France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
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Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#2"English is becoming less relevant in developed economies"
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#3No shit, learning English from a romanic language is hard. German to English is easy mode.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#4I think it is the opposite - everybody is speaking english a bit, so less people bother to test or obtain any formal proof. And google translate makes it easier to get away with poor English when communicating.
Also we are in an age in which native english speakers are a minority, so what is good english will inevitably change.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#5English is on course to eat up smaller languages. Mass communication has brought the world closer together, and with that, diversity is lost. It’s too early to say whether it’s for better or for worse, but here we are.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#6As it stated in an article, probably it is not a very representative example of the general population. People taking an online English tests probably already feel to need one.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#7From my experience, English has been mostly useless in these countries as far back as I can remember. Even in touristy Paris, there are plenty of places where nobody speaks a word of English and this gets even 'worse' when you venture outside of cities. I'm from the country with the highest English proficiency (Netherlands), so I'm used to everyone speaking English. The benefit of this though, is that I can do basic stuff, like ordering coffee, in about 6 languages.
I wonder, though, whether the conclusion from the data is correct. It could be that more people are getting access to the internet, so even people who didn't have a reason to learn English half a decade ago are now looking for courses online.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#8English is on course to eat up smaller languages. Mass communication has brought the world closer together, and with that, diversity is lost. It’s too early to say whether it’s for better or for worse, but here we are.
Going in the reverse direction - "a community speaks one language that then splits to two mutually unintelligible languages" seems so destructive that standardising on one language seems like an obvious and massive win for humanity at large.
But by raw number of languages standardising on English is probably not ideal. Probably some hybrid of Chinese grammar, Korean alphabet and Latin pronunciations would have been my pick for example.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#9No shit, learning English from a romanic language is hard. German to English is easy mode.
I'm sure that's a factor, but it's also a bit cultural. Countries with the highest proficiency tend to use subtitles in stead of dubbing for foreign language movies. Because of this, you get much more familiar with other languages. I learned most of my English from watching movies and the internet. I was pretty much fluent in English before I even started getting English classes in High School, so I never had to actively learn it.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#10English is on course to eat up smaller languages. Mass communication has brought the world closer together, and with that, diversity is lost. It’s too early to say whether it’s for better or for worse, but here we are.
Going in the reverse direction - "a community speaks one language that then splits to two mutually unintelligible languages" seems so destructive that standardising on one language seems like an obvious and massive win for humanity at large. But by raw number of languages standardising on English is probably not ideal. Probably some hybrid of Chinese grammar, Korean alphabet and Latin pronunciations would have been m…
Why not stick with Korean pronunciations? The pronunciation is deterministic from the alphabet.