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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Does Japan count? They're pretty monolingual.
I would count them, foreign language classes (so basically English) are mandatory in Japanese schools, but I doubt many Japanese people speak other languages well.
I'd love to have some actual data for this, but searching mostly just brings up results for the Japanese language test for foreigners.
From anecdotal experience being in Japan, it's very rare to meet someone who can casually communicate in English unless it's part of their job or they've studied abroad. English in schools is mandatory as a class, but it only seems enough to remember basic phrases rather than imparting full fluency. I'd compare it to how Americans in high school will often study Spanish or French, then remember none of it.
That’s because memorizing a dictionary isn’t the same thing as learning a language, and memorizing a thousand different grammatical rules doesn’t really help you at all. You’re basically translating every time you speak the other language and spend half your mental faculties trying to figure out how the words go together. There’s no intuitiveness.
It’s an exhausting way to learn and at the end of the day the best case scenario is you’re a walking dictionary. Obviously you can’t remember all of that forever if you’re not constantly using it.
The vast majority of American language classes is just rote memorization.