(Perspective: Anglo-Quebecoise.)
The obvious answers of British colonialism and immersion aside
I don't think you
can put immersion aside. Quebecois from more isolated areas tend to have poorer English than those from more mixed, urban, or touristy areas. French-Canadian students who have an English-speaking parent or who attend English or English immersion schools have the best English of all. After one has been taught the rudiments of the language and thus has a framework to build upon, use and exposure are the biggest factors in second language acquisition. If Mom is anglophone and Dad is francophone, your English will probably be pretty good even if you are in the French education system.
So my question is, why does it seem to be so easy for South Africans and French Canadians to pick up perfect English?
a) It's
not easy.
b) "Perfect" English is rarer than you imply.
Most French Canadians don't have perfect English. Many have very good English. If you aren't perpetually exposed to and using the language, you are not going to reach perfection. You can artificially create such an environment for yourself, but most people don't.
Achieving complete fluency in a language is HARD. It is hard for French Canadians. It is hard for Koreans. It is eas
ier for French Canadians, however, because there are a lot of linguistic similarities between English and French (English being the illegitimate child of all of Europe), there is a TON of French influence in English vocabulary, they generally have more exposure to English than your average Korean, and they at least use the same alphabet -- and English opens up more immediate job opportunities because of their proximity to English-speaking populations, giving them much more immediate incentive to branch out from their native tongue.
One would think that these same advantages would lead to a lot of bilingualism among Canada's English-speaking population, but that's generally not the case. Despite having more exposure to French than most Americans (it's on all the cereal boxes, yo!), your average Anglo-Canadian is not fluent in French. Mastering a second language, as stated above, is hard. English speakers are generally less motivated to pick up French. Most of them decide they don't need it. My cousins in Saskatchewan didn't take a single French class until
high school. (Disliking this, my cousin put her daughter in French from elementary. She just came back from an exchange trip in Quebec and is now hosting her francophone friend. It's awesome!)
do you believe there's something within either education system or within society itself which made it easier to learn? Something that perhaps, the Korean education system could learn from?
Within society, I'd say it's mainly the immediate incentive to expand one's world that leads to higher levels of English mastery. For a lot of Koreans, English is not necessary beyond passing their exams. Its global use makes English fluency an excellent way of expanding one's world, but Korea can be pretty self-contained. Although foreign culture is gradually exerting more and more influence on Korea, there's still a long, long way to go before your average Korean really NEEDS to master English.
Educationally, I think English is taken more seriously within the Quebec school system. I attended French elementary school for a few years, and English study was much more intense and study-focused than the "fun fun English" way we are encouraged to teach in Korea. I also studied FSL in the English system. I know the rationale behind making language learning fun, but it doesn't mesh with the way I was taught French, the way my peers were taught English, and the results we obtained in an ESL/FSL (rather than EFL) context.
My experience of language learning in Quebec was mostly based on learning French, but the few years I spent half-listening to English class in French school seemed roughly similar. This is what I remember:
We had homework. You went home and did your exercises, studied for your
dictee, memorized the verb list and assigned vocabulary, and read your texts aloud.
Feedback was more frequent. Your homework, quizzes,
dictees, and coursework were graded and returned to you. You could fail and be moved to remedial classes or assigned extra help. At least in my schools, there were support programs in place to get less-skilled students up to a basic level of functioning.
We did projects. Class was homework-checking, grammar or vocabulary study, and then creative activities or projects in which students had to produce original language. This is key: we were expected to produce original language.
We didn't do Korean-style listen and repeat. (Some drilling, yes, but then you moved along to using that language.)
We almost never played games. We sometimes got to do activities that were more entertaining than others, but games were a rarity.
We had more exposure to authentic media, and were expected to extract information from it relatively early on. When we got to watch movies, there were no subtitles.
Linguistically, Korean students have to overcome the MAJOR obstacles of learning a new alphabet and acquiring entirely foreign grammar structures. Culturally, I think they are impeded by the relative lack of creativity demanded in Korean education in general. I don't know if the teaching methods in my husband's middle school are representative of most of Korea, given his students' abysmal placement in citywide test scores, but his kids aren't expected to produce anything original in KOREAN class. To really master a language, you have to learn to use it originally, to improvise, to think laterally, to take what you've learned from one context and apply it in another. Are these things being developed in the Korean education system?