7 ms·

To me, a simpler reason is the Japanese language has 140million speakers vs English At 1.4 billion. You can argue that they've succeeded in other areas in the

by nox101 2y ago

To me, a simpler reason is the Japanese language has 140million speakers vs English At 1.4 billion. You can argue that they've succeeded in other areas in the past like TVs and cars but software and apps imo are much harder to communicate usage and much harder to localize. It's not just localization, it's close zero conscience of the world outside of Japan by most people in it. That is not to say people in the USA have more consciousness of the outside world. It's that they don't need it by luck that English works with 1.4 billion people

alephnerd 2y ago
South Korea has a market of 51 million and an equally horrendous English language fluency and continues to retain Japanese style corporate law and norms, yet does comparatively better in tech entrepreneurship than Japan. The big difference is capital markets, as SK along with other Asian countries became more attractive for Japanese capital than Japan during the 2000s.
- valenterry 2y ago
  Does it? I wouldn't know of any popular software that originated in and by South Koreans. Can you give examples?
  - markerz 2y ago
    I agree with you. Samsung is probably their only global software exporter. Their other top companies are exclusively local: Naver, Kakao, Daum. Pretty much no one outside of SK (or Japan) knows of them. I will say they come out with some dank video games like Lineage, Guild Wars, MapleStory, Black Desert Online, PUBG
    - maeil 2y ago
      Line is the biggest messaging (and taxi, and many other things) app in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. The software Samsung puts on their phones may just be a layer on top of Android but is still very influential by being run on billions of end-user devices. The country's definitely low on internationally impactful SaaS, though they do exist e.g. Sendbird and Moloco.
      - Tor3 2y ago
        Line was previously owned by Naver, but is now Japanese-owned. I believe it was actually developed in Japan - it happened as a reaction to communication problems during the 2011 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster. It's an absolutely excellent app, no ads or anything, only pure communication with everything you would want for that purpose.
        maeil 2y ago
        LY Corp is owned 50/50 by Naver and Softbank. It started as a reskin of Naver Talk, and the product development has effectively been done in Korea throughout the years. They've intentionally marketed it as being a Japanese app/company to assauge the Japanese government, as unlike in the West, East-Asian governments understand that an app that the entire nation has come to rely is a critical piece of infra that needs to be in national hands. But this has not reflected the reality. This strategy of pretending to be a Japanese app has worked for a decade but now seems to be coming to an end, with the JP government looking to force Softbank to somehow broker a deal with Naver to reduce their share to less than 50%. The EU should do similar with Whatsapp.
        amrocha 2y ago
        This is completely false. Line has been developed almost entirely in japan after the first couple years. The japanese team at this point is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the korean one, and most of the development is decided in japan. I would know, I literally worked there.
        maeil 2y ago
        These people aren't being hired to pick their nose [1]. Nor is it like the US where they only place such adverts to justify H1Bs. There has been an entire scandal about Line's data having been hosted in Korea all this time for more than a decade, after which the servers finally got moved to Japan. You're hardly going to place all physical servers in country A and then do all backend and infra development in country B. [1] https://careers.linecorp.com/ko/jobs?ca=Engineering&ci=Bundang&co=East%20Asia https://careers.linecorp.com/ko/jobs?ca=Engineering&ci=Bunda...
  - cookiengineer 2y ago
    I can recommend reading about Chaebol in this context. [1] Basically conglomerates grew so big through foreign investments that they control large parts of the legislative and executive body. The families regularly get threatened by some aspiring/greedy politicians, then they threaten to fire a lot of people, and then they get spoken free. I'd argue that this was the inspiration for the Mr.Robot series (apart from enron group), as it's portraying a similar disfunct democracy that's effectively owned by oligarchs or is effectively an oligopol. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol
  - mc3301 2y ago
    Naver
    - valenterry 2y ago
      I actually used that when I was in Seoul (because I had to). Never had the need (or saw the need) to user it afterwards. Am I missing out? Or do you just mean it came from Korea? I guess I should have been more clear that I was talking about software that is known internationally.
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    Everything that's shipped with Samsung phones, LG TVs, etc Sure, most of it is Android, but even, like, using the darn thing needs more software proficiency than average Though Nintendo and Sony kinda do a good job (a lot of development is done outside Japan though - same for Samsung)
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  >equally horrendous English language fluency I don't agree with this, I have researched English proficiency across the world and South Korea consistently ranks quite a bit higher than Japan. Here is one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index I also regularly talk with many people from both Japan and South Korea (being that I learn the languages), with those people having wildly varying degrees of English literacy... but in talking to all of them, the one consistent thing everyone has agreed on is that Koreans by-and-large definitely speak better English than Japanese.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Yeah. Horrendous Japanese English has to do with what I'd describe the "software" approach. Japanese English textbooks is written like a programmer's manual that grant readers a means to generate or analyze English scripts in certain punctual grammatical ways. IIUC, most other Asian nations including SK don't take this approach at all, and their English proficiency is massively higher. I'm not sure if any other countries than Japan do that, but I smell something similar might be going on in public education in rural China; it's a somewhat usable alternative where immersive training is not available.
