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Japan ranked 31st in digital competitiveness, 92nd for English skills
- not_your_vase 2y agoUhh, 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 2y ago> 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 2y agoagreed. the newest data is here: https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/ https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/ there is absolutely no way that Austria has "Very high proficiency".
- cschmid 2y agoI 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 2y agoThere 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 2y agoNot 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 2y agoare 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Dutch in my experience when it comes to spoken English but otherwise proficiency is high, always seems like a bit of an outdated stereotype to me.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 2y agoAustria has a big tourist industry sector.
- teractiveodular 2y agoThat'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 2y agoThe 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 2y agoI'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 2y agoI’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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Portugal
- chaostheory 2y agoThe 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 2y agoThe Philippines is already considered "Very high proficiency", second in Asia only after Singapore
- chaostheory 2y agoYes, but it’s also higher than many of the European countries listed.
- rjsw 2y agoI would say that the Dutch think they are a lot more proficient at English than they are.
- whatwhaaaaat 2y agoCrazy 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 2y agoI have worked there too.
- Jensson 2y agoHave you been to some other non English country that spoke better English?
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI wonder if this means that English proficiency rates subject vary a lot by locality.
- omoikane 2y agoFull list of World Digital Competitiveness Ranking is on pages 48-49 of this PDF: https://imd.widen.net/s/xvhldkrrkw/20241111-wcc-digital-report-2024-wip https://imd.widen.net/s/xvhldkrrkw/20241111-wcc-digital-repo... via: https://www.imd.org/centers/wcc/world-competitiveness-center/rankings/world-digital-competitiveness-ranking/ https://www.imd.org/centers/wcc/world-competitiveness-center...
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 2y agoGermany that high? Do they count fax machines as digital?
- Archelaos 2y agoCountry credit rating #1 Robots in education and R&D #2 E-participation #3 Graduates in Science #4 Computer science education index #4
- cookiengineer 2y agoAs 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 2y agoLook where IMD is located....There is a reason why Switzerland ranks up there.
- skissane 2y ago> 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.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- snozolli 2y agoI 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-documents/db-pages/world-competitiveness-rankings-methodology.pdf https://libraries.emory.edu/sites/default/files/migrated-doc...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- qayxc 2y agoSome of their metric are dubios (number of published AI articles - wtf?) and the weighting seems arbitrary.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoSo like every ranking ever
- Foobar8568 2y agoIMD study, what else do you expect?
- alephnerd 2y ago> 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.
- nojs 2y agoHaha, I love the typesetting in particular
- lakis 2y agoAnd they are 1st in Japanese Skills !
- johnnyanmac 2y agoWow 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 2y agoEnglish 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 2y agoSaying "English is the French language", half in Latin says much about English!
- card_zero 2y agoIt gets worse than that, it's a term for a trading language that was mostly Italian and originated in Turkey.
- gerdesj 2y agoWhich Turkey are we on about here? The Franks were mostly Germanic which is why English is considered a Germanic language and why Lingua Franca is a thing and why I can riff on the French (Franks) language being English as a silly joke. English absorbs vocabulary from wherever and whomever it touches because it abhors a vacuum. I will give you a gold star if you can tell me how many languages I have referenced in that last sentence, and this one.
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- johnnyanmac 2y agoI 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoI 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 2y agoThe "good news" is that US youth brain rot is probably a global phenomenon, so it shouldn't affect the rankings :)
- Prbeek 2y agoI'm surprised that Kenya is not in the list. Very high English proficiency and a large industry that does assignments for American students
- downrightmike 2y ago[flagged]
- alephnerd 2y ago> 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. In fact, nowadays Kenyan ICT companies have begun expanding the tech industry in Uganda and Tanzania. Also, Chinese investment in Kenya is low. Indian investment tends to be much more prominent. Heck, President 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-63397760 [1] - https://www.lloydsbanktrade.com/en/market-potential/kenya/investment https://www.lloydsbanktrade.com/en/market-potential/kenya/in...
- downrightmike 2y agoAnd that's how you propose the wrong answer and get the right one ;-)
- rawgabbit 2y agoI 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 2y agoThese rankings are always just random marketing bait. I can’t think of a single one that is actually useful and methodologically sound.
- alephnerd 2y agoJapan 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.
- second_brekkie 2y agoAgreeing with other comments. I wouldn't take this too seriously. Judging by the Korean score. Korea's English proficiency is nowhere near that high. Among university age reading and listening is good. But Koreans even when they 'know' English can't string a sentence together. (Source: live here)
- kazinator 2y agoNative English speakers who teach English in Japan make like 30K per year or something in that ridiculous ballpark.
- GuestFAUniverse 2y agoIsn't that the general problem teaching anything there? -- you get the "sensei" honors for free, but have to cope with the fraction of a decent pay.
- valval 2y agoI’m like 94% sure that I could guess a list before lunch that would be closer to the truth than this one.