No shit, learning English from a romanic language is hard. German to English is easy mode.
That makes no sense when you factor Portugal in, for example.
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
#12English 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…
Language standardization is not something that exists.
You could hope for merging of communities that create an unified language, but whenever two communities are not completely merged, each will coin new words, the pronunciation will drift, etc.
That is because locutors create languages, not ruling bodies.
Examples of that include canadian french, and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#13No 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 acti…
I totally agree with this.
Pretty much everything is dubbed in France, Italy and Spain.
I also learned a lot of english by watching movies and series in the original language with subtitles.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#14"English is becoming less relevant in developed economies"
Doesn‘t sound right, does it?
Even weirder is this re-phrasing: „The more integrated into the global economy you are, the less you need english“
Greetings from Austria!
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#15Another article on that page https://qz.com/1213443/the-world-is-getting-better-at-englis... lists English proficiency by country. English proficiency is measured by average score on a test by a certain English testing company, which is obviously a flawed measure but ^\_o_/^.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Korean pronunciation is hard. Also, maybe the pronunciation is deterministic, but the rules are non trivial. Indeed, there's some recent changes that made the orthography more complex (to keep orthographic forms more consistent across different inflected forms).
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#17No one cares about perfect English, queen's English, when speaking with Europeans. The place it matters is in writing, where improper constructions can be really irritating. And writing well is a real skill.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#18English 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.
That's really not true. Many people I know also speak English, but that doesn't mean that they somehow forget how to speak their own language. If anything, small communities with an own language tend to be fiercely proud of that language, and do everything in their power to protect it [see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German]. And if these languages do disappear, it tends to be because the national language is taught in schools and slowly replaces it in younger generations.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#19It is not that they are failing in English, rather that they are less dependent on foreign content, having localized versions from whatever might be relevant.
As polyglot speaker, I am really thankfully to have been brought up learning multiple languages.
English only got relevant during the last century, and as human history is full of different kinds of lingua francas throuhout the milenias, others will follow.