Englisch wird heutzutage zum Leidwesen von Schülern und Eltern immer mehr zum Thema bei Aufnahmeprüfungen für japanische Mittelschulen. Ein Teil davon ist die Vorbereitung auf den Hochschulzugang – „es ist heutzutage praktisch unmöglich, sich an einer Spitzenuniversität zu bewerben, ohne den Eiken zu bestehen“.
https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/961027?page=6
16 Kommentare
And yet actual EN proficiency is at rock bottom.
Japanese student who have ample time (~6 years) to study english language but perhaps still meet difficulty
Meanwhile
Foreign worker (expat especially ssw) only have limited time to study japan language, and can still get negative comment from their japanese coworker (case by case basis)
https://www.reddit.com/r/japanese/s/mqzUIM8gmu
https://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/ca/fna/ssw/us/overview/
Eiken is a joke imo.
My first supervisor as an ALT in Japan was pulled from her elementary school to have the job of creating the English elementary school curriculum for Nara City as well as being supervisor to the JET teachers for the city. She did an excellent job, but wasn’t asked if she wanted to leave teaching to do administrative work (This, btw, is the norm in Japan. Rather than advertising openings and finding someone who wants a position, teachers are moved around with no input on their own desires). Anyway, she hated administrative work so much that she quit and became a professor at one of the best Universities of Education in the country. There she specialized in English language education, traveling around the world to see how English was taught in other countries. She advocated for reforms to the English curriculum, but told me that the biggest opposition came from the juku companies. They spend massive amounts on politicians to prevent reform because if English education in the school system was more effective, juku would be less necessary. She was so incredibly frustrated at the corruption preventing actual educational reform from happening.
I know English is the current lingua franca blah blah blah, but what is the rationale behind promoting English education in Japan? Most Japanese don’t work in fields that require English, nor do they even want to. Fewer Japanese are traveling abroad than ever. The differences between Japanese and English make learning it much more difficult than say, Korean or even Chinese. Japan is never going to outperform the average European country for number of proficient ESL speakers. Why the obsession? It seems pointless.
I’m so happy my son will be bilingual natively and not need to waste extra effort studying for Eiken.
Wait? English is a big deal in jp academe? Why?
Another thing is that a lot of Japanese loanwords come from Dutch or German, not just English. Their katakana system also adapts foreign words to Japanese pronunciation, so they’ve essentially developed their own Japanized version of English vocabulary, almost like a pidgin-like system. Since these words are already part of everyday Japanese, I imagine it can be difficult to separate them from actual English when learning the language. Unless you consciously treat them as two different systems, that’s another layer of difficulty to overcome.
More and more children are apply to private junior high schools. I first heard about this 4 years old but here are some news report:
https://youtu.be/tCpvGwo8GVo?si=QjsJWA-oMRoGApgf
https://youtu.be/Agfl7av79Kg?si=oJh-OFtcJXqLtRIA
Abema Prime had a talk show about the topic last week as well.
I work at a private elementary school. And one of my senpais at the school and my university says it is easier to teach reading and writing than speaking and listening. Reading is just really easy to teach, especially phonics. But speaking, it is hard because teachers, even non-Japanese, are not taught on how to teach speaking. It isn’t about having a basic conversation and knowing vocabulary, but how to make a unit plan that gives students enough times to use it (one teacher says the kids know the language only one time, that is a lie) and how to use ways of communicate is broken down.
Also, I think many parents think that English is learned only at school. But learning a language is not a one place and one time deal. Parents and kids need to work on it at home. Have a basic conversation together, watch a tv show or movie in English, or read a books. I know parents are scared to use English, because they raised that accuracy is more important than fluency, but they need try and care about fluency.
Eiken is the reason japanese students dont actually learn english.
Eiken is like people talking about car specs and how it works but never drive the car itself. Its treated as an extension of Japanese more than a different language.
Eiken is not a good test, same with all the other japanese developed tests like Dokken or Futsuken, they don’t test speaking ability or communication skills.
Other tests are better.
And yet they won’t stop saying “clothsis”.
All the priorities here is wrong man, you speak English to communicate not for the entrance Exam. Heck if you can speak English you can apply any University all over the world. this mentality makes their English so impractical and just becomes an unless knowledge in the end. Shame
Welp now what?
I had to do a small talk asking if they like morning or not. The student said morning because „high tension.“ I was like wow man you should see a doctor then. It blew the class away to find out what they were actually saying in English.
At an individual level, I don’t blame any person considering the demographics. At the country level on the world stage, the poor English level is holding them back.