Via Jon Huer in the Korea times:

The Korean mind that refuses to accept help in English is legendary. I have heard it so often from those who advise Koreans on English ― as copy editors for newspapers, as English personnel at corporations, and as classroom teachers, and so on. Their difficulty is nothing technical, but all cultural. They say the Koreans who hire them to correct their English refuse to accept their recommended corrections.

Korea’s English writers are so stubborn and so proud that they refuse their own English advisors’ corrections. I had a long conversation once with the copy-editor at a major English-language newspaper in Korea. His on-the-job tale of woes was the very embodiment of English advice in Korea. He related that the Korean writers and editors so often refused his recommendations for change that he finally gave up on advising and let them go ahead with their inferior, if not wrong, English. This may explain why so much poor English is printed in the major English-language newspapers in Korea.

Korea’s proud mindset is one of the worst culprits of the English ineptitude that is the subject of constant public lamentation. National pride and learning a foreign language are natural enemies of each other only in Korea. Here, they are in constant conflict, as learners refuse to humble themselves while learning it. 

I have to officially chime in here as dissenting from Mr. Huer’s analysis.  In fact, I’ve heard variants of the same complaint in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and China.  First, every country in East Asia thinks that they have a monopoly on poor English learning.  Koreans, in fact, are quite typically praised in that respect by their neighbors.  However, Mr. Huer is responding to the results of the latest British English Test.  While such tests are a mere snapshot of learning over time, and one shouldn’t read to much into any one year’s results, it is understandable to feel some wound to national pride when one ranks towards the bottom.

The complaint itself is indicitave of a sense of national exceptionalism, which, admittedly, is pretty normal throughout the region.  All the countries I mentioned before often promote the idea that their language, culture, or some combination thereof makes foreign language learning particularly difficult for them.  Such complaints are cutout of the same cloth as comments such as Japanese being “especially” difficult (or “impossible”) for anyone else to learn.  While there is plenty of evidence to the contrary (i.e., there are plenty of non-natives who master these languages, as well as people in Korean, Japan, etc. who speak phenomenal English), these urban legends on language learning scratch a national itch of sorts, allowing the speaker to imagine himself to have been born into a kind of exceptional circumstance.

There are some linguistically defensible excuses which can effect English learning in some of these groups.  Korean and Japanese, for instance lack any similar languages, making any sort of foreign language learning difficult (compared to, say, an Italian learning Spanish), but this still isn’t to say that it makes English any more difficult for them than for any of the other national groups whose language bears no relation to English.

The more “academic” answer as to East Asian regional lack of facility in foreign language learning actually has more to do with the educational culture there.  Prior to the second world war, many across the region were learning western languages (largely in missions schools) to extremely high levels.  While, granted, at that time, education was mostly the domain of the “well-heeled,” one does not see anything in the literature to indicate any particular regional difficulty in learning and teaching foreign languages.  Such is not the case today.  The post-WWII educational systems made conscious decisions to stress national unity — often at the expense of quality in foreign language programs.  With the cold war heating up and dominating regional politics, the entire educational system was designed to instill ultra-nationalism, and even English study was conducted through that prism, leading to the prevalence of the grammar translation teaching methods, and classroom English teachers who teach entire classes without uttering a word of the target language, that we see throughout the region today.  The low quality of FL instruction in the public school systems led to the rise of the multi-billion dollar industry of private cram school and language school “supplementary” instruction that we see in all such countries today.

Where is the evidence to support

Prior to the second world war, many across the region were learning western languages (largely in missions schools) to extremely high levels

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