[HN Gopher] Japan ranked 31st in digital competitiveness, 92nd f...
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Japan ranked 31st in digital competitiveness, 92nd for English
skills
Author : mikhael
Score : 68 points
Date : 2024-11-17 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.japantimes.co.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.japantimes.co.jp)
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Uhh, about that English skill ranking... I wouldn't take that
| very seriously.
|
| I mean sure, Japan is quite infamous when it comes to English
| proficiency. But looking at the list, some countries are quite
| interesting in the "High proficiency" group. I know that in some
| of these countries most people would die of thirst if they had to
| ask a glass of water in English (or any other foreign languages,
| to be exact).
| csa wrote:
| > But looking at the list, some countries are quite interesting
| in the "High proficiency" group.
|
| The labels are somewhat arbitrary cutoffs (every 50 points),
| but which country in the "high" category would you say is worse
| than HK or Honduras (the two top countries in the "moderate"
| category)?
|
| I could definitely see an argument for a few ranks up or down,
| especially if you change the ranking criteria.
|
| That said, this list seems directionally correct.
| dinkblam wrote:
| agreed. the newest data is here:
|
| https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/
|
| there is absolutely no way that Austria has "Very high
| proficiency".
| cschmid wrote:
| I wonder what makes you say this? In my (limited) anecdotal
| experience, I've noticed that Austrians seem to have far
| higher levels of English competency than Germans, for
| example.
| ulfw wrote:
| There is no way Hong Kong has moderate proficiency and German
| has high proficiency. It's a bullshit list.
|
| This is coming from a German living in Hong Kong.
| jahnu wrote:
| Not sure how it's graded but it is very rare to meet an
| Austrian who can't speak basic English and kids in the cities
| these days are often practically bilingual!
| Barrin92 wrote:
| are you sure you're not making that judgement just based on
| accents? As a German, Austrians and us tend to stand out a
| bit compared to Swedes or the Dutch in my experience when it
| comes to spoken English but otherwise proficiency is high,
| always seems like a bit of an outdated stereotype to me.
| rjsw wrote:
| Austria has a big tourist industry sector.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| That's debatable, but there are some other howlers. The
| world's #1 tourist destination Thailand is near the bottom of
| pack 10 spots below Afghanistan, Finland is below Germany,
| Switzerland is below Serbia, and South Korea is almost 50
| ranks above Japan.
| dustark wrote:
| The general population in Thailand has very limited English
| skills. As a tourist, you'll encounter Thais whose jobs
| involve interacting with foreigners, and they can speak
| some English (not much). As for the rest of the population,
| english is practically non-existent ("hello", "good bye",
| and that's it).
| moogly wrote:
| I'm guessing Portugal must have improved a lot since I was
| there in 2019 and didn't have a great time trying to use
| English. I had better success rate with my extremely
| atrophied high school Spanish.
| rancar2 wrote:
| I've been to Portugal over 20 times in the last 10 years.
| In Lisbon and Porto, the Portuguese people speak English
| very well and most with an American accent. Foreigners who
| come to Portugal [1] and may work service jobs (a more
| recent phenomenon) may not speak English as well as the
| native population, while many of them still do still speak
| English well.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Portugal
| chaostheory wrote:
| The Philippines should be much higher. The majority of the
| population can do conversational English. A lot of their media
| is also American media in English.
| bogtog wrote:
| The Philippines is already considered "Very high
| proficiency", second in Asia only after Singapore
| chaostheory wrote:
| Yes, but it's also higher than many of the European
| countries listed.
| rjsw wrote:
| I would say that the Dutch think they are a lot more proficient
| at English than they are.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| Crazy to hear as a person who lived there for 7 years and had
| to conduct 0 conversations in Dutch in business, daily
| commerce, or interactions with the government. There are
| trilingual bums.. The only people who didn't speak English
| didn't speak Dutch either.
| rjsw wrote:
| I have worked there too.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I wonder if this means that English proficiency rates
| subject vary a lot by locality.
| omoikane wrote:
| Full list of World Digital Competitiveness Ranking is on pages
| 48-49 of this PDF:
|
| https://imd.widen.net/s/xvhldkrrkw/20241111-wcc-digital-repo...
|
| via: https://www.imd.org/centers/wcc/world-competitiveness-
| center...
