I'm not saying their proficiency is greater (since prior to this discussion I had no knowledge of it), I was just saying it's possible. I hope there is English proficiency outside of KATUSA soldiers (only 3,400 as of 2012 according to Wikipedia), i.e. how are higher level officers going to coordinate with their American counterparts? But then again South Korea is I gather more and more confident of being able to handle threats by themselves (and perhaps less and less confident of meaningful US help ... and I'd assume proficiency is higher in the Air Force (English being the official worldwide language for air traffic control) which is what we could surge the fastest).
Anyway, to clarify my point about Samsung, if there's a greater pool of good English speakers to pull from (even if in general the pool is poorer ... especially since in either case there's little to chose from being functionally illiterate vs. even more functionally illiterate???), it could explain their being able to pull it off. They must being doing something right....
> how are higher level officers going to coordinate with their American counterparts?
Oh, I wouldn't doubt that higher level officers have a better command of English than your average rank-and-file soldier. But that's a relatively small number of people, right?
> They must being doing something right....
They're obviously doing something right in terms of being commercially successful. My whole point is that English fluency is not all that important for commercial success. For example, they could have the software engineering done overseas, with only the liaisons between the hardware and software teams fluent in English. This is all speculation. All I can say for sure is that South Korea's English education system is no better than that of Japan's.
Anyway, to clarify my point about Samsung, if there's a greater pool of good English speakers to pull from (even if in general the pool is poorer ... especially since in either case there's little to chose from being functionally illiterate vs. even more functionally illiterate???), it could explain their being able to pull it off. They must being doing something right....