Gaming My Japanese Coach

[SjemBo1]

I played My French Coach..
It was boring

 

[kazuki_pl]

I visited japan and EVERYONE speaks English.

I live in Japan and no they don't.

this one owned me xD

 

[Wynd]

I played My French Coach..
It was boring

It wasn't booring it was educating.

You live in France, tha's why it's boooooooooring XD


EDIT: oh lol you don't live in FRANCEXD

 

[kikuchiyo]

If you visited a TOURIST region of japan maybe 50% of people know a little of english, but if you visit a non tourist or comercial zone are less tan 20% i think....

If you visit an English speech contest maybe 50% of the people speak English. It might have been up around 60 or 70 at my foreign language college, but step outside the gates and most people did not.

I've spent a lot of time in Tokyo, Kyoto, and in Osaka and I promise you 50% of the population does not speak English.

Where I live I would be impressed if 20% of the population spoke English. One guy at work can get by with very basic English (and he usually doesn't speak it to me unless he wants to know if some dirty/ecchi joke he has works in English i.e., "Your breasts look like two bites of a mosquito.")

 

[-Mew-]

If you visited a TOURIST region of japan maybe 50% of people know a little of english, but if you visit a non tourist or comercial zone are less tan 20% i think....

If you visit an English speech contest maybe 50% of the people speak English. It might have been up around 60 or 70 at my foreign language college, but step outside the gates and most people did not.

I've spent a lot of time in Tokyo, Kyoto, and in Osaka and I promise you 50% of the population does not speak English.

Where I live I would be impressed if 20% of the population spoke English. One guy at work can get by with very basic English (and he usually doesn't speak it to me unless he wants to know if some dirty/ecchi joke he has works in English i.e., "Your breasts look like two bites of a mosquito.")

What I find funny about you guys is that most of you speak that engrish instead of English

And not to mention on television shows and anime etc... god i cant understand a thing they're saying in "english"...

 

[pilotwangs]

Im guessing this'll just teach numbers and basic stuff like that,not enough to get through a Japanese game...

Still,could be fun,I remember using the French coach to help me rivise for tests.

 

[kikuchiyo]

What I find funny about you guys is that most of you speak that engrish instead of English

And not to mention on television shows and anime etc... god i cant understand a thing they're saying in "english"...

Well, I'm not Japanese, so you're not talking about me, but:
Some of the best foreign speakers of English I have known have been Japanese. Native level fluency is (relatively) rare, but there are people who do are amazing - plus the number of people in bigger cities that speak other languages NOT taught in compulsory education.

As for "Engrish," it's hard to speak English and even my middle school kids do really well for what they have been taught.

As someone who's lived in the U.S. and just recently began reading some British forums, so called native English speakers mangle the language as bad or worse than my Japanese students. Indeed, American students, for the most part, don't understand their own language and don't speak another. I'm continually impressed by my Japanese kids - say what you will about the Japanese educational system, and certainly complaints can be made, but most people have an excellent knowledge of how their language fundamentally works and then on top of that have anywhere from a smattering to a intelligent command of English. I went to a foreign language school and most of the students took another language on top of that - usually Spanish or French, but I knew this really beautiful girl who spoke passable Arabic, in addition to English and Japanese.

I've heard some really awful English from Eastern Europeans (you're from Croatia, yes?). As for countries that have a lot of English but it's not the native language, I hear a lot of South Asian English and while SAsians are amazing (learning their local language, Hindi, and English at least), their English sometimes comes out either laughably stilted (authors like P.G. Wodehouse are still very much in vogue in South Asia and so much of the English writing is that same older, stuffy English style) or Indian-ish. I've only recently (last few years) started dating girls that spoke no English, but before then all the Japanese girls I dated spoke at least conversational English.

And if you think Japan's best English speakers are wasting their time on TV shows and anime...well, your cultural interactions with Japan aren't exactly of the highest caliber.

 

[-Mew-]

What I find funny about you guys is that most of you speak that engrish instead of English

And not to mention on television shows and anime etc... god i cant understand a thing they're saying in "english"...