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Germany that high? Do they count fax machines as digital?
| Archelaos wrote:
| Country credit rating #1 Robots in education and R&D #2
| E-participation #3 Graduates in Science #4
| Computer science education index #4
| cookiengineer wrote:
| As a German, I think Estonia has to be before us with a huge
| lead. Their digital infrastructure is the wet dream of our
| bureaucratic apparatus.
|
| I don't think the IMD is aware of just how crappy digital
| processes are in Germany.
|
| A legal process that is digital literally means that you fill
| out an online form so they can send you the printed out paper
| form via snail mail and you have to redundantly fill that out
| again, saving overall exactly 0 seconds with the initial
| digital website. Not kidding.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| Look where IMD is located....There is a reason why
| Switzerland ranks up there.
| skissane wrote:
| > Do they count fax machines as digital?
|
| I'm surprised by the number of medical practices in Australia
| that still use fax machines for sending reports and
| referrals.
|
| Ordinary email is widely not viewed as sufficiently secure to
| use for sending confidential patient health data (although
| I've seen a minority use it for that purpose anyway). There
| is a secure digital messaging system supposed to replace fax
| machines, HealthLink, which some practices use. But it is
| owned by a private company and costs extra $$$, and a lot of
| practices decide they don't want to pay it. So fax machines
| survive. Now running over VoIP (actually FoIP) - Australia
| has turned off its POTS telephone system.
| skissane wrote:
| Direct link to the PDF (instead of having to go via some web-
| based PDF viewer):
|
| https://imd.widen.net/content/q3p8lowz7b/original/20241111-W...
| snozolli wrote:
| I tried looking at the methodology document, but it just seems
| like pseudo-technical double speak that doesn't actually explain
| what they're measuring. Is this study actually known to be
| valuable, or is this just click-bait for middle managers?
|
| https://libraries.emory.edu/sites/default/files/migrated-doc...
| qayxc wrote:
| Some of their metric are dubios (number of published AI
| articles - wtf?) and the weighting seems arbitrary.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| So like every ranking ever
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| IMD study, what else do you expect?
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Is this study actually known to be valuable, or is this just
| click-bait for middle managers
|
| It's basically marketing for IMD - a degree mill business
| school in Switzerland.
|
| They make a lot of this content due to close proximity to think
| tanks in Lausanne and Zurich.
| lakis wrote:
| And they are 1st in Japanese Skills !
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Wow what an upset! I wanted Korea to win.
|
| The fact that we have an English proficiency Index worth
| spending more than 10 words on really highlights the bias of
| the people who organize this data.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| English is the international lingua franca.
|
| Not being able to speak English means you have limited
| ability to speak to people from around the world. That's
| worth 10 words in a report.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Saying "English is the French language", half in Latin says
| much about English!
| card_zero wrote:
| It gets worse than that, it's a term for a trading
| language that was mostly Italian and originated in
| Turkey.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > English is the international lingua franca
|
| True, but this underestimates Japanese's prominence.
|
| Japanese (and Korean) fluency is fairly important in much
| of ASEAN (for example, Vietnam and Thailand), as much of
| their leadership, rising executives, and rising academics
| tend to study abroad in Japan.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| What's higher education in Japan like?
|
| In Germany and Austria, for example, a lot of graduate
| level STEM university programs are taught in English,
| even when everyone in the room is perfectly capable of
| speaking German, just because the literature is English.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Which bias is that? English proficiency is extremely relevant
| to a country's ongoing development for all sorts of reasons I
| would think are obvious.
|
| Read the report. It's really well put together.
| https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/WIBIwq6RdJvcD9bc8RMd/cefcom-
| epi...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That exact bias:
|
| >English proficiency remains a reasonable indicator of a
| nation's ability to produce goods and services that
| generate economic growth, and it correlates well to
| national investment in helping people achieve their full
| potential by providing education, healthcare and a decent
| standard of living.
|
| Meanwhile China's boom in the mid 2010-s (China is 2nd to
| dead last on this chart, above Japan) still had westerners
| flock to them. In a few instances, disgustingly so. The
| language barrier at that level of economy is negligible. A
| few skilled translators are a rounding error for that gold
| mine.
