<p>UCLAri,</p>
<p>Chances are that your profiency in Japanese is due to the fact that you have been immersed in the language. All those Asian students with their English classes are trying to learn a language through textbooks, lectures, etc., I presume. I doubt that when they leave the classroom, they converse to each other in English. BTW, I live in Vancouver where there are large influxes of Asian students who come for the purposes of learning English. They catch on quickly, and surprise, they understand concepts of “I”. Their main problem lies in the fact that they’re cliquey, but that’s another story altogether.</p>
<p>I never said that Asian countries had the best education systems. I said that I’m tired of Americans using the “creativity” excuse whenever countries from all over the world outperform them in high school academics. It’s a falsely reassuring excuse to not reform the flawed American education system. You tout the number of Nobel Prize winners as justification of the current American system. What about the extremely high incarceration rates? The crime rate? I thought the point of education was to give everybody an equal chance at a stable life. For every Nobel Prize winner, there are thousands of underprivileged kids who are not being taught to read properly, or solve math problems.</p>
<p>Is the Asian educational system ideal? Of course not. For the properly motivated student, the American one is, IMHO, better, because of the lack of pressure and cutthroat competition. However, this discussions isn’t even about American vs. Asian educational systems, it’s about Asian students in America. So let’s get back to that.</p>
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<p>I seriously doubt that more Anglophones are proficient in Japanese than Japanese-speakers are proficient in English. I’ve been told that it’s pointless for English-speakers to try and learn Japanese (one of the most difficult languages in the world) because the Japanese will speak better English than you can hope to speak Japanese. </p>
<p>Don’t compare the transition from Japanese-English with European languages. Italian, Spanish, and French seem to the most common multilanguage packages, and they’re all Romance languages. If you know one, it’s not that hard to pick the other one up. Try and find kids who can learn Finnish and Greek, or something odd like that.</p>