世論 What Japan Thinks

This survey from iShare was educational for me, and I hope it will be educational for some of my readers who may be unaware of the Japanese names in this look at month names, in both English and classical Japanese.

Demographics

Between the 24th and 29th of September 2010 461 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.5% of the sample were male, 28.6% in their twenties, 30.6% in their thirties, and 40.8% in their forties.

In modern Japanese, the months are ridiculously easy to remember, being basically “Month 1″, “Month 2″, and so on up to “Month 12″, but before they adopted the Gregorian calendar there was a completely different set of names which I rarely see and could not name any of them at all. Note that although in Q1SQ I mention the English month, there’s not really a direct one-to-one correspondence as the old Japanese calendar was lunar-based, so they tended to repeat months here and there to stop things getting horrendously out of sync.
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A recent survey from goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into learning foreign languages found not surprisingly that English was the most popular language, but surprisingly that for most it was a hobby rather than for any specific work or travel-related objective.

Demographics

Between the 22nd and 26th of September 2010 1,074 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample were male, 16.2% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.5% in their thirties, 16.5% in their forties, 15.6% in their fifties, and 12.0% aged sixty or older.

I’d love to have found out more about how people were learning for free – was it something like me with What Japan Thinks, just reading stuff on the web and hoping it sticks, was it free lessons through NHK educational television, or just choosing to go to the subtitled instead of dubbed version of movies?
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Here’s a short but sweet survey from goo Ranking, looking at when on holiday, at what moments do people wish they’d studied more English.

Demographics

Between the 21st and 23rd of June 2010 1,137 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 65.1% of the sample were female, 8.0% in their teens, 20.4% in their twenties, 31.2% in their thirties, 23.9% in their forties, 9.2% in their fifties, and 7.2% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

Being a native English speaker, I of course have the benefit that any communications problems are caused by the other person not learning enough English, so just shouting a bit louder can solve all language problems.

Seriously though, in Japan I occasionally have the second problem, often as I adopt the English, not the Japanese pronunciation for certain words that should be understood by both of us. The most recent example I can think of was when I was asking if they had any Xylitol-based chewing gum, and given that I’m not even quite sure of how to say it in even in English, I had to get my Japanese wife to rescue me from the blank stares!
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Here’s a fun look at when Japanese feel embarrassed by their lack of English ability, with the top ten moments for both men and women. This survey was, as usual, from goo Ranking.

Demographics

Between the 23rd and 26th of April 2010 1,187 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-base questionnaire. 61.4% of the sample were female, 10.1% in their teens, 17.4% in their twenties, 30.9% in their thirties, 24.9% in their forties, 10.1% in their fifties, and 6.5% aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

Even though Japanese study English for at least six years in school and it is, as far as I am aware, a compulsory subject in most universities, the level of English is pretty poor, quite frankly. There was some news recently that Uniqlo will make English the office language from next year. I was watching television tonight and they were talking about Samsung, who now sell more electrical goods than the top nine Japanese manufacturers put together, and they will be making English the official company language too. The program compared English levels; Japanese electronic firms set a TOEIC score of between 530 and 700 for management-level jobs, yet Samsung require 700 just to get in the door, then 920 to progress to management, which is pretty close to native fluency.
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But, to my English teaching readers, don’t all start patting yourselves on the back yet, as this survey from iShare on foreign languages also reveals that less than one in fifteen feel capable of stringing more than a few words together.

Demographics

Between the 21st and 25th of November 2008 430 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.5% of the sample were male, 13.3% were in their twenties, 54.4% in their thirties, 23.5% in their forties, and 8.8% in their teens or fifty or older.

Note that at least those in their twenties and thirties should have studied English for all six years in high school.

One wonders how much degree of racial bias is in the answers of favourite language, as Asian languages are rated much lower than Western ones. On the other hand I do find Chinese and Korean pretty rough on my ears, but then again, German can be too. I wonder, though, why exactly is knowing a language rated as cool? Is it due to perception of difficulty or association with having travelled to countries or moved in circles associated with the language?
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With the Nova bunny finally succumbing to myxomatosis last year, there has been a good number of people with nowhere to learn English. So, this recent survey from JR Tokai Express Research Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com regarding studying English conversation looks at if people might be interested in virtually learning the language.

Demographics

On the 29th of March 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel employed in either public or private industry completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 77.9% of the sample was male, 12.4% in their twenties, 41.2% in their thirties, 34.5% in their forties, 10.3% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.

English conversation differs from actual English language study, as it is based on the theory that if you sit a Japanese person beside an English speaker, there will be a miraculous transfer of the contents of the victim’s wallet language abilities. There are of course a few good schools and teachers, but the mass market companies are not much more than social clubs for both the students and teachers.
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I am always amazed at quite how high the desire to learn English is in Japan, as despite at least 5 years in school ability levels are pretty atrocious on the whole, and even given Nova’s demise there seems to be no fall-off in the popularity of study. This recent poll conducted by goo Research in conjuction with the Yomiuri Shimbun as part of their 13th Topi-Q Net survey into the matter of English showed youth keen to learn more.

Demographics

Between the 21st and 25th of December 2007 549 young members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sex ratio was reported as 1:1 male to female, but there obviously was one odd person left over. The ages of the respondents ranged between teens to thirties, although the exact split is not reported. 40% of the sample were students in either secondary or tertiary education, 28% were full-time employees, and 12% homemakers, with the other 20% presumably made up of part-timers, NEETs, etc.

In Q1SQ, I thought it interesting that it was chance encounters with foreigners in the street or on holiday that was more of a reason to learn English when compared to other situations such as communicating better with foreign friends or dare I suggest looking for an exotic partner. I’ll also throw Q2 back at my readers.

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I had one of these “you know you’ve been in Japan too long” moments reading this list, as for three or four of them I had to stop and think if they really were Japanese inventions, 和製英語, wasei eigo, Japanese-style English! How many of these expressions that the Japanese didn’t know were Japanese-English, as reported by goo Ranking, did you have to mentally double-check? The survey was conducted between the 28th and 30th of August 2007.
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Over the first 5 days at the start of the New Year, MyVoice surveyed its monitor group to find out their views regarding foreign language learning. 10,504 people successfully completed the survey; 54% were female, 2% in their teens, 19% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 26% in their forties, and 13% in their fifties.

Note that putting Q1 and Q3 together we see that around half of the poplation would like to study English but currently aren’t doing anything about it. You may want to cross-reference the results here with a similar survey on English last year, also conducted by MyVoice.

I’m trying to find a way to tie this into the news today that 7 NOVA “English” “teachers” got busted for drugs, but I’m failing miserably.
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Following my recent 100 top goo Japan search keywords of the year translation(with the top 10 covered in detail over at Recognize Design), we now have the top 50 words looked up in goo’s English to Japanese dictionary in the first 10 months of the year. As with the search terms, one suspects that the four-letter words have been filtered out. This time there is no score for each of the keywords to reflect their frequency.

I don’t know why vomit sneaked in at the bottom, and redundance seems a bit odd, but redundancy also maps to the same definition when looked up.

I also thought it was quite funny seeing bear in 30th place as I do get an occasional search like “how to say bear in Japanese”. Oh, it’s 熊, くま, kuma, just in case you are here actually searching for bear in Japanese. That’s the Japanese for the animal kind of bear, anyway.
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