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Comment by fermuch | Hacker News Reader

Please excuse my ignorance, but why would you start a business in a country you don't understand its language? Doesn't sound logical to me, except if there's a big part of the country that doesn't speak that language or something bizarre like that.

(this is a serious question, but I'm unable to phrase it this late in a way that doesn't sound like I'm trying to provoke you)

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In Tokyo it is possible to get a job as a software developer without speaking Japanese. After living here a couple years someone decides they like life here, but want to run their own business. Maybe they want to run a SaaS or something that targets a global audience. For visa purposes, they need a Japanese company.

By this time they’ve maybe picked up up some basic Japanese but aren’t fluent. Becoming fluent in a language is quite challenging, especially if you’re working full time in an English language environment. Even without fluency, it’s possible to enjoy life here.

Especially in Japan. I don't think it's really possible for a native English speaker to ever become 100 percent proficient in Japanese.

What makes you think that? Japanese is just a normal language. You have to study vocabulary and grammar and interact enough with native speakers to learn expressions. The writing system and the lack of cognates makes it harder for an English speaker than, say, Swedish, but there is no reason to believe that you can't ever reach full professional proficiency.

The only category V language for English speakers, that also has an asterisk:

https://www.atlasandboots.com/foreign-service-institute-lang...

> Category V: 88 weeks (2200 hours) Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers

> Arabic

> Cantonese (Chinese)

> Mandarin (Chinese)

> [asterisk] Japanese

> Korean

> [asterisk] Usually more difficult than other languages in the same category

Why is that? Except for Kanji, Japanese doesn't look like a difficult language because it doesn't have genders and inflections.

Japanese does have inflections. Specifically, verbs are conjugated: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Japanese_verbs#Conju...

You are right, I meant cases [1] , like those that are there in German.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case

The Wikipedia article you linked has a section on cases in Japanese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case#Japanese

The British Empire did it successfully for centuries.

These days, it doesn't even take an army. Anglophone chauvinism is actually growing in many ways. In another generation or so even Japan will have a sizable expat class that stops bothering to learn the local language.

Anecdotally from living there for a few years, it was way more common to meet older expats living there with little to no Japanese than it was to meet younger expats, so long as they weren't totally brand new. There's quite a few people who went there during the bubble period that seem proud of the fact that ordering a beer is the extent of their Japanese despite living there for years.

Its much easier to learn the language now with the internet, and Tokyo offers near free lessons all over the city that are staffed by volunteers. Had one friend who came in with absolutely zero Japanese and by the end of his first year was understanding conversations. I see the opposite happening.

I actually agree with your point of view, too. It is getting easier to learn languages and the number of resources only grow.

There are two simultaneous trends. On the one hand the number of people who expect people everywhere to accommodate them in English is increasing. Their ability to remain in an English bubble is stronger than ever, thanks to Netflix, Google Maps, Spotify and online news sites. On the other hand, those who are motivated to learn are making more progress than ever before and they can get very, very far before moving abroad.

We have the same trend with computer literacy. There is a generation of people who have grown up with impenetrable walled garden mobile devices and would be completely lost on a command line. There's also a subset of that generation who has learned more about computing through MOOCs, Github and YouTube than their parents learned over decades of practice that early PCs essentially forced upon users.

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