Education

1. Do you think Japan should give more students options to study more languages (other than English) in Junior and Senior High School?

It's important to learn other languages besides English. It will be definitely helpful to get involved in international society now. However, I think English is the most important language considering the fact that it's a de facto official language in the world, and in Japan, there are few people who have enough ability to communicate freely in English compared to other countries. So, to me, it's more important to be able to actually speak English than learning several languages getting a little knowledge about them and without actually being able to speak them. Also, I think it would be nice to show or introduce the other languages to students in some classes, and then if the students were interested in some languages, they would start to learn the languages by themselves or by attending private tutoring schools and it would be easier for them to learn. I say that because I didn't even think about learning other languages besides English when I was a junior or senior high school. That's because no one even suggested me to do that and it seemed very very rare to learn another languages, or it seemed even useless to do that. So, I didn't have environment to learn foreign languages besides English, and I think that's too bad. Therefore, I believe that building solid learning system of English is the first thing to be concerned, and introducing other languages to students is good way to get them interested in languages other than English.

2. Read this interesting opinion from the Mainichi newspaper. Do you agree with the author? Is being fluent in English a waste of time?

I agree with the author. Trying to be fluent in English may be good to keep the motivation, but it could be pressure or stressful as well because it's a difficult thing to do like the author said. What this author says is probably right, and I can go along with the idea that true value of language study linked with a person's way of living lies within a lifestyle. Even if children began to learn English earlier, that wouldn't simply mean that they could be able to speak English fluently. One of the reasons is that we don't need to speak English in our daily life like Hirakawa in the article.

However, I just don't want to say that it's useless or waste of time to be fluent in English. I believe that we need to think other ways besides "educational" way. I mean, we should incorporate English into our life more. So, I guess we need to review our incorrect "Wasei eigo"(of course not all of them are incorrect), or being shy to use English, seriously. I think those are more important than trying to be fluent in English by educational way at the moment.