AFAICT, Japan has the easiest immigration for skilled professionals, by far. However, this has been the case for less than 10 years, as they totally revamped their immigration laws in the 2010s sometime to try to attract more such people, so of course it's going to take time to see the difference. Japan is also somewhat difficult for foreigners to live in because of the language barrier, but Germany isn't that different here: in my experience as a tourist there, it's nothing like Netherlands where everyone and their dog speaks perfect English. In Germany, the college-educated people generally speak it quite well, everyone else, you're lucky if they know any at all, and it seems like you won't do well living there if you can't speak the language. In Japan, it just depends on your company: a lot of people here have lived here for years or decades and still don't speak Japanese, because their job is in English. German is probably easier for European-language speakers to learn though.
> it's nothing like Netherlands where everyone and their dog speaks perfect English. In Germany, the college-educated people generally speak it quite well, everyone else, you're lucky if they know any at all, and it seems like you won't do well living there if you can't speak the language.
There are 2 kinds of countries in Europe:
- Those where movies and TV shows are dubbed: Germany, France etc. Especially the older generations and working class don't speak English too well
- Those where movies are English with subtitles: Many of the smaller countries with their own native language. So everybody is exposed to English all the time and many speak English pretty well.
(Have not watched movies in the Netherlands, but I could guess many are not dubbed?)
My experience in East Germany was that even waiters spoke pretty decent English and would switch to it at any opportunity. Not quite Holland, but not far off. I had a friend who had lived there 10 years and still didn't speak German.
I think that's an eastern Europe vs western Europe issue. In my experience as a tourist in both, people in eastern European countries (like Czechia and also Hungary) had much better English skills than people in (mainly former West) Germany. Even since the fall of the wall, eastern Europeans seem to have eagerly learned western ways and that includes English, whereas western Germans were already western, but didn't need to know English for that. East Germany is still quite different from west Germany (except Berlin, which is unique).
> Japan is also somewhat difficult for foreigners to live in because of the language barrier, but Germany isn't that different here
In the case of Japan, you also have the insanely difficult writing system, probably the most difficult writing system in current usage. The German language might be difficult, but at least it uses an alphabet with a somewhat consistent spelling.
The writing system isn't that big a deal. For daily life, it's more important to be able to converse in basic/conversational Japanese, not to be able to read literature, and you don't have to read kanji to talk to people. Just learning katakana is enough to read all the foreign loanwords (which are everywhere these days), and knowing hiragana + some basic kanji is really plenty to get by. For reading anything more difficult, just use Google Translate's camera ("Lens") function.
You’re correct, but as a foreigner that lived in Japan for 3 months, it gets very old constantly having to use google lens or translate just to go grocery shopping. In most European countries, people will know a tiny bit of broken English at least, and most of the words you can figure out on packages/signs by their roots.
I loved living in Japan, but even where I lived in Shinagawa, it was very rare finding someone with any English skills at all unless they were young and college educated in the states.
>In most European countries, people will know a tiny bit of broken English at least, and most of the words you can figure out on packages/signs by their roots.
I mean, what do you expect? European languages are all related to each other, so of course it's easier to figure things out by roots. Japanese isn't even remotely related to English, except through borrow-words. That said, I'm usually able to figure a lot of things out by simply reading the katakana, since 95% of the time it's just a borrowed English word. Of course, this depends a lot on what you're looking at: western foods almost always use katakana borrow-words, Asian foods almost never.
I strongly disagree. Yes, speaking is more important than reading, but being illiterate in a modern society is not fun. And as the other comment said, having to use your phone all the time gets old really fast.
> German is probably easier for European-language speakers to learn though.
This is a bit of an understatement. Japanese is a category-V language, taking an estimated 88 weeks of full-time study to learn, while German is a category-II language taking just 30 weeks.
