Dear education minister Ryu Shionoya,

Many reasons have been proposed for the relative failure of Japanese to learn foreign languages well, despite their great effort. The Japanese obsession with native speakers is one problem. The traditional grammar translation method of teaching and the impractical nature of college entrance examinations in English are also problems. The fact that Japanese is unrelated to English and that it has a different sentence structure is another reason.

I would like to suggest another reason that I have not yet seen proposed. Japanese have a hard time distinguishing linguistics from language learning. This results in Japanese language teachers being trained in skills of language analysis rather than in skills relevant to language teaching. The result is not only the poor preparation of language teachers that is so evident in the Japanese school system, but also the dysfunctional methods of language teaching used in that same system.