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Comment by sodfj11240 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's more apt to compare between Korea / China / Japan where the written language is not Latin-based.

From my experience, most Vietnamese students catch up quickly with extra-curricular English class during their 4 years university.

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Not really, there's little to almost no difference in English literacy between Viet, Korea & China. Yet there's a big gap compare to Japan, the reason is either culture and economic incentive rather than because of the native script.

In Japanese TV, you can even see that for influencers (idols, singers, comedians) being bad in English is considered a cute "feature", this is uniquely apply to Japan.

yeah, the novelty approach to English is one of the things that is inherently holding back Japan from any generally decent level of English.

Japan was sealed off from the world by the Tokugawa Shogunate and only opened back up relatively recently (~150 years ago). So yeah, their culture is kinda built different to the rest of Asia, having evolved for centuries in isolation. They are still prone to exceptionalism: one story goes that European ski equipment manufacturers had difficulty exporting their skis to Japan in the 1960s because of a widespread belief that "Japanese snow is different" and Western skis would not work on it. So while the Chinese readily learn English in order to conduct trade with Westerners, there is an unconscious expectation among Japanese that potential foreign trade partners learn Japanese.

Japanese snow is different, it’s predominantly powder. Different to ski on.

hardly unique..Colorado snow is also mostly powder

But that was used as a non-tariff barrier to prevent the import of foreign goods. If I remember correctly, certain groups also tried to stop the import of foreign beef, because "Japanese intestines were longer [shorter?] and couldn't absorb the nutrition well".

The snow is quite different between Honshu and Hokkaido.

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