Re: Culture clash

On Fri, 07 Sep 2007 11:21:46 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:

Or are you suggesting that:

The spoken Japanese language is much easier for a native English
speaker to learn after childhood, than it is for a native Japanese
speaker to learn the spoken English language after childhood.

Yes.

If the latter, a greater percentage of native Japanese speakers
learn English after childhood than native English speakers learn
Japanese.

What relevance do you think this has to the ease of learning in each
case? How do you remove the factor of enormous economic pressure for
adult-NSoJ-learning-English, and very little the other way?

My evidence, on the other hand, is largely anecdotal. NSoE that I
speak with who have learned Japanese *outside* Japan to the point of
conversational fluency speak highly of how ordered and easily-learned
the (spoken) language is. Whereas NSoJ that I speak with struggle for
many years with English *immersed* in an English-dominant environment
and still frequently make frustrating corner-case errors that
significantly impede understanding.

The *perception* of these (anecdotally-selected) people, at least,
bears out the hypothesis that adult-NSoE-learning-Japanese has an
easier time than a corresponding adult-NSoJ-learning-English.

In the part that you snipped, I did note that my obervations were:

"quantitative assessments and you may be correct that native English
speakers have a greater predisposition toward acquiring Japanese than
native Japanese speakers have with respect toward acquiring English."

However, I draw different conclusions from your anecdotal information. You
refer to "NSoE that I speak with who have learned Japanese *outside* Japan
to the point of conversational fluency". You imply, though, that your
anecdotal Japanese learners of English are striving for more than mere
"conversational fluency."

Therein lies the rub. A determined language learner can acquire spoken
conversational fluency in virtually any language in a three month to six
month period of intense immersion and study. However, I equate true
intermediate proficiency in a language with the ability to read a
newspaper, draft business correspondence that might require some editing by
a native speaker or more proficient editor, and the ability to discuss
business on a non-technical level.

It's hard to establish a level playing field. The average Japanese learns
English in high school. The average resident of North America, the UK,
Australia, and New Zealand does not learn Japanese at all in school. My
anecdotal information tells me that there are a lot of Japanese who can
read the New York Times with varying degrees of comprehension but there is
a very small percentage of native English speakers who can read the Asahi
Shimbun.

Phil Yff
.

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