Ten Years of English. Still Can’t Speak It.

In recent EF English Proficiency Index rankings, Japan has sat in the “very low proficiency” category, near the bottom among high-income countries. Japan has struggled to improve in these rankings for more than a decade.

That’s the data. But the data tells you what, not why.

The system is built backwards.

Japan’s English education has historically been built around one goal: passing entrance exams. Entrance exams test grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. They don’t test whether you can order a coffee, ask for directions, or tell someone how you feel.

Then there’s the katakana problem. Japanese has a writing system specifically designed to represent foreign words. Katakana is useful inside Japanese — it’s an efficient way to absorb vocabulary from other languages. The problem begins when its version of English is mistaken for English itself.

“Strike” becomes sutoraiku. “McDonald’s” becomes Makudonarudo. The original sound is gone before it’s learned. The person speaking it has no idea anything is wrong — they learned sutoraiku, they’re saying sutoraiku, and in their mind they’re speaking English.

As of 2020, English is mandatory from the third grade of elementary school — though it only becomes a formally graded subject in fifth grade. Add middle school and high school, and many students reach adulthood after nearly a decade of English classes. Add university English requirements, and it can be more.

Ten years. Still freezing up when the conversation goes off-script.

Why the silence persists.

The first reason is cultural. In Japan, being wrong in public carries real social weight. Grammar mistakes are mistakes. Pronunciation errors are errors. And in a culture where not embarrassing yourself — and not embarrassing others — is a baseline social operating principle, the logical response to the possibility of making an error is to say nothing.

So they say nothing. And because they say nothing, they never get better. And because they never get better, the fear grows. The loop closes.

The second reason is simpler: Japan doesn’t need English to function. Every form of entertainment, every government service, every product, every conversation — all available in Japanese. No pressure point. No moment where the inability to speak English creates a genuine crisis.

Compare that to the Netherlands or Scandinavia, where English-language media was never fully dubbed, where international business is unavoidable. Those countries top the proficiency rankings. The exposure isn’t incidental. It’s structural.

The business of not speaking.

This is my own observation, not a provable fact — but English education in Japan is a massive industry. Conversation schools, prep courses, textbooks, apps, tutors.

A country full of people who still can’t speak English after years of study is, from a certain angle, a very stable customer base. This isn’t unique to Japan — it’s the same structural problem as any industry where the product works better as a subscription than a solution. Think diet programs, or language apps that celebrate streaks while avoiding the question of whether anyone is actually becoming fluent. I’m not suggesting a conspiracy. I’m suggesting that systems which are also businesses don’t always have strong incentives to produce the outcome they advertise.

The result is a specific kind of loop. Someone decides they want to learn. They buy a course. They study. They still can’t speak. They conclude the problem is themselves. The trauma of not speaking — built up over a decade of school — deepens. They try again with a different course. Same result.

The method isn’t the first problem. The foundation is.

I came to English from the other direction.

I was twenty years old. I’d barely studied in school — can was a word I’d heard, but couldn’t have told you what it meant. I showed up at a language school in America with essentially nothing.

What I didn’t have was the fear.

I couldn’t speak, so there was nothing to protect. In one class, the teacher explained the difference between “city” and “country” — as in urban and rural. I spent the entire lesson convinced something was wrong. A place and a nation, the same word? I raised my hand. The teacher explained again. I asked again. In broken, confident, completely wrong English, I kept asking until something clicked.

The other students — most of them Japanese, with years more study than me — watched this exchange with visible discomfort. You weren’t supposed to ask like that. You weren’t supposed to be that wrong, that loudly.

Six months later I could hold a conversation.

The other Japanese students knew more English than I did — grammatically, structurally, on paper. But many of them couldn’t get through a sentence without stopping, recalibrating, apologizing for the attempt. The knowledge was there. The permission wasn’t.

I also noticed something else. My pronunciation was better than most of theirs — not because I’d studied more, but because I’d studied less. No katakana filter. No years of classroom English telling me what the sounds were supposed to be. I just listened and repeated.

And most of them had no idea their English was hard to understand. That’s the quiet part. The katakana system doesn’t just distort the sounds — it convinces you the sounds are correct.

The people who become fluent.

I have a Japanese friend who connected with an American on social media. For months, they communicated through Google Translate. Then something shifted — he started wanting to actually talk to this person. Not through a machine. Just talk.

That desire is worth more than any textbook.

The students who become fluent aren’t the ones who study hardest. They’re the ones who found something — a place, a person, a piece of music, a film, a dream — that happened to exist in English. The language follows the desire. It always has.

The structural problems are real. The fear is real. The decade of miseducation is real. None of that disappears because someone wants to make a friend.

But it’s a better starting point than anything I’ve seen in a classroom.

I’ll be honest: this blog exists partly because the problem I’m describing hasn’t been solved.

If every Japanese person could explain their own culture in fluent English, you wouldn’t need me.

All of the above is one Japanese person’s interpretation. Treat it accordingly.