Comments by "Gordon Graham" (@gordonbgraham) on "Who do Japanese girls want to date ? : Foreign guy vs Japanese guy" video.

  1. Most foreigners living in or visiting Japan haven't "mastered" Japanese. Most speak broken Japanese with really crappy pronunciation, even after years...So, unless the girl is fluent in English there will be communication issues. Like babysitting a toddler, cute but emotionally and intellectually limited.
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  2.  @Dondepuedoencontrar  Fair points, however, most foreigners who LIVE in Japan, can't read or write. A lot of whom mewl like a kitten sucking on a hind teat about not being able to advance in the workplace. Imagine not being able to read or write and expecting to not only get a job but advance in the workplace in any other country. Yes, it's hard to admit that foreigners can master Japanese when most can't. Also, it's *on the contrary or *in contrast. English isn't as easy as some assume.
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  3.  @Dondepuedoencontrar  I've lived in Japan since 1988. It's not been my experience that the Japanese are "afraid of foreigners". It honestly took me 5 years to be conversational, 10 years to be fluent and 15 years to be literate, literate enough to have taken a full course load at a Japanese university, entirely in Japanese (to upgrade my degree and get a teaching license). Yes, there is a huge difference in mastering Japanese as the writing system takes years to learn, even for the Japanese themselves. Foreigners can live in Japan because there are enough people here who speak enough English for them to get by in daily life. However, getting by in daily life and developing deep meaningful relationships are two different things entirely. Also, while English is the lingua franca of international discourse, most Japanese don't work for international companies and those who do work in domestic offices which require little to no English. Certainly, there are Japanese who are not only fluent but have superior grammatical knowledge to most native speakers, including a lot of English teachers here who are not licensed teachers but ALTs (assistant language teachers) who have a degree in political science or women's studies or some other discipline unrelated to language acquisition. The pool for those kinds of Japanese is small, so when the people being interviewed say the language barrier is an issue, they're speaking from experience, the experience of frustration when trying to communicate with foreigners who can't speak Japanese and the frustration caused by their own inability to adequately express what they want to say. Yes, the Japanese learn English in school, from jr.high school through to high school, but they learn grammar and vocabulary for entrance examinations. They don't use the language. It's like learning to play the piano through sheet music but never actually sitting down at a piano to play. There is little opportunity for most Japanese to use English at any rate that is significant in terms of acquisition. Also, the amount of grammar, idioms, vocabulary etc. that they are expected to learn for entrance exams is overwhelming. The entrance exam of a good university requires students to know in 6 years what it takes a native speaker 20 or more years to acquire. The level of the examination is native speaker university level...and when I say university level I mean after a minimum of 3 years of university. It's overwhelming
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