|
| I'm more than fine with data for data's sake. I have all
| sorts of useless trivia and statistics that simply put a
| smile on my face and have little practical use. But using
| "how good you are at English as a society" to predict
| economics seems a bit tonedeaf.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| That's not a bias it's just reality. Of course English
| proficiency isn't perfectly correlated with economics.
| It's one factor of many.
|
| People aren't usually trying to just predict GDP or
| something. A report like this is useful for a big company
| deciding where to expand. I'm writing this from Colombia,
| which has a big call center industry, much of it in
| English.
|
| "English proficiency of a nation doesn't matter, don't
| talk about it much", which is what you seem to be getting
| at, is so clearly wrong to me. Maybe it's the bias of
| personal experience. Just because it's not important to
| you doesn't mean it's unimportant in general.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You can talk about it all you want, but the correlation
| just seems too weak for a statement like the above to
| track. Nothing in statistics is perfect, but they should
| at least be reasonable (don't make me bring out the XKCD
| comic).
|
| And sure. I have bias and didn't do any mass survey. But
| when you see more and more of your country falling in
| education ranks, and the people up top trying to appeal
| more to countries with very poor english skills as
| opposed to building those facilities domestically. , I'm
| going to be skeptical that the language of the country
| matter much in the grand scheme of things.
| adastra22 wrote:
| English fluency matters less for Japan, for what it's
| worth. They have their own Japanese versions of everything.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| They don't have their own japanese versions for a lot of
| stuff?
|
| They still use the same software as the west (iOS,
| Android, Windows, Chrome, ...).
|
| Most of these cornerstones of modern Software maintain
| Japanese, Chinese and Korean documentation, but there is
| no way those docs are as good as the English ones.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Correlation is not causation, and if you look at most of
| the graphs correlating English proficiency to outcomes, the
| correlation coefficient is around 0.55-0.65, which aren't
| great correlations. Paying closer attention, it seems that
| a lot of the correlation comes from the fact that the low-
| English-proficiency countries include some states that are
| in the process of self-immolation, and the countries that
| have the highest English proficiency has no one worse off
| than Greece and Croatia, which are about average on a
| global scale. The causation probably more goes the other
| way: the countries that do well on development can afford
| to have higher English proficiency than those that don't.
| Archelaos wrote:
| When I look at the ranking on p. 4, English does not appear
| to be very relevant. Switzerland is #31, but Greece #8.
| Romania is #12 just two places behind Germany #10. Italy is
| #46, France #49. India #69, China #91, Japan #92, Thailand
| #106.
|
| The diagrams on p. 13 all have correlation coefficients (r
| values) between 0.56 and 0.61, which signify only moderate
| associations. And the causality from language to success
| behind such associations is very likely even weaker. In
| other words, people from many countries are good at English
| because their country is economically advanced (and not the
| other way round).
|
| I think that on an individual level, it is very desirable
| to be able to at least read English very well because it
| opens up so many resources on the Internet. However, when
| it comes to economic impact, the ranking seems to suggest
| an extremely tenuous link at best. In addition, foreign
| language skills are likely to become even less relevant in
| the future as translation software improves.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >the bias of the people who organize this data.
|
| It seems that IMD is based in Switzerland and Singapore.[0]
| Singapore and Switzerland hold ranks 1 and 2, respectively,
| in digital competitiveness.[1] Singapore has a high level of
| English proficiency.[2]
|
| I don't think the mere fact that an English proficiency Index
| worth spending more than 10 words on exists shows that the
| people who organized this data are biased. English
| proficiency is important in business, science and
| programming, to name some examples. I think an argument as to
| why the inclusion of such a metric is biased should be given.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Institute_for
| _Ma...
|
| [1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-
| economy/articl...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Inde
| x#2...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I know this is the Jaapn times and it's focusing on its namesake.
| But I found it more interesting that the US fell from 1st to 4th
| in a single year on this digital competitiveness. Hope that isn't
| a slippery slope.
|
| For Japan, the English skills aren't worth acknowledging. The
| digital competitiveness is unfortunate, but when you read the
| reasons (most of the current crises of the world that Japan got
| to experience first)
|
| >The country still struggles with a number of significant
| challenges that hamper its efforts to become a technological
| leader, especially in terms of the ability of companies to adapt
| and the lack of the workers with the right skills and experience,
| the survey found.
