teachers to all Japanese people. Imagine trying to teach an entire country a foreign language. That's essentially what the Japanese government is going for in Japan right now with the idea of universal bilingualism. Obviously that's impossible.