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Japan ranks 92nd in English proficiency, lowest ever: survey (mainichi.jp)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Summary

Japan’s English proficiency ranking dropped to 92nd out of 116 countries, the lowest ever recorded.

The decline is attributed to stagnant English proficiency among young people, particularly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Netherlands ranked first, followed by European countries, while the Philippines and Malaysia ranked 22nd and 26th, respectively.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Pitch accent isn't a tone system, also ん can he pronounced in way too many ways.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

also ん can he pronounced in way too many ways

If English speakers¹ can deal with oo being pronounced at least six different ways (moon, book, door, blood, cooperation, brooch) they should be able to deal with this...

1— Disclaimer: as a non native speaker, I not only can't deal with it, but at this point have absolutely no intention to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I mean according to Wikipedia,

Some scholars have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general.

And yeah ん is messed up but aren't three of these the same sound? I'd say it's more five different pronunciations rather than seven, which still a lot but would match with my understanding of it as English+2.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think he titled it 7 because he explicitly presents 7 different cases. I'm not sure what you mean by saying three are the same though? Two are obviously exactly the same. Personally, I would only consider it three different "things":

A uvular nasal at the end of an utterance.
The nasalization of a following consonant when that consonant has the tongue contacting the roof of the mouth.
The nasalization of a preceeding vowel when the following phoneme has the tongue not making contact.

I think it's fair to even say that it's almost exactly one thing: an instruction to let air out of your nose whilst producing the surrounding phonemes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I meant the same in terms of the actual sound that comes out.