Came across this article on how English is used (and not used) in Japan.
The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan (tokyodev.com)
They were discussing it over at HN and they had a lot of people chiming in with their experience of English in Japan.
HN thread with people discussing their experience with English in Japan
Before I open the link, what is HN?
Site run by one of the tech founders. Responsible for the Y-combiner Start-up Incubator that runs every year? Responsible for some of the larger firms among the rest.
Description of site at Wikipedia
If you go there, the original article/link is posted at the top of the page and the rest are comments. Some of the top level comments contain experience from people all over the World. After that each thread can get into arguments but the moderators are pretty good and keep it on track most of the time.
edit: Should have mentioned the Founder, Paul Graham, comes from the old school MIT computer science where the term "hacker" had a VERY different meaning than now.
edit2: Also should have mentioned the author of the post at that link, "The English Paradox: Four decades of life..." stops in to that comment page on HN and replies to a few posts.
