Yes, there is resistance from some. But the extremist are always louder. Most people do not really care, and moeny is above anything else today.

Just see how many Chinese student and ‘fake student’ in Japan today. i believe it is from 1/4 to 1/2 million.

There are quite a few elderly Koreans who are the same way.

Earlier today I was reading a Japanese book on campus, having my lunch, and an older couple started talking to me. The husband didn’t know much Japanese, but the wife spoke it quite well-not because she learned it in school, but because all of her aunts and uncles used it as their native language when she was growing up!

Well any Korean older than 65 would have grown up with heavy exposure to it. Many still retain some of it.

The attitude towards Japan and Japanese is completely different in Korea and Taiwan, something that eventually I’ll be writing a lot about”¦

There are a lot of caveats there. This gets very misunderstood, but for many, many Koreans who actually grew up during that time, there is a clear distinction between Japanese military authorities and Japanese people.

The civilian-run government in Taiwan had to answer to the government in Tokyo; in contrast, the military-run government in Korea had to answer to know one. Plus, with Korea being seen as a stepping stone to a higher position, there was a lot of pressure to keep things in line in Chosen.

And yes, Japanese is NOT looked upon well in China at all. Every single Chinese person to whom I told I was studying Japanese responded with a look combining mild bewilderment and disgust. “Why Japanese? Why don’t you study Chinese instead?”Â?

I would have taken that more as promotion of Chinese instead of disgust with Japan.

But since you brought it up, there are some people (a tiny minority) in Korea who think that compulsory English education is a result of American imperalism and they resent that English education is such a major thing in their lives.

The attitude towards Japan and Japanese is completely different in Korea and Taiwan, something that eventually I’ll be writing a lot about…

And yes, Japanese is NOT looked upon well in China at all. Every single Chinese person to whom I told I was studying Japanese responded with a look combining mild bewilderment and disgust. “Why Japanese? Why don’t you study Chinese instead?” they would say. “Don’t worry, I’ll study it next,” I told them, in an attempt at pacification. And lo, so it was!

Oh, and Lirelou, thank you for the compliment.

Just to be clear, are you comparing mandatory English study today with the colonial period policy of nation-wide forced use of Japanese, including names, which included banning the use of Korean?

I just can’t see someone having such a “dislike” of Japan that they go to the trouble of learning Japanese but then refuse to speak it.

English, maybe. Not Japanese. Unless you’re referring to the elderly people of Taiwan who were required to learn Japanese as children in school. I know that some Koreans would avoid using Japanese because of their hatred for Japanese authority, but that is a unique situation more akin to compulsory English study today.

The Chinese aren’t all that fond of the US or the UK either, yet there’s a major national push for Chinese nationals to learn English. I’d say given the nature of Chinese/Japanese commerce, many Chinese learn Japanese out of purely pragmatic reasons. I can certainly say that’s true of English, for my employment in China is a direct consequence.

Italian of course is quite useful in Italy, especially as Italians are notoriously bad at English. It isn’t difficult to learn at all…..I was an average student of Italian for two years yet after six months living there was able to speak it more or less fluently. By contrast, my Chinese is still middling despite having been in China for fourteen months and having studied it for the past seven months or so.

And I have the same evil plot for my progeny. There was a guy in my study abroad program whose parents sent him to China for high school for a year, and his slang and idiomatic Mandarin was fantastic. Even the Triads complimented him.

Do you live in Korea now? Ten years ago, the “no practical experience” would have been true for almost everyone, but not so much anymore. From the mid-1990s on, many kids have been exposed to native English speakers, and so their confidence level and ability are both much higher (though still leaving a lot to be desired) compared to five or ten years ago.

Combine this with a historical shame complex at looking uneducated factor

What you’re saying does apply to a business situation, but for a tourist situation, especially when it comes to figuring something out for a visitor in obvious need, even terrible speakers will usually try to muster what little ability they have to fix the situation.

and viola, a population much more comfortable speaking in a third language; Japanese or Chinese. (Sometimes French, German, or Spanish)””?-

But the problem with your theory is that the percentage who have elected to learn Japanese is considerably smaller than those who have been required to learn English, because the latter group is EVERYONE. Even more so with Chinese.

In an office, a person who speaks functional Japanese or Chinese might be the only functional Japanese or Chinese speaker in the place, so yes, there is less worry about looking stupid in front of others. But that’s an office situation, not an on-the-street tourism situation.

