Re: Culture clash

On Sat, 08 Sep 2007 10:57:30 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:

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.

Note that this is entirely different to what I was dicussing:
conversational fluency of *spoken* language. I will happily admit that
the situation is reversed, and the difference even more marked, for
the *written* forms of English and Japanese.

It depends a lot about what you mean by conversational fluency. If you
mean the ability to talk about the weather or how cute your friend's baby
is that's one thing. On the other hand, if conversational fluency means
the ability to have meaningful conversations on current events, such as the
issue of global warming, that's something else entirely.

Based on my experience, native English speakers and native Japanese
speakers who have studied English for three years in a Japanese high school
would be able to discuss (in English) a drop in US employment based on an
article in an English language newspaper. The native Japanese speakers
might have to consult their dictionaries, but they would be able to make
sense of the following lead-in that I took from the Wall Street Journal.

"U.S. payrolls fell by 4,000 in August, the first employment drop in four
years."

In contrast, based on my experience of native English speakers who have
studied Japanese for four years in high school in the State of Michigan,
they would not be able discuss with NSoJ (in Japanese) the same drop in US
employment based on an article in a Japanese language newspaper. Here's
the corresponding lead-in for the same story taken from the Nikkei - the
Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal:

「米労働省が7日発表した8月の雇用統計（季節調整済み）によると、非農業部門の雇用者数は
前月に比べ4000人落ち込んだ。」

In spite of the additional year of schooling and the fact that the subject
matter is about the US economy, the native English speakers, in my
experience, have greater difficulty discussing such a current event topic
with an acceptable degree of conversational fluency. There could be many
reasons. Certainly, native Japanese speakers growing up in Japan are
exposed to quite a bit of English before they study it in school. By and
large, native English speakers, on the other hand, are exposed to very
little Japanese growing up in North America.

Nevertheless, the intangibles influence our anecdotal information. I find
it puzzling that your anecdotal information leads you to believe that
native speakers of Japanese are at such a disadvantage acquiring
conversational fluency in English. I feel it is more likely that, as a
NSoE, you are more aware of the deficiencies of NSoJ communicating in
English than you are of the deficiencies of NSoE communicating in Japanese.

Phil Yff
.

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