"Do you speak English?"

A few years ago a friend and myself were at a local shopping center just walking around looking at the things that we wanted to purchase but didn't necessarily have the money, space or use for. We were then approached by a young man between the ages of 17 and 20 (The truth is I never really know the age of Japanese people here. A ballpark figure is the best that I can do.). This young man then approached us and said "Do you speak English?" Of course we have just been speaking to each other within the store so to say "no" would have been an extremely rude and obvious lie so I said "yes" and he then said "I have a question". Of course with time to kill we then sat there and answered some questions that this young man had for us. After the occurrence my friend said to me "Why did you answer those strange questions? Don't you think it was odd?"

The truth is that yes I did think that some of the questions were odd but not int he way that you would expect. The questions had clearly been rehearsed and were in no particular order with no cohesive path. In fact the language was almost text book; English speaking text book. Having been trying to learn Japanese for some time now the questions made a lot of sense to me: "Nice To Meet You." "What is your name?" "Where are you from?" "Do you like ~?" "I like ~." "Nice to talk to you." "See you again.".

There are some JVLOGGERS out there who will say that Japanese people do not prefer to use English and are shy about it so they will not just approach you or in some cases will avoid you all together to try and prevent using English. Of course I am not trying to discredit them in any way but the fact of the matter is that here in Okinawa there are a lot of good incentives for learning English and therefore people will make more of an effort towards it and from time to find you will find yourself being approached for a moment or two by someone wanting to try and learn a little bit about the language by asking you some questions. There are people who find this threatening because these people could be trying to gather information about you and you could be putting yourself at risk however my thought is that if you have a Facebook page there is nothing you can give them by answering a few questions in English that what you are broadcasting on the world can't already tell them. You also may find yourself being asked by a group of giddy school children a few questions in English at various tourist attractions. This is one thing that I had been asked to do when I was in the Aquarium a few years ago with my inlaws and it was a lot of fun because the groups of girls who approached me were having a great time and actually seemed interested in learning English.

So what if you don't want to answer questions. Of course you can always politely decline. There is not always time to stop and have a discussion with someone in the middle of a shopping center or in the middle of your vacation destination, although I would encourage you to not only answer the questions but try to answer them in Japanese. This will allow the person to try and use their English and you can take this opportunity to try you Japanese which is a difficult thing to do for a number of reasons which I will discuss in an upcoming post.

Have you had any experiences like this? If you have share them below or please feel free to share them on our Facebook page!