English still reigns supreme, and the odds of finding someone to help you in English is much greater than with Japanese.

I live near MyÃ…Â?ngdong, so I go there a lot and occasionally try out my very poor and very limited Japanese, giving directions to people looking at Japanese-language maps and appearing lost. I know from what they tell me that asking people in Japanese how to find something doesn’t always work. They have to go back to shops with “we speak Japanese” signs in the window and ask them for directions.

There are several people who I worked with for a couple of weeks. Everything was conducted in Korean, one day I said “So desu Ka”Â? and a chorus of “So desu ne”Â? startled me.

Even people in Korea who never took Japanese do know those phrases, plus a few more.

Also, I noticed that section chiefs would dismiss the staff and ask to talk to me alone, and immediately switch to decent English. They did not want to make any mistake in front of their subordinates.

That doesn’t surprise me, but the parameters were tourism, not office work.

Why would someone go to the trouble of learning the language of a country they dislike?

There are lots of people in Korea who learn Japanese, and even if they don’t like Koizumi or have serious opinions about Yasukuni, they are interested in Japan as a country, at least its traditional culture, pop culture, people, or something, and they’re not going to NOT speak something they’ve gone through the trouble of CHOOSING to learn, if the situation came up.

I’d also like to nominate my second language, Italian, as being among the most useless- since they were such lousy colonialists, Italian is only spoken in Italy, the Ticino province in Switzerland, and pockets of Dalmatia (Croatia), Albania, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Libya.

Italian is a very useful language if you’re in Italy, which is at the top of my short list of countries I would really like to live in for three to five years (followed by Japan).

For English speakers, it’s not all that hard to learn, apparently.

Koreans are required to learn some 2000 hantcha to pass the college entrance exam (the numer goes up and down; at one time the number was essentially ZERO). That means that if you need to communicate, you might be able to write something down and have a hantcha-literate Korean get the idea.

The caveats are that not every Korean gets to college SAT-level hantcha-reading ability. Also, the Koreans and the Japanese have tended to use hantcha-based vocabulary constructed from different characters. Plus, as sun bin (?) noted, Koreans tend to use non-simplified characters, a luxury Koreans have over Japanese and Chinese because Koreans need to manually write Chinese characters only occasionally (there are many characters a typical Korean can read but not write accurately).

So if a Korean were to write æ°¸éÂ?  for ‘eternal’ or ‘forever,’ a Chinese (or Japanese) might be able to pick up on the meaning as æ°¸æÂ?’ (right?), at least because of the first character.

And a Korean would easily figure out that Ã¥”ºÂ½ is supposed to be 圔¹.

On the other hand, a typical Korean (or a Japanese?) would see 明天 and not recognize it as tomorrow (do I have the right word for that?). Instead, it looks like it would mean ‘bright sky.’

Even though 明æ—Â¥ is an (underused) term for ‘tomorrow,’ the 天 would throw off a lot of people, since this is not used to represent ‘day,’ to my knowledge.

I’d also like to nominate my second language, Italian, as being among the most useless- since they were such lousy colonialists, Italian is only spoken in Italy, the Ticino province in Switzerland, and pockets of Dalmatia (Croatia), Albania, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Libya.

Oh well, it’s fun to speak, anyway. Isn’t it fashionable now in Europe for people to say, “Ciao?” Sort of like people in China saying “Bye bye” at the end of their phone conversations.

Finally- is there a foreign language more difficult than Chinese? Someone please tell me, “no”, so I’ll feel much better about my own struggles to learn it.

Sun Bin’s suggestion on learning Arabic for the alphabet is worth considering, but I would propose instead as a corollary that any serious traveler pick up the Arabic and Cyrllic alphabets, which will at least allow you to puzzle out the rough pronounciation of dozens of different languages, and may be a huge help in reading maps throughout much of the world.

then i would focus on the written form as a way to choose.

i would choose arabic over spanish, mainly because it has a different alphabet.

then maybe russian

then kushibo’s point about chinese character (in one of the languages that uses it)….unfortunately there is very infrequent usage of chinese character in korea now so it may not be that useful. (vietnam also romantized).
i put chinese at the end, because there are a lot more characters to learn compared with phonetic languages.

spanish and the roman languages have a lot in common, and you can at least use your knowledge of english alphabet to do a little something

As for Chinese, it will become increasingly useful as Chinese tourists head overseas — add to the fact that it has, over the past decade, become the most popular language across the world to learn after English.