  - flakiness 2y ago
    My sense (as a Japanese expat) is that the smaller and closer to China the country is, the more serious people there are thinking about moving out of the country as a risk management, encouraging them to learn English harder. Another good example is Taiwan. It has a lot of good English speakers in its highly-educated cohort. Japanese people aren't that serious about moving out (at least my generation. Your people look a bit different though.)
    - fnord123 2y ago
      That breaks down as soon as you leave Asia. In Europe, most people attribute it to whether the country prefers subs v dubs. SK and Taiwan use subtitles for foreign media so they hear English language. In Japan, it's more common to dub. This is mirrored in Europe where countries using subs (Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, etc) have better English language skills than dub countries (France, Germany, Spain).
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  No, the difference is cultural. Japanese people are very capable, but the flipside of that is they don't need tools to get stuff done. This is why their software sucks fucking donkey arse balls, and I say that as a Japanese myself. To put this in a more relatable way: Most people will invent apple peelers to peel apples, and make better peelers to make peeling easier. Some will just be lazy bastards and eat the apple skin and all. Japanese peel the apple with just an ordinary kitchen knife, their cutlery technology thus never advances beyond kitchen knife because "Why?". Japanese simply cannot grasp the appreciation of good tools made for purpose because they can do everything with their bare hands, they can't understand WTF good software is because they don't need it and don't use it.
  - anthk 2y ago
    And then you now realize that a lot of diehard Unix/GNU users will just use vim/emacs and a Makefile...
    - grues-dinner 2y ago
      The syntax may be eyebleedingly awful but damn if it doesn't actually keep working. Justfiles aren't even parallisable, but make had that baked in decades ago. And no matter how much vi(m) might be a plugin-bloated mess that never really gelled for me, it also never lagged out or randomly failed to do things like autocomplete or formatter running to nearly the extent VS Code does daily. And it didn't use half my CPU just sitting there. Autotools, now, that's some real self-flagrllation.
      - anthk 2y ago
        Autotools are complex, yes, but I've seen simple setups. Here's a good start to compile Inform. And, yes, inform could be surely compiled with a literal 'cc -o inform src/*.c' but my point stands. https://jxself.org/git/?p=inform.git;a=summary https://jxself.org/git/?p=inform.git;a=summary
  - mc3301 2y ago
    What an excellently worded comment and great analogy. I've witnessed so many similar things in Japan. It isn't until very recently that new houses in Japan were built with insulation. Why? Wearing a bunch of layers, slippers, sitting in front of a kerosene heater or under a kotatsu... It works, so why fix it? Maybe it's a lack of creativity, critical thinking, or suppliers.. but it doesn't matter. If it kinda works, don't fix it. Which is interesting, because hundred of "keep warm in your house" little junky products have come out in the past decade like USB warmers and whatnot. And yeah, there are some arguments (other than the status quo) against insulated houses: more cost, when houses are seen as a one-type-thing and not a long-term investment. No basements for a furnace for central heating. Earthquake standards. But really, it's mostly just the same "Why" from your comment.
- maeil 2y ago
  > South Korea has a market of 51 million and an equally horrendous English language fluency This shows that even on HN, all you have to do is sound confident. Anyone who has spent a lot of time residing in both countries could tell you this is not true. English proficiency levels are significantly higher in Korea, to the extent that this difference has a societal and business impact on each country.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    I have spent a lot of time in Japan and some time in SK and I cautiously disagree. In both countries I found English levels to vary widely based on which industry and location you were in. I think Korean society in general has higher English skills among younger people especially due to the number of Koreans that have spent significant time in the US. But among IT industries and top graduates I'm not sure there's a big difference.
    - maeil 2y ago
      Among the IT industry there's definitely a noticeable difference, e.g. when you compare IT teams at their big local companies (not local branches of US companies), same goes for non-IT teams. A significantly higher percentage of Chaebeol subsidiary employees are able to conduct productive business in English than at Zaibatsus. Of course this difference disappears at the top 1% level, but this holds pretty much anywhere in the world. China might be an exception because it's so big, not sure, but elsewhere you're not going to be at the forefront of things if you can't participate in the international community.
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Yeah it’s extremely rare to see the typical employee at a major Japanese firm’s office in Japan with passable verbal english skills. So rare they practically don’t exist outside of foreign companies and upper management of Japanese companies and their consultants/‘advisors’/etc… And this isn’t limited to IT, it’s pretty much the case in most departments. Decent written English skills are not as rare though.

