English-only at Rakuten

Petty, baseless, and stupid. And pretty much par for your course.

Um, no, that would be par for your course, actually, but a flaming hypocrite and troll like yourself can hardly be blamed for failing to notice their own personality flaws.

I sense a lot of anger from you, snookums, what happened? Wife and kids dump you and take the house or something?

I think it should be “Start cross-sharing of expertise and best-practices” (plural)

Either plural or singular will suffice in this presentation. And “English-nization” is also clear and unambiguous for the purpose of the presentation, Mr. Shakespeare.

There are books that can help you, you know, like this one.

If randomcommenter is “pretty arrogant” as you said, what are you? Presumably you are a native English speaker, and isn’t it arrogant to expect others to speak your native language?
Okay, there might be some companies which adopted English as the official language, but I’m sure few of them are East Asian ones. Good or bad, Japan, Korea, China (except Hongkong) and Taiwan are the worst place to learn English — their native languages are by no means (linguistically or culturally) related to English and they’ve never been colonized by the British Empire or America.

It’s proven that English is too difficult for East Asian. While an European, whose language and culture are very closely related to the English one, spends ten years in their primary and secondary education, how long an East Asian needs to achieve the same thing? Twenty or thirty years. In fact, there is a famous study which showed that an American diplomat needed thrice as long time to master Dutch, French or Spanish, twice as long time to master German, to master Japanese, Korean, Chinese or Arabic.

It’s very unlikely that an average Japanese would be able to speak English fluently even under the best of all possible education systems.

Leitmotiv

Let me be really precise, so there is no room for misunderstanding:

I think it’s an extremely difficult thing Rakuten is trying to pull off. The difficulty in switching a company’s language over to English depends on many factors: The size of the company. The composition of the company. The average level of English ability of that country’s citizens.

For some countries and some companies, the switchover is easy. For some, it is hard. The fact that it’s easy for some doesn’t mean it’s easy for others, nor does the fact that it’s hard for some mean it’s hard for others.

For Rakuten, it’s going to be very, very difficult. I wouldn’t say “virtually impossible” (and, despite your eye-rolling, I didn’t say it). I said the execution is decidedly not simple. If the idea were to establish English as the lingua franca in documentation only, or only in certain departments, or certain echelons of the company, I’d say, “sure”. But once you start talking every level of the company, even extending to cafeteria workers, you’re now in the “decidedly not simple” area. Not impossible: hire foreigners to staff your cafeteria. Or hire people with pretty strong academic backgrounds or overseas living experience to staff your cafeteria. These are not impossible things. But it’s difficult to maintain a profitable company when you’re paying for bilingually skilled employers at every level. Every workplace I’ve worked at in Japan has paid a premium (some minor, some major, but always there) to bilingual workers, and unless Rakuten does the same, it’s going to find itself lacking in personnel.

My analogy was not a direct analogy. I wasn’t comparing the difficulty involved in creating an English workplace to becoming the most profitable corporation in the universe in a single year. My analogy was merely to illustrate that the simplicity of deciding something does not correlate to the simplicity of implementing it. It may not have been the most elegant of analogies, for which I apologize, but I didn’t realize each word would be so carefully scrutinized. There’s no backpeddling here: what I attempted to say before is the same thing that I am (so long-windedly) attempting to say here. And if something I say is misunderstood, and I have to clarify it, I hope that it, too, will be understood as clarification.

As for the hole-in-one analogy, how is it equally misguided and inconsistent? (You may be right, it may be, but I haven’t realized it, so it would be nice if you could point it out). I meant to provide an example of something which is difficult, but occurs frequently, which is what I believe “switching the lingua franca of a company to English” is. Which part of it was misguided or inconsistent?

@Kevin not kevin – not as long as leitmotiv is around. He’s a one trick pony.

Well, OK, he did actually make an intelligent, thought-provoking comment on the “Japan’s Best Technology” thread. Fairly stunned me – I never knew he had it in him.