is it true?

[steven]

Originally Posted by Akihiko

In Kyoto it's very small. But if you move towards massive cities such as Tokyo ,etc you'll find much more English-friendly speakers.

I think that in any big city (I don't mean to contradict you, but in many ways Kyoto included) you have a lot of people in a small area, therefore the chances of someone knowing English and willing to help foreigners with English are higher than in the inaka where you might have like more rice fields than people.

The last time I went to Tokyo, I was travelling with my parents and there was a woman who I could kinda tell was eavsdropping in on our conversation. I, not being too familiar with Tokyo, didn't really know exactly where to go, but I had a general idea. I was basically explaining that to my parents. I think we were on the train heading to Harujuku. The lady, in very clean and natural Enlgish, told us where a good place to go was. I can never imagine that happening in my area. The closest thing I've had is a drunk old man scooting next to me and struggling to tell me IN JAPANESE that he loved John Wayne movies, especially growing up.

[dogsbody70]

Yes I meant from a very early age young children just pick up language easily.

I believe there also needs to be an incentive to learn a language. Will you be travelling to these countries?

French and German used to be the main languages apart from Latin but now Spanish seems very common also and with so many people holidaying in Spain thats not surprising.

I am not sure when UK decided to introduce Chinese and Japanese into the curriculum? I believe much is led by Business interests.

I am also a believer in sign language for the deaf being taught everywhere as then deaf people and hearing folk can communicate so much better than often happens.

[steven]

Actually, I think you've touched on two very important things about language learning.

The first one being pretty straightforward- incentive. That is probably the biggest factor in language learning. For a baby, learning their L1 could possibly mean life or death... or at least communicating very important things to your parents, who are usually 100% of the people you know (unless you have siblings).

Finding an incentive in second language learning is an extremely difficult area. If you grow up in a small European country smack dab in the middle of the continent, I would imagine there would be a lot of incentive to learn many languages. If you are someone who travels a lot on business, there would be an incentive. If you are immersed into a language, which can often mean living in one of that language's countries, then you also have incentive. Finding incentive while studying from a book is very hard for some people (unfortunately myself included).

The second thing you brought up is the idea of sign language being taught to all deaf people. Not to take the focus away too far from what you originally said, but there is a huge degree of language that doesn't include words, and that is a big part of language acquisition. Drawing pictures to get your point across is even good. Teachers and schools seem to avoid this aspect of communication, which is unfortunate because that's usually what communication will boil down to for some people. There are a lot of things about a language that are specific to that language (or at least different from some other languages). Like for example, if you see a kid drawing a picture of the sun in America it will most likely be yellow. In Japan, however, the kid will most certainly color it red. It's hard to say just how heavily that impacts language, but I believe that is a huge part of it. General body language and really watching/looking at the person you are talking to will give hints that spoken language will not always convey. Both the way you look and how you act, however, are bound to your languages rules.

I feel a little bit rude bringing this up, but I feel like it connects with the topic at hand. I was talking to some friends recently (who are in their 50's - 60's) and they were talking about how lately when Japanese go on trips to Asian countries, like Guam and places like that, they try to speak English to the people to communicate what they want. Unfortunately something hasn't been working out communication wise recently to the extent that people of those countries have been learning simple Japanese phrases in order to deal with the Japanese. I think it's interesting to note that a lot of practical English use will happen with non-native English speakers for Japanese. I've seen it happen in hotels and other places like that- a Japanese person speaking English and maybe a French person speaking English. Those conversations usually take a long time, but usually seem to work out. I still can't get over the idea of a Person from Guam speaking in Japanese to a Japanese person who is speaking in English. That would be a trip to watch