by nox101 2y ago

alephnerd 2y ago

South Korea has a market of 51 million and an equally horrendous English language fluency and continues to retain Japanese style corporate law and norms, yet does comparatively better in tech entrepreneurship than Japan. The big difference is capital markets, as SK along with other Asian countries became more attractive for Japanese capital than Japan during the 2000s.

valenterry 2y ago
Does it? I wouldn't know of any popular software that originated in and by South Koreans. Can you give examples?
- markerz 2y ago
  I agree with you. Samsung is probably their only global software exporter. Their other top companies are exclusively local: Naver, Kakao, Daum. Pretty much no one outside of SK (or Japan) knows of them. I will say they come out with some dank video games like Lineage, Guild Wars, MapleStory, Black Desert Online, PUBG
  - maeil 2y ago
    Line is the biggest messaging (and taxi, and many other things) app in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. The software Samsung puts on their phones may just be a layer on top of Android but is still very influential by being run on billions of end-user devices. The country's definitely low on internationally impactful SaaS, though they do exist e.g. Sendbird and Moloco.
    - Tor3 2y ago
      Line was previously owned by Naver, but is now Japanese-owned. I believe it was actually developed in Japan - it happened as a reaction to communication problems during the 2011 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster. It's an absolutely excellent app, no ads or anything, only pure communication with everything you would want for that purpose.
      - maeil 2y ago
        LY Corp is owned 50/50 by Naver and Softbank. It started as a reskin of Naver Talk, and the product development has effectively been done in Korea throughout the years. They've intentionally marketed it as being a Japanese app/company to assauge the Japanese government, as unlike in the West, East-Asian governments understand that an app that the entire nation has come to rely is a critical piece of infra that needs to be in national hands. But this has not reflected the reality. This strategy of pretending to be a Japanese app has worked for a decade but now seems to be coming to an end, with the JP government looking to force Softbank to somehow broker a deal with Naver to reduce their share to less than 50%. The EU should do similar with Whatsapp.
        amrocha 2y ago
        This is completely false. Line has been developed almost entirely in japan after the first couple years. The japanese team at this point is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the korean one, and most of the development is decided in japan. I would know, I literally worked there.
        maeil 2y ago
        These people aren't being hired to pick their nose [1]. Nor is it like the US where they only place such adverts to justify H1Bs. There has been an entire scandal about Line's data having been hosted in Korea all this time for more than a decade, after which the servers finally got moved to Japan. You're hardly going to place all physical servers in country A and then do all backend and infra development in country B. [1] https://careers.linecorp.com/ko/jobs?ca=Engineering&ci=Bundang&co=East%20Asia https://careers.linecorp.com/ko/jobs?ca=Engineering&ci=Bunda...
- cookiengineer 2y ago
  I can recommend reading about Chaebol in this context. [1] Basically conglomerates grew so big through foreign investments that they control large parts of the legislative and executive body. The families regularly get threatened by some aspiring/greedy politicians, then they threaten to fire a lot of people, and then they get spoken free. I'd argue that this was the inspiration for the Mr.Robot series (apart from enron group), as it's portraying a similar disfunct democracy that's effectively owned by oligarchs or is effectively an oligopol. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol
- mc3301 2y ago
  Naver
  - valenterry 2y ago
    I actually used that when I was in Seoul (because I had to). Never had the need (or saw the need) to user it afterwards. Am I missing out? Or do you just mean it came from Korea? I guess I should have been more clear that I was talking about software that is known internationally.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  Everything that's shipped with Samsung phones, LG TVs, etc Sure, most of it is Android, but even, like, using the darn thing needs more software proficiency than average Though Nintendo and Sony kinda do a good job (a lot of development is done outside Japan though - same for Samsung)
ranger_danger 2y ago
>equally horrendous English language fluency I don't agree with this, I have researched English proficiency across the world and South Korea consistently ranks quite a bit higher than Japan. Here is one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index I also regularly talk with many people from both Japan and South Korea (being that I learn the languages), with those people having wildly varying degrees of English literacy... but in talking to all of them, the one consistent thing everyone has agreed on is that Koreans by-and-large definitely speak better English than Japanese.
- numpad0 2y ago
  Yeah. Horrendous Japanese English has to do with what I'd describe the "software" approach. Japanese English textbooks is written like a programmer's manual that grant readers a means to generate or analyze English scripts in certain punctual grammatical ways. IIUC, most other Asian nations including SK don't take this approach at all, and their English proficiency is massively higher. I'm not sure if any other countries than Japan do that, but I smell something similar might be going on in public education in rural China; it's a somewhat usable alternative where immersive training is not available.
