<p>I have met a large number of Japanese people with very proficient English on neutral ground (that is, in Chinese-speaking countries) and I have little doubt that while Japanese schools are laggards in their region in teaching foreign languages (Taiwan’s schools appear to do far better), in actual day-by-day expatriate reality many more Japanese learn English successfully by immersion than Americans learn Japanese successfully by any means. </p>
<p>I note that few of us in this thread are discussing other subjects than languages over the last several messages. What really caught my attention, as a Chinese-speaking American living for three years in east Asia in the early 1980s (and again for three years at the turn of the most recent century) is that there are plenty of other subjects in which Asian people (Taiwanese, Hong Kongers, Japanese, and various SE Asian nationalities) are much more knowledgeable, matched for levels of schooling completion, than Americans. And the kind of “popular” books that one finds in bookstores in east Asian languages (I can read Chinese proficiently and struggle through Japanese) suggest that there is plenty of self-study that goes on after school completion. The trick, always, is finding a representative sample of the national population rather than relying on anecdotes. Some attempts to do that are recorded in Harold Stevenson’s writings, e.g. [The</a> Learning Gap](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671709836/learninfreed]The”>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671709836/learninfreed) and in Liping Ma’s excellent book [Knowing</a> and Teaching Elementary Mathematics](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805829091/learninfreed]Knowing”>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805829091/learninfreed), among many others.</p>