|
| Some of that lack of agility is cultural, but I suppose this
| simply all opens up the immigration question that's been pricking
| at them for some time now.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| I don't think the US going 1st->4th is at all meaningful.
| According to the report the US went from 2nd to 18th in
| "adaptive attitudes" and 2nd->8th in general "future
| readiness." This seems more like a difference in how IMD is
| measuring things than a change in US economy/policy. But maybe
| the EU did something that moved their rankings upwards?
|
| In general there is too much complexity behind the ranking to
| tell a meaningful story about such a small decline in said
| rankings, especially when none of the variables are
| particularly quantitative in the first place! It's better to
| interpret this more as "the US is consistently in the top 5"
| than "the US is slipping," or "those wily Singaporeans finally
| beat the Americans."
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I sure hope so. I did say slippery slope for a reason, I know
| it's a bad method of thinking overall
|
| But seeing this data after I read other local reports of the
| US digital literacy plummeting with GenZ does give me a bad
| omen in my mind. But once is coincidence.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| The "good news" is that US youth brain rot is probably a
| global phenomenon, so it shouldn't affect the rankings :)
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > But I found it more interesting that the US fell from 1st to
| 4th in a single year on this digital competitiveness.
|
| Nit picking, but "falling" from 1st to 4th could simply be
| because the others "rose" above.
|
| It's not like you have to be digitally worse to do worse in a
| ranking.
|
| Other people / countries can just be improving faster.
|
| Some might argue it's a pedantic distinction, but I would argue
| it's pretty important here.
|
| It's like if over the next 30 years, GDP per capita inflation
| adjusted increases 50% in the US but 75% in China - would you
| really say the US "lost"?
| rawgabbit wrote:
| I find it odd that India is 51st in digital competitiveness. More
| than half of the Fortune 100 is completely dependent on Indian
| outsourcing. It is also strange that Vietnam is not on the list.
| Quite a few companies I interact with have engineering located in
| Vietnam.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| These rankings are always just random marketing bait. I can't
| think of a single one that is actually useful and
| methodologically sound.
| Prbeek wrote:
| I'm surprised that Kenya is not in the list.
|
| Very high English proficiency and a large industry that does
| assignments for American students
| downrightmike wrote:
| Probably the chinese immigrants and not the kenyans themselves.
| China has been indebting Africa for a while now, They are happy
| to take land when cash payments fail
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Probably the chinese immigrants and not the kenyans
| themselves
|
| Absolutely not.
|
| Kenya's ICT industry is very robust and home grown. Kenyan
| companies like M-Pesa and Safaricom are fairly competitive,
| and I think Kenya's tech industry is at the same position
| India's was in the 2000s and is set to take off.
|
| Also, Chinese investment in Kenya is low. Indian investment
| tends to be much more prominent. Heck, Ruto's campaign
| advisory team was from the same company the BJP uses [0], and
| the second largest source of FDI in Kenya after the UK is
| India's Marutius backdoor [1].
|
| You're more likely to see Chinese investment in Ethiopia or
| DRC, not really Anglophone East Africa where Indian, South
| African, a d UAE firms/investors can outcompete Chinese
| investors due to stronger business (and family) connections.
|
| Surprisingly, in Lusaphone countries like Angola and
| Mozambique, Vietnamese players like Viettel have a strong
| presence in the ICT industry, which I think might be due to
| Military support from their revolutionary era (Viettel is
| owned by the VPA).
|
| ----------
|
| Also, this ranking is from IMD - an unaccredited degree mill
| posing as a business school in Lausanne that coasts off it's
| reputation from when it was an executive training program for
| Nestle before the 1990s.
|
| Switzerland has a big issue with unaccredited business
| schools.
|
| [0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-63397760
|
| [1] - https://www.lloydsbanktrade.com/en/market-
| potential/kenya/in...
| alephnerd wrote:
| Japan has English fluency issues (but it can be argued that this
| is because there isn't much of a need to study English in Japan),
| but using the EF Test rankings are dumb.
|
| EF's English tests aren't accepted by most institutions.
|
| TOEFLS, IELTS, and CAIE tests are the commonly used English tests
| globally.
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(page generated 2024-11-17 23:01 UTC)