Wow what an upset! I wanted Korea to win.
The fact that we have an English proficiency Index worth spending more than 10 words on really highlights the bias of the people who organize this data.
The fact that we have an English proficiency Index worth spending more than 10 words on really highlights the bias of the people who organize this data.
Read the report. It’s really well put together. https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/WIBIwq6RdJvcD9bc8RMd/cefcom-epi...
>English proficiency remains a reasonable indicator of a nation's ability to produce goods and services that generate economic growth, and it correlates well to national investment in helping people achieve their full potential by providing education, healthcare and a decent standard of living.
Meanwhile China's boom in the mid 2010-s (China is 2nd to dead last on this chart, above Japan) still had westerners flock to them. In a few instances, disgustingly so. The language barrier at that level of economy is negligible. A few skilled translators are a rounding error for that gold mine.
I'm more than fine with data for data's sake. I have all sorts of useless trivia and statistics that simply put a smile on my face and have little practical use. But using "how good you are at English as a society" to predict economics seems a bit tonedeaf.
People aren’t usually trying to just predict GDP or something. A report like this is useful for a big company deciding where to expand. I’m writing this from Colombia, which has a big call center industry, much of it in English.
“English proficiency of a nation doesn’t matter, don’t talk about it much”, which is what you seem to be getting at, is so clearly wrong to me. Maybe it’s the bias of personal experience. Just because it’s not important to you doesn’t mean it’s unimportant in general.
And sure. I have bias and didn't do any mass survey. But when you see more and more of your country falling in education ranks, and the people up top trying to appeal more to countries with very poor english skills as opposed to building those facilities domestically. , I'm going to be skeptical that the language of the country matter much in the grand scheme of things.
They still use the same software as the west (iOS, Android, Windows, Chrome, ...).
Most of these cornerstones of modern Software maintain Japanese, Chinese and Korean documentation, but there is no way those docs are as good as the English ones.
There are whole stacks of software used in Japan which are not used anywhere else. Sometimes it predates western adoption of similar ideas (like the media phones Japan had years before the iPhone, which to some degree Apple was copying), sometimes it Japan that adopts something western and then forks it. It is a recognized and studied phenomenon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome
There is some advantage to speaking English as you then get access to two separate development cultures and can pick the best of each for the job. But it is not a hard requirement like it is for the rest of the world. Only a small minority of engineers work on the latest western technology stacks like we do.
In that way I would say English fluency very much matters for Japan if they want to stay relevant with the rest of the world.
The diagrams on p. 13 all have correlation coefficients (r values) between 0.56 and 0.61, which signify only moderate associations. And the causality from language to success behind such associations is very likely even weaker. In other words, people from many countries are good at English because their country is economically advanced (and not the other way round).
I think that on an individual level, it is very desirable to be able to at least read English very well because it opens up so many resources on the Internet. However, when it comes to economic impact, the ranking seems to suggest an extremely tenuous link at best. In addition, foreign language skills are likely to become even less relevant in the future as translation software improves.
Imagine doing that same analysis on a report of a country’s metal deposits. I’m sure it would be all over the place. But saying this topic isn’t worth writing ten words about would be silly.
This does not mean that it might not be extremely relevant in a certain subdomain, such as academics. But generally? No.
It seems that IMD is based in Switzerland and Singapore.[0] Singapore and Switzerland hold ranks 1 and 2, respectively, in digital competitiveness.[1] Singapore has a high level of English proficiency.[2]
I don't think the mere fact that an English proficiency Index worth spending more than 10 words on exists shows that the people who organized this data are biased. English proficiency is important in business, science and programming, to name some examples. I think an argument as to why the inclusion of such a metric is biased should be given.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Institute_for_Ma...
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-economy/articl...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index#2...
It's natural for the citizens of a country that uses English as though it were its native language to be proficient in it.
[0] https://www.singstat.gov.sg/-/media/files/publications/cop20... p. 40
[0] https://www.singstat.gov.sg/-/media/files/publications/cop20... p. 42
[2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... p. 8
[3] https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/d4a8d621480672a1c99...
If adult immigrants are included, then I strongly agree with the later part of your comment! There's no reason the US shouldn't similarly be included in the list as it has tens of millions of Spanish-speaking residents who immigrated as adults. Canada, Australia and New Zealand should probably be included too, if Singapore is.
Not being able to speak English means you have limited ability to speak to people from around the world. That's worth 10 words in a report.
The Franks were mostly Germanic which is why English is considered a Germanic language and why Lingua Franca is a thing and why I can riff on the French (Franks) language being English as a silly joke.
English absorbs vocabulary from wherever and whomever it touches because it abhors a vacuum. I will give you a gold star if you can tell me how many languages I have referenced in that last sentence, and this one.
It's kind of ironic that we remember the name via the Roman scholars. Rome had fallen and the Holy Roman Empire was very not holy and sure as heck not Roman.
True, but this underestimates Japanese's prominence.
Japanese (and Korean) fluency is fairly important in much of ASEAN (for example, Vietnam and Thailand), as much of their leadership, rising executives, and rising academics tend to study abroad in Japan.
In Germany and Austria, for example, a lot of graduate level STEM university programs are taught in English, even when everyone in the room is perfectly capable of speaking German, just because the literature is English.
There are two types of ASEAN students:
1. "Students" - guest workers brought under the "Trainee" program who in reality are temporary guest workers cleaning toilets, gutting fish, manually harvesting strawberries, or working in hostess bars. They are treated similar to how Nepali and Bangladeshi migrant labor would be in UAE because these trainee workers in Japan lack legal support and often in debt to a broker in the home country.
2. Actual Students - brought as part of Japan's soft power diplomacy in ASEAN. They will study in a mix of Japanese and English or full Japanese (depending on the university). They will also be housed in dorms for international students. These students end up becoming civil servants, professors, and potentially business leaders.
Most junior and mid-level professors and medical leadership at top medical universities in Vietnam like UMP tend to be alums of these programs in Japan and SK.