[sien]

How do you think it compares to various European countries?

Say, Germany, Spain, Italy (or any that you're familiar with).

Northern Europeans seem to be fantastic at learning languages. It's surprising the rest of the world doesn't copy what they do.

[DrNosferatu]

Germany has very similar problems.

But unlike Japan, the education system is the antithesis of fair - as, if I understood correctly, your 4th grade teacher will decide which of the 3 tracks you will follow at 10(!) years of age. This obliterates the possibility of social elevator through education.

I wonder how it is in Japan? Is it common to have class movement between generations?

[minebreaker]

To be fair, it's much easier to learn English if your mother tongue is a variant of Indo-European.

[tkgally]

Yes, I was about to say the same thing. The similarities of vocabulary and grammar among those languages make it easier for speakers of one language to learn another.

Also, it seems to be easier for people to learn another language when they already know two or three. As Europe is more multilingual than Japan, more Europeans have a head start at acquiring additional languages.

There may be other factors—stronger attachment to one’s native language and culture, resistance to seeming different from one’s peers—that make it harder for people of some nationalities to acquire foreign languages. But such claims are difficult to verify and can easily sink into superficial stereotypes, so I will be a cowardly academic and decline to take a position.

[eszed]

> it seems to be easier for people to learn another language when they already know two or three.

Yes, that's empirically verified by multiple studies.

My pet theory about that is that a great deal of one's psychological sense of self is tied to one's ability to communicate with others. Learning a new language entails "letting go", to a great extent, of a linguistic sense of self. (Peter Hessler writes perceptively and humourously about this in one of his early books.) People who speak more than one language have either a) gone through this process (as adults) already, and can negotiate it more easily, or b) have (as dual-native speakers) a self-perception that is less-rigidly tied to a particular language context.

This is also why people who are highly articulate in their native tongue often progress more slowly than people who are not. I have more than once been humbled by someone who (natively) speaks what I'd (in my academic arrogance) judge to be "bad English" zooming ahead of me in foreign language acquisition. I'm concerned about being "correct", while they burble away unconcernedly and leave me far behind. Those experiences have been good for my character. :-)

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077992, down-thread a bit, who makes this point better than I did.

[foobarian]

I don't know if it's the Indo-European thing or not, but it seems that the writing system is a huge obstacle. In Europe I don't even have to understand a language to be able to read text out loud, just learn a very limited set of pronunciation rules. Even Cyrillic/Greek is a more or less 1-1 phonetic mapping.

[svachalek]

Japanese use 3 different writing systems but 2 of them are simple phonetic systems. The hard one is kanji which uses Chinese characters, there's really nothing you can do about that except memorize memorize memorize.

[eszed]

It is and it isn't, in my experience teaching ESL. The basics are incredibly easier, as students receive the benefit of cognates and (at least some) similar constructs. However, there's an interesting stage, right around the beginning of intermediate where students tend to become judgemental of the target language: there's a lot of frustrated "well, why doesn't English do it this way?" (It doesn't help at all that English is such a bastardized and inconsistent tongue that their native language's way of doing [whatever] often is more logical / concise / beautiful!) Some students get stuck there and never progress.

I recall very few, if any, Asian-language speakers hitting that particular speedbump. It's like they're prepared for English to be so different from the start that they've already made a psychological shift to English-mode that other learners may struggle to negotiate.

[euroderf]

My kid is being raised bilingual English-Finnish. I hope he acquires an interest in linguistics, because when he examines his own language facility he will find fertile ground - a car crash of deeply different languages.