Many Japanese people study English for years but still cannot speak it well. Is it because they have no talent? Probably not. Japanese and English are very different languages. They have different word orders, sounds, and writing systems.

In the US, a training school for diplomats says English speakers need about 2,200 class hours to learn Japanese. Spanish needs only about 600 to 750 hours. So English takes time for Japanese learners too.

Japanese people often say they are bad at English, but the main reason may be distance, not talent. The US Foreign Service Institute estimates that English speakers need about 600 to 750 class hours to reach a professional level in languages like Spanish or French, but about 2,200 hours for Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Arabic. In 2005, two economists created a measure of how far other languages are from English.

Using data on adult immigrants in the US and Canada, they found that people whose native language was further from English tended to have lower English skills, and Japanese and Korean were among the most distant languages. Japanese and English differ in word order, sounds, writing and grammar, and they share very few words with the same origin.

The common complaint that Japanese people are "bad at English" overlooks a powerful factor: linguistic distance. The US Foreign Service Institute estimates that English-speaking diplomats need around 600 to 750 class hours to reach professional proficiency in closely related languages such as Spanish or Dutch, but roughly 2,200 hours for Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Arabic. These figures describe the English-to-Japanese direction, yet given the differences in grammar and writing, the reverse journey is unlikely to be short. Economists Chiswick and Miller turned this idea into a measure in 2005, scoring languages by how well Americans learned them.

Applying it to adult immigrants in the United States and Canada, they found that, other factors being equal, the further a person's native language was from English, the lower their English proficiency, with Japanese and Korean ranking as the most distant. A 2020 analysis of Dutch exam data likewise showed that similarity between the first and target language strongly constrains adult learning. The gaps between Japanese and English are cumulative: different word order, sound systems, scripts and grammatical features such as articles, and almost no shared cognates. Struggling with English is less a sign of missing talent than of a long road.