Language "Cool" Ranking

[Mulboyne]

English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Latin, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Russian, Portuguese, Other.

An article on CNET (Japanese) details a survey ranking the "cool" quotient of foreign languages. The results come from a small sample of net users mainly between their twenties and forties. Asked about their current overseas language skills, 67.7% admitted they basically had none, 25.8% said they could handle a simple exchange while 6.5% said they were comfortable with daily conversation. Of those who claimed some ability, 92.1% had English, 9.4% Chinese and 5% German (the numbers don't sum to a hundred because some are presumably multilingual). Most speakers thought it was cool to have another language but, in general, the survey revealed that non-speakers valued having a language more than speakers - perhaps not a particularly surprising result. Those who thought it was cool favoured English as the preferred language by an overwhelming majority as the table above shows. The results show that Chinese, although a popular language to study, is regarded as less cool than Arabic and only slightly ahead of Korean. European languages are clear favourites and even Latin ranks higher than Arabic.

[Mulboyne]

There's a new site called Nihonjin Eigo which looks at how the average Japanese person uses English. Annoyingly, it requires registration but you can get a rough idea of what it consists of from the example page. It asks what English phrase, out of three choices offered, would best convey the meaning of " bonenkai" to a native English speaker. When you click on your answer, "Eric sensei" will tell you what he thinks and will also suggest that a better translation than any of them would be "year end party". Similarly, the options for テンパる are "panic", "temperl" and "up up", Eric says "panic" is closest in meaning out of the three but suggests "about to snap" is better still.

[ghostunit]

wow, two things: why do they think it's cool to speak English when they are all supposed to speak it at some level?

they study it in school for like, ten years. Yeah, I know the regular Japanese can't really speak any English beyond greetings but still, I was guessing they would be sick of it after ten damn years of studying it.

Second, wassup with Korean at 1%? I thought Korea was sorta chic with its nice economy and being so close to Japan.

[ec_nana]

^^^ For some reason, there are still loadsa people out there who thinks that SK is a backward society.

[Marked Trail]

Originally Posted by ec_nana

^^^ ... loadsa people out there who thinks that SK is a backward society.

Because it is.

And, it doesn't help that Korea slavishly copies only the crappiness of Japan.

[Greji]

Originally Posted by Marked Trail

Because it is.

And, it doesn't help that Korea slavishly copies only the crappiness of Japan.

I'm kinda glad you backed up Take on this Marked T, because I am in complete agreement.

[ghostunit]

do elaborate on your opinion about South Korea (I don't know Korea, I'm curious).

[Gilligan]

Should we tell parasitius what people here think of English?

[kusai Jijii]

Originally Posted by ghostunit

wassup with Korean at 1%? I thought Korea was sorta chic with its nice economy and being so close to Japan.

Yeah, especially like how they have historically been so God-dammed-lovie-dovie and all. Its like, Japan was in love with the 'Kankies' when they helped them out with the whole annexation thing, and now they dont even wanna know them. Who woulda thought?

[kusai Jijii]

Oh, and buy the way, I was at a bonenkai last night, and according to the fuckwits I was surrounded by, the best (and only) thing that Korea was apparently good for was its cheep and enthusiastic whores. Long live the Flower children!