I have the same opion with you when i look though this passage.I am a Chinese.In our country ,we students should study English many years. Although our grades are high,we really have poor scores in oral English.Your writing part is really good in my eyes

" We always focus on grammar, but it's not that we are good at grammar. And teachers only teach how to pass the exam. " - this sounds just like foreign language teaching in UK schools . . and 'ordinary' English speakers " can't speak [European languages] at all ". The same cannot be said for some other European countries, where the teaching of foreign languages, including English, puts us to shame.

I can't speak for Europeans, but Americans (in general) have a hard time learning another language. Simply put, we don't practice it enough because we have no need for it. The less we practice and/or the less important it is for us, the harder it becomes to master it. Practice is important! Try to speak English as much as you can and you'll get better ^_^

Well, for starters, a lot of the European languages like Italian, French, Spanish and German have grammars that are much more similar to English than to Japanese. Also, there are a lot of words that are shared between the languages. In a similar way, I would imagine you would have a much easier time learning Chinese than most English speakers sue to your familiarity with Kanji and using counters with nouns all the time! Finally, I wouldn't say that you can't speak English at all. Your writing is pretty good, so if you just say it instead of writing it, you would be speaking English!