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It is a tricky language. Almost nothing in common with Indo-European languages except loan words. Completely different grammatical structure. Three different writing scripts.

At least the pronunciation isn't too bad coming from English as all the usual sounds are represented within our phonology. Compared to Spanish rolling R's, Russian and Arabic consonant clusters, Chinese tonality, and other difficult to pronounce languages.

I wonder what the methodology is. There’s no way Turkey is higher than Lebanon unless the metric is something specific that we have terrible data coverage for (which is very likely)

Funny. Joking aside, I don't think England, Ireland, the US, and Canada were tested.

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).

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.

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).

I was reading the book by Chris Broad of the Travel Abroad YouTube about his experience teaching in Japan. You're totally correct. It's really a faux pas to correct a teacher as a foreigner teaching English. So the teacher would give say the wrong thing, and you'd just nod.

Not to mention, from Chris, the Japanese tests for English are really stupid. They're teaching them with tests from the 80s, and using words that aren't common in spoken language.

I’ve heard it characterized that Japan has been in the early 2000s since the 80s. At first ahead, but now behind with less than expected development economically, societally, and in some ways technologically.

I’m just a foreigner and do not understand the culture well enough to be writing this comment, but reading “stagnant” didn’t surprise me much.

Is it really that surprising? If you've ever played a video game before, you'd know that pretty much every Brazilian speaks English.

Japanese isn't widely adopted across the Internet as the default language, so this comparison is irrelevant.

I'm only familiar with Western Internet, but if you don't understand English, you're isolating yourself from large parts of the world.

Would probably be more relevant to measure English-speaking countries' ability to speak whatever the most commonly studied foreign language is, rather than Japanese. That would also probably need a caveat of eliminating native speakers and/or heritage speakers from the data set in some countries, as well.