Well, I'm not Japanese, so you're not talking about me
Well not about you in specific but about the japanese people in general, I saw the jap flag on your profile so i thought you where Japanese.
I've heard some really awful English from Eastern Europeans (you're from Croatia, yes?).
Well it's not really Eastern Europe it's more central or south eastern depends who you ask, but we do speak a lot of non native languages, our television unlike East European and other European ones dosent dub anything we only have subtitles and thats a great help to everyone trying to learn any language i personally speak Czech,German,English and Croatian. But yes the average English is bad, since people here usually know German or some other usable language.
Indeed, American students, for the most part, don't understand their own language and don't speak another
From what i can see the average american isnt really interested in any other language, the only thing thats important is you can communicate. As for my self i could care less about Croatian, it's basically a useless language not even 10 million people speak it. But as you can see i feel about the same way about my language as your students care about english, you dont need to master it in order to communicate.
And if you think Japan's best English speakers are wasting their time on TV shows and anime...well, your cultural interactions with Japan aren't exactly of the highest caliber.
I have no cultural interactions with japan

Since anime/manga etc... dosent really qualify as an cultural interaction.
But what i really dont understand is i mean TV stations and movie makers and all that crap have TONS of money why not invest some of the money to actually hire someone who speaks proper English or can at least proofread stuff...

 

[megawalk]

at long last! a japanese coach!
which doesn't Brag a lot!
now i can finally learn japanese so that i can atleast understand anime's
and manga's

 

[thedicemaster]

*looks at page 1, post date*

... still not here?

 

[Taziz]

I'm freaking waiting for this

 

[Orusaka]

Since I have spoken of the merits of a Japanese language teaching game several times before, I shall not touch on the subject here, but I will give you my impressions on English proficiency in Japan.

I lived in Japan for about 6 months, while attending the well-known university of Ritsumeikan in Kyoto. I was studying Japanese at the time; I now study English, and I'm not a native speaker of English. My experiences with English in Japan seems to differ a bit from what I've read here. In my, and my fellow students experience, no-one spoke a lick of English anywhere. Well, this is not quite true, and I will elaborate.

Living in Japan, pretty much anything you'd need to do, you can count on not being able to do it in English. For instance, when you arrive, you have to register. Do you think the government might have someone on hand who might know a word or two of English. No, of course not. Do you think they might have the forms in English. No, again, of course not. Need to open a band account? You'd think the big banks might have someone around to help foreigners open them, wouldn't you. Again, no. Not even the forms you'd need to fill out will be available in English.

The only way I could think of that anyone would be under the impression that "most people" spoke English in Japan, would be if they never left their five star Tokyo hotel, which, incidentally, is the only place I ever ran into a steady supply of proficient English speakers, leading me to believe, that in fact, all of them were probably working there.

To further give you an idea of how horrible the level of English that you'll find in Japan is, I shall give you an example. A very precious few of the university students who studied English were actually able to produce meaningful sentences, and often asked us to help them with their homework. Now, most of the English students there would probably never be able to render such a request. I remember the first time this happened, I was flabbergasted. You would not believe this, but in their textbooks, at university, were horribly written texts full elementary grammatical errors. Even things as bad as incorrect article use. In Japan, at good universities, they actually teach broken English. Horribly broken English at that. What's worse? Their teacher wrote the book! Even better was the fact that the English they were being tought was the kind they teach in elemtary education here. (Norway)

Bottom line is this, don't expect to be able to get anywhere with English in Japan. You might be able to in some tourist spots, but mostly, I found this to fail rather a lot. I could go on forever about the horrors of trying to get anything done in Japan, but this is not the place. Eventually, you'll find a Japanese friend who speaks a bit of English, and s/he will be your lifeline.

 

[hksmrchan]

Helllo fellow weaboos.

I can't wait for this game either, but i think that this game would only provide you of the very basics of the basics. Better to buy textbooks.

 

[alex]

Helllo fellow weaboos.

I can't wait for this game either, but i think that this game would only provide you of the very basics of the basics. Better to buy textbooks.

Did I hear someone say weaboo?

It looks complicated from the screenshots...

 

[cupajoe]

How effective are these games at actually teaching you a language?

