Quote Originally Posted by Mycernius
Probably not the best examples as both are commonwealth countries and had English imposed on them in the past. In India English is used as a common language because of the amount of different Indian dialects spoken in the country. Belgium, The Netherlands or Sweden might have been better examples, as the English spoken by the inhabitants is very good and they have not really been influenced by the British Empire.
But European languages being closer to English, it is also normal that other Europeans should learn English more easily than Asian people. Hence my examples within Asia. However I do not support your argument about the Commonwealth, because Japan was occupied for several years by the USA, after the independence of India, and was as much influenced by the English language than India or Singapore. One proof is that all Japanese must learn English at school (no alternative), that thousands of English words are used in everyday Japanese, that Japan has more English schools than any other country, that American/British movies are usually in English with subtitles, that NHK news and other programmes are bilingual Japanese/English, and that most public signs in big cities are bilingual (see examples).

If we had all this in Belgium, much more people would be fluent in English. In the French-speaking part, it's near impossible to get to see a movie in original non-dubbed version, either at the cinema or in video (well, now it's ok with DVD's). Public signs in English are mostly restricted to Brussels. There are no bilingual Belgian channels or newspapers (even on the Net). People don't have to learn English at school, and often choose Dutch/French first, although probably 90% do also take English.
BTW do other foreign languages suffer the same problem in Japan?
No other foreign language is taught in Japanese schools (except in some special private schools). So there is no comparison possible. University students usually have to take another language, but I have never met a Japanese who was able to remember more than "Hello ! How are you ?" and a few numbers after 4 years of French, German or Spanish a few hours a week at university. So it's clearly not better than English, even worse, I would say.