How long have you been studying English?

Kansai gaidai cant be very good then, cause everyone ive spoken to at Nagoya Gaidai (where i study Japanese) are pretty good at English

In Spain its the same or even worse. People study English since they enter school (that means 12 years before entering university) and they don’t know almost anything. Actually, many people in Spain wouldn’t even be able to speak like the girl in the video.
As someone said before, you have to “want” to learn the language. In many countries of Europe, English is a must, since they dont have big industries or ways to be really competitive without English.

It’s much harder to learn to read and write Japanese (including kanji) than to speak it.

To be fair to the Japanese, English is a difficult language to learn to speak — it’s much harder than Japanese. Also, native English speaking countries are a long way away, and can’t be easily visited for practice.

It’s basically impossible to get to a good level of fluency in a language without chances for in-depth speaking practice.

“focuses on exams instead of communication”: exactly. And this is not a coincidence.

The Japanese do many things extremely well, but communicating is unfortunately not amongst them. Just last week, I found out that a friend of my girlfriend majored in English at the University. But she refused to speak to me in English, because she was too shy!

At the research institute where I am at, a good fraction of the scientists have difficulties even introducing themselves in English. They seem very nervous when they must speak English. Since English is the lingua franca of all science, they inevitably limit their career chances due to this deficit.

Sure, language learning can be hard, but the few Japanese who speak English fluently, typically smart people but not unusual geniuses, show that it can be done. I think that a little bit of effort to engage in friendly communication could go a long way.

There are a number of issues with English teaching in Japan other than the “rote memorization of grammar vs. oral communication” side, but the easiest problem to find is that most of the people teaching English are Japanese. When I studied Japanese in college in the States, I learned from a Japanese person. When I studied Spanish, it was from billingual teachers who were native speakers or had lived abroad (and this is in a public HS). The pronunciation both in class and how it’s butchered on TV and in everyday life only increases the divide between proper oral communication in English and the situation you see in the video.

Programs like JET and companies like Nova, Interac, Aeon are all well and good, but when you give kids an hour or 4 every week or so, they’re not going to remember much.

Yes, it’s exactly exams over meaningful language skills. Let’s not think that Japanese—or Koreans, as in my case—are experts at grammar or writing, either. Writing samples from even Korean ENglish teachers are riddled with errors. Perhaps they have a general understanding of the Korean equivalents of the English grammar found in their textbooks, but they struggle with concepts not in the book or with applying what they learned. It’s not a coincidence.