By Rha Hae-sung, Park Si-soo
Six out of ten South Koreans can speak at least one foreign language at a level of having casual dialogue smoothly, a survey showed Sunday.
Job Korea, a job information website, conducted the survey that had 836 respondents. Of them, 62.8 percent said they can speak at least one foreign language. Nearly 70 percent of the bilinguals were jobseekers.
While 4 percent of them described their second language’s proficiency as a native speaker’s level, the majority at 75.8 percent called themselves an intermediate speaker who could have a casual conversation at best. About 17 percent said they could engage in conversation for business purposes.
English was the most popular second language (87 percent), followed by Japanese (26.7 percent) and Chinese (19.6 percent).
Employees of foreign companies and medium-sized companies were more exposed to an environment in which they needed to speak a foreign language, compared with those at large or state-run companies.