English takes no skill to speak.

Seriously, some of the dumbest people in the world speak it. It takes no skill to speak. Whereas other languages such as Русский, Español, Tiếng Việt, 日本語, 汉语, 한국어 and several others require skill. I'm sick of hearing this comment about how English is one of the most difficult languages in the world. It's the easiest. Anglophones are also some of the most ignorant and obnoxious people in the world.

"Japanese people cannot speak English because, although they all "study" it in grade school, the English education system is flawed and basically consists of memorizing a series of vocabulary words and preset sentences to regurgitate for a test, after which they will be soon forgotten.  "English" class is taught almost entirely in Japanese, and there is little, or more often absolutely no actual "speaking" done by the students.  A Japanese person who's spent half a year in the US will be able to speak more English than a Japanese person who's studied since they were in elementary school." >>21

Hmm. This explains why "Engrish" is so abundant in Japan....also, the method of learning Japanese (the written version, anyhow) is also based on memorization, because of the garbled writing system (memorization-oriented Chinese writing, along with more phonetics-compatible kana - which might ALSO be memorized due to the older emphasis on kanji), and this older memorization focus may have heavily influenced the learning of English.