- flakiness 2y ago
  My sense (as a Japanese expat) is that the smaller and closer to China the country is, the more serious people there are thinking about moving out of the country as a risk management, encouraging them to learn English harder. Another good example is Taiwan. It has a lot of good English speakers in its highly-educated cohort. Japanese people aren't that serious about moving out (at least my generation. Your people look a bit different though.)
  - fnord123 2y ago
    That breaks down as soon as you leave Asia. In Europe, most people attribute it to whether the country prefers subs v dubs. SK and Taiwan use subtitles for foreign media so they hear English language. In Japan, it's more common to dub. This is mirrored in Europe where countries using subs (Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, etc) have better English language skills than dub countries (France, Germany, Spain).
Dalewyn 2y ago
No, the difference is cultural. Japanese people are very capable, but the flipside of that is they don't need tools to get stuff done. This is why their software sucks fucking donkey arse balls, and I say that as a Japanese myself. To put this in a more relatable way: Most people will invent apple peelers to peel apples, and make better peelers to make peeling easier. Some will just be lazy bastards and eat the apple skin and all. Japanese peel the apple with just an ordinary kitchen knife, their cutlery technology thus never advances beyond kitchen knife because "Why?". Japanese simply cannot grasp the appreciation of good tools made for purpose because they can do everything with their bare hands, they can't understand WTF good software is because they don't need it and don't use it.
- anthk 2y ago
  And then you now realize that a lot of diehard Unix/GNU users will just use vim/emacs and a Makefile...
  - grues-dinner 2y ago
    The syntax may be eyebleedingly awful but damn if it doesn't actually keep working. Justfiles aren't even parallisable, but make had that baked in decades ago. And no matter how much vi(m) might be a plugin-bloated mess that never really gelled for me, it also never lagged out or randomly failed to do things like autocomplete or formatter running to nearly the extent VS Code does daily. And it didn't use half my CPU just sitting there. Autotools, now, that's some real self-flagrllation.
    - anthk 2y ago
      Autotools are complex, yes, but I've seen simple setups. Here's a good start to compile Inform. And, yes, inform could be surely compiled with a literal 'cc -o inform src/*.c' but my point stands. https://jxself.org/git/?p=inform.git;a=summary https://jxself.org/git/?p=inform.git;a=summary
- mc3301 2y ago
  What an excellently worded comment and great analogy. I've witnessed so many similar things in Japan. It isn't until very recently that new houses in Japan were built with insulation. Why? Wearing a bunch of layers, slippers, sitting in front of a kerosene heater or under a kotatsu... It works, so why fix it? Maybe it's a lack of creativity, critical thinking, or suppliers.. but it doesn't matter. If it kinda works, don't fix it. Which is interesting, because hundred of "keep warm in your house" little junky products have come out in the past decade like USB warmers and whatnot. And yeah, there are some arguments (other than the status quo) against insulated houses: more cost, when houses are seen as a one-type-thing and not a long-term investment. No basements for a furnace for central heating. Earthquake standards. But really, it's mostly just the same "Why" from your comment.
maeil 2y ago
> South Korea has a market of 51 million and an equally horrendous English language fluency This shows that even on HN, all you have to do is sound confident. Anyone who has spent a lot of time residing in both countries could tell you this is not true. English proficiency levels are significantly higher in Korea, to the extent that this difference has a societal and business impact on each country.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  I have spent a lot of time in Japan and some time in SK and I cautiously disagree. In both countries I found English levels to vary widely based on which industry and location you were in. I think Korean society in general has higher English skills among younger people especially due to the number of Koreans that have spent significant time in the US. But among IT industries and top graduates I'm not sure there's a big difference.
  - maeil 2y ago
    Among the IT industry there's definitely a noticeable difference, e.g. when you compare IT teams at their big local companies (not local branches of US companies), same goes for non-IT teams. A significantly higher percentage of Chaebeol subsidiary employees are able to conduct productive business in English than at Zaibatsus. Of course this difference disappears at the top 1% level, but this holds pretty much anywhere in the world. China might be an exception because it's so big, not sure, but elsewhere you're not going to be at the forefront of things if you can't participate in the international community.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Yeah it’s extremely rare to see the typical employee at a major Japanese firm’s office in Japan with passable verbal english skills. So rare they practically don’t exist outside of foreign companies and upper management of Japanese companies and their consultants/‘advisors’/etc… And this isn’t limited to IT, it’s pretty much the case in most departments. Decent written English skills are not as rare though.