>>1372275>er than your average Japanese.There's a lot more to it. Part of it is that it isn't their native language, but it's closer to why the French are as monolingual as they are. Their education system is a very much structured in a banking model, where participation is strongly discouraged, with slight mistakes resulting in ridicule from their teacher and peers. In the English teaching books that I have for TESOL, a big part of teaching in a lot of Asian countries is getting students to participate without fear of reprisal. A lot of learning comes from making mistakes and just participating, while their education system focuses on rote memorization. There's a lot of other issues with the Japanese education system, but that's one of the biggest things they try to get teachers to work around.
On top of that, students usually have a negative opinion towards learning English. It's stressful because so much of their work is focused on rote memorization, while English as a language is about building off of concepts, though it's less consistent than something like Spanish. In comparison to Japanese, which requires the memorization of thousands of characters, as a result, English is a very dissimilar language from Japanese. Spanish or French are category 1 from English, requiring the least amount of time to acquire proficiency. English and Japanese are category 5 from each other.