 

[kikuchiyo]

Bottom line is this, don't expect to be able to get anywhere with English in Japan. You might be able to in some tourist spots, but mostly, I found this to fail rather a lot. I could go on forever about the horrors of trying to get anything done in Japan, but this is not the place. Eventually, you'll find a Japanese friend who speaks a bit of English, and s/he will be your lifeline.

I agree. I have lived here two years now and I actually visited Ritsumeikan a few times. There are exceptions (Kansai Gaidai, where I went to school being one - Ritsumeikan is a much better and generally focused school so I am not surprised people didnt speak English) but basically people don't speak English.

 

[kikuchiyo]

I hate replying right after my own post but I just saw the reply here:

But what i really dont understand is i mean TV stations and movie makers and all that crap have TONS of money why not invest some of the money to actually hire someone who speaks proper English or can at least proofread stuff...

TV stations don't have that much money. It costs a lot to produce anything and that's even truer for regional broadcast material, even in Japan. It's easier and cheaper to just get people who speak a smattering of English.

The people who do speak English are working in service industry (travel, hotel, etc. like many of the Japanese students at Kansai Gaidai), are doing real work and wouldn't do "media," (academics, lawyers, diplomats, etc.), or are foreigners and not involved in the system (though I know a lot of foreign teachers working in government offices get called up to proofread - we have a CIR here, but I get called sometimes too - just recently I was asked for the best American-English translation for ??? and ???, for example).

 

[Rahnee]

The Japanese and English...

Based on what I've seen so far in the My Chinese Coach, I don't know how useful I'll find this game, but I was thinking, it's September, the game should be out soon, so I go to Amazon.com to double-check and what do I get?

This item will be released on October 14, 2008.

That's no fun...

 

[MyauChanDesu]

Since I have spoken of the merits of a Japanese language teaching game several times before, I shall not touch on the subject here, but I will give you my impressions on English proficiency in Japan.

I lived in Japan for about 6 months, while attending the well-known university of Ritsumeikan in Kyoto. I was studying Japanese at the time; I now study English, and I'm not a native speaker of English. My experiences with English in Japan seems to differ a bit from what I've read here. In my, and my fellow students experience, no-one spoke a lick of English anywhere. Well, this is not quite true, and I will elaborate.

Living in Japan, pretty much anything you'd need to do, you can count on not being able to do it in English. For instance, when you arrive, you have to register. Do you think the government might have someone on hand who might know a word or two of English. No, of course not. Do you think they might have the forms in English. No, again, of course not. Need to open a band account? You'd think the big banks might have someone around to help foreigners open them, wouldn't you. Again, no. Not even the forms you'd need to fill out will be available in English.

The only way I could think of that anyone would be under the impression that "most people" spoke English in Japan, would be if they never left their five star Tokyo hotel, which, incidentally, is the only place I ever ran into a steady supply of proficient English speakers, leading me to believe, that in fact, all of them were probably working there.

To further give you an idea of how horrible the level of English that you'll find in Japan is, I shall give you an example. A very precious few of the university students who studied English were actually able to produce meaningful sentences, and often asked us to help them with their homework. Now, most of the English students there would probably never be able to render such a request. I remember the first time this happened, I was flabbergasted. You would not believe this, but in their textbooks, at university, were horribly written texts full elementary grammatical errors. Even things as bad as incorrect article use. In Japan, at good universities, they actually teach broken English. Horribly broken English at that. What's worse? Their teacher wrote the book! Even better was the fact that the English they were being tought was the kind they teach in elemtary education here. (Norway)

Bottom line is this, don't expect to be able to get anywhere with English in Japan. You might be able to in some tourist spots, but mostly, I found this to fail rather a lot. I could go on forever about the horrors of trying to get anything done in Japan, but this is not the place. Eventually, you'll find a Japanese friend who speaks a bit of English, and s/he will be your lifeline.

My, my..

For someone who's not a native English speaker, you're very good.

Anyways, I checked the original link I've posted and found this,

Amazon Link

It seems that they changed the release date to October 14th instead of September 23.

 

[Wynd]

Ain't that Good news.

OMG! october 14!!!!! my father's birthday and his in Japan ryt now

then I'll renew my countdown 5 weeks, 5 days, and 49 minutes left.