So inefficient...

*Sigh*

People are so stupid. There's a lot of bashing on the Japanese education system for it's English on some newspaper site I was reading -- for the most part completely ignoring the focus that the system has, on the college entrance exam level and beyond.
What it is is, grammar translation. This is what language education was based and measured on up until the mid 20th century or so, when mass immigration showed a need for new methods of language teaching in mixed native-language classrooms. What grammar translation gets students good at is just that: TRANSLATION. There are some beautiful translations, and many concepts embodied by newly coined words in Japanese, that are the product of students under the grammar translation method.
Perhaps the biggest effect this had, in the Japanese context, is to make a ton of information AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC; really, if you want to read a masterwork in language X, it will take a long time of study, a commitment that most people are not really willing to make. The same thing goes for even basic information, like news or pop culture. Americans today, mostly visible in the anime/manga/Kpop fandoms, rely on people with interpretation yes, but most often translation skills (even/esp. for songs). The citizens of the rest of the world have more access to information, published in their own native languages and also English, which is really an imbalance that needs to be corrected.
In the Japanese context, they have simply not adapted to the current trend of putting a lot of weight on creating bilingual SPEAKERS of a language, which involves a totally different learning process. It's very hard (in terms of acquisition) for an old man to become a native-like speaker of a foreign language; but give him dictionaries, grammar rules, and a lot of literature (examples of great writing), and he can learn to produce more beautiful writing in the target language than many highly educated native speakers.
As we have more direct contact with people from other backgrounds, it is sort of natural for our values to shift in terms of language production. But to completely ignore and devalue translation (when in fact it is still an integral part of our efforts for communication) in favor of attempting to create (artificial?) bilingual speakers is just silly and every failure in that attempt deprives people of the chance to access information themselves.

This is part of my motivations for learning how to surf the web in Japanese; to find all the types of sites that I look to and see how the Japanese are doing things, particularly graphic design.
Then again the prevalence of cellphone-based internet and stricter registers of communication also complicate things, so the web landscape could indeed be considerably different. That was sort of a segway with a big leap in logic, but man

THIS GODDAMN GIRL BEHIND ME IN THE COMPUTER LAB PLAYING HER STUPID TV SHOW OUT LOUD IS SO FREAKING ANNOYING.

I'm gonna get out of here -- I've learned to 我慢 too well and have to work on that =__=;;
Too passive, especially when it comes to women (double meaning there ohohoho)