dtcamero Wrote:that's interesting... my experience living in nyc and tokyo was that there is a large number of women mostly, with good english, who usually fell into one of 2 profiles.
1) japanese family, grew up in america speaking 2 languages flawlessly... they simply will never acknowledge your level as strong enough to take seriously.
2) japanese living in asia who did college in the west for years... they are the most dangerous, despite having lower english levels than #1. The reason is that they secretly see you as the way to keep their english skills up, and will only passingly acknowledge your desire to use their native language until you demonstrate a higher proficiency level in japanese than their english.
First, my experience is by no means how things are for everyone.
#1) is out People who grow up bi, grow up bi, and they code switch so internally that even without thinking they are going to speak English to a non-Asian face. And that's hard to reset, on any level.
The strange part is whether or not they were sent to Japanese school kind of determines where the reading and writing are. Their speech is completely bi, but I have talked to a couple of guys who (for instance) went to American language schools in Japan and then Oxford Cambridge, and prefer to speak English with me, and get their forms in English, because they read it more naturally than Japanese, and yet won't speak English to even fairly decent English speakers who are Native Japanese. And this is just what you are saying: They are not there to be English Conversation School for the Japanese, nor Japanese Language School for the Gwai Lo. In fact they often have no ability to parse where points of difficulty lie in learners from either side because they never 'learned' a language.
The other place I personally see something like this is when I am talking to a Korean in English (not Zainichi, but born and raised in Korea) because not Japanese, and the Japanese staff/other customers just starts speaking to them in Japanese, and they just start talking to each other in Japanese. The Korean person who can travel unnoticed in a Japanese group will identify as Korean to me as a Gwai Lo, but will simply accept being spoken to in Japanese, and speaking in Japanese with a Japaneser.
#2 is where you experiences and mine probably differs due to the nice places where you worked. Most Japanese I work with and/or know are not college graduates. And the customers are coming from Japan, in 社員旅行, or 卒業旅行 and the like. They are not meeting me for business.
In my experiences, outside of the raised bi-lingual groups, and the very few who studied at top level Western Universities, the number of Japanese who can speak functionally are not that many.
It's good to know that somewhere, there are some Japanese who can learn English as adults. But like I said, the only success story I hear about in person is Japanese learning Spanish quickly.
