Easy Money

[Neo-Rio]

The Japanese are so F*cking stupid! So many of them want to learn a foreign language that they'd take lessons from anyone as long as they looked foreign. It would seem ALL foreigners are native English speakers!!!

Koreans are not much better. I met an Iranian guy in Seoul who was posing as an Italian Canadian and teaching English there, and living out of a youth hostel. His English accent was really bad too!

It seems to me that most people who want to learn English have no idea why they want to learn it. They just WANT to. Every time I ask a student what they want to learn English for, they just DON'T KNOW! (I'm actually encouraging a student of mine to get pen-pals, only because I'm quitting English teaching soon. Ordinarily, I wouldn't do this or I'd be out of a job!)

That would help explain why they are all generally so terrible at English. All of them want to be seduced by the exotically foreign, but so few of them really have a need to use English at all in their daily lives... so they never practice it and never get good at it.
As long as they FEEL they are learning something, then they are sufficiently seduced.

Then there is this weird group of people who learn English REALLY well, and don't even want to use English! I know a girl who went to university to study English, got EXCELLENT grades, and has wonderful pronunciation. BUT... when I spoke to her in English, she got shy and CRIED!
I mean..... WTF?!?!?

[Marvin Feltcher]

Thank God the Japanese are stupid or we'd all (or nearly all of us, I guess) be out of work.

[Neo-Rio]

The Japanese used to pride themselves on their level of education, but the new generation of kids are as thick as two very short planks!!! Why do the Japanese bother learning English at school... they never use it!

As long as they FEEL they are intelligent.... that's all that matters.
A true triumph of the primitive/emotional side of the brain overtaking the civilised/logical side.

The three blows to human pride:-
1) The earth is not the centre of the universe
2) We were evolved from apes
3) We're not really in control of how we think, even though we think we are.

[Taro Toporific]

Then there is this weird group of people who learn English REALLY well, and don't even want to use English! I know a girl who went to university to study English, got EXCELLENT grades, and has wonderful pronunciation. BUT... when I spoke to her in English, she got shy and CRIED!
I mean..... WTF?!?!?

Oh, I tell ya what's worse and happens many times a day to me...

I'm talking in full-blown, Blues Brothers English with a couple of NIHONJIN translators. And, they're talkin' trash back to too me twice as fast-- native-speaker like. Cool. The phone rings and NIHONJIN translators' dai-sempai---the guy that taught them everything they know about English--- needs some English text revision and they all start jabbering in whacked out KATAKANA English. ARRRRG! Just when they need to be accurate to read an English transcription of the phone, they fall back to ungrammatical Let's English as taught in school here. Ohhhh.

[Neo-Rio]

they fall back to ungrammatical Let's English as taught in school here. Ohhhh.

Gotta love that Japlish grammar.

I'm not sure who started it, but it seems that somebody taught the Japanese that they could turn nouns into verbs by putting Let's in front of them. (e.g. Let's Gaming)

I mean, this kind of crap is so common place that you'd think all teachers were teaching this or somehting. They seem to remember the mistakes a lot better than the correct way of doing it.