It is a japan-wide consciousness that Japanese people are not good at speaking English. I think one of the major reasons for this symptom is that most of Japanese people think speaking English is embarrassing. For example, the pronunciation for a word of “apple” is “appuru” for Japanese people, so if I pronounced it correctly as “æpl”, I probably would be a target of bullying a little bit.
Since the Japanese-Katakana-English is imprinted into all Japanese people’s subconscious, if you try to pronounce any English words with correct ways, you would be judged as a stuck up person. That is why we, Japanese people, speak English with the pronunciation of the Japanese-Katakana-English. Although all of us know the pronunciation of the Japanese-Katakana-English is incorrect, the tiny warped feeling, such as “it is embarrassing I can’t speak English, but it is more embarrassing if we speak English very well”, is imprinted into our mind unconsciously. It can be said that that is one of the reasons why Japanese people are not able to speak English well even though how hard we learn the grammar or we remember so many vocabularies in our heads.
It can said that this is a kind of honored but evil effect of the Japanese shame in a way.
Well, in Japan, we have a proverb saying “asking is a moment shame, not asking is lifetime shame”. In Cambodia, the locals are very afraid to ask someone about anything, it is like asking is a shame for them. They look like they hate asking like a psycho in our eyes. In order to bear their heads high, they completely focus on one particular thought, which is “I don’t want anyone to think I am stupid. I don’t want anyone to think I am poor”. Because of this thought, they hate asking so much, they don’t even ask quote of a product, for example. Let’s say that you asked a quote for something and you didn’t buy it. Cambodians automatically judge you as “you didn’t buy it because you don’t have money”. In fact, if you ask a price without buying, people would say, “that guy is so poor” behind your back. It is a helpless reality in Cambodia.
Moreover, if you are telling a story Cambodians don’t understand well, however they say, “I understand that, actually I know that already”. I have so many experiences such as a tuktuk driver get lost because they say, “Ok, get on”, instead of asking me the directions. “Not knowing” and “not understanding” are biggest shames for them, that is why they never say, “I don’t know”.
I know this fact sounds so ridiculous in general. However, this shame of sense is imprinted into their DNA like Japanese people’s shame which I noted at the beginning of this blog. It is very hard to get rid of this imprinting. They face a dilemma of “they don’t understand it unless they ask. But they don’t want to ask it, so they just stay ignorant. They know they are ignorant but still they don’t ask because they don’t want anyone to think he/she is ignorant”. Furthermore, since they act like they know what they actually don’t know, any cases tend to become so complicated like you get lost in a labyrinth.
Yes, it is like a tuktuk keeps running toward somewhere impossible even though I confirmed the direction with a driver.
Anyway, I think Japanese people are able to be good at English if we keep speaking it by being beyond all sense of shame. So I am pretty sure that if Cambodian ask questions to others without the feeling of shame, no one thinks Cambodians are ignorant anymore. Well, we have a proverb, “the leopard cannot change his spots”, so it is probably hard to change their nature, I guess. I am just wondering that any other countries have these kind of shame or not.