France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study • Hacker News Board

Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study

#21

Post by Al-Khwarizmi » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:26 AM UTC

As a Spanish person, I can confirm that average English proficiency in Spain is poor in absolute terms. It has often been reported to be the country that speaks English worst in the EU, and it may very well be (although the French also deserve a honorable mention). But I find the claim that it has been declining since 2014 very difficult to believe, to say the least.

English is studied in primary school, which wasn't the case 20 years ago, let alone 50, so young people all have at least a minimal level whereas most people that are now passing away don't speak any English at all. This alone should be an important factor pushing average proficiency up. The coming of Netflix, HBO and their ilk in the last few years have made viewing TV series in English much more common (regular TV typically only offers dubbed versions). I teach at a university in English, ten years ago we didn't even offer that possibility and now demand is steadily increasing.

OK, I don't have actual data, they do... but given the limitations of their data (acknowledged in the piece itself), I'm taking it with a huge grain of salt.

Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study

#22

Post by squiggleblaz » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:29 AM UTC

toxik wrote: post #5

English 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.

English still hasn't eaten up Irish, Scottish and Welsh. What languages are threatened, aside from those already rendered weak by settler invasions (e.g. in the US and Australia) which are surely not part of your concern mentioned here. (I think they must be excluded since it's not relevant to the topic of the article and because you refer to "mass communication bring[ing] the world closer".)

Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study

#23

Post by PeterStuer » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:32 AM UTC

2 remarks:

- of course Europe's largest economies are going to be the least incentivized to adopt English due to their larger internal market both in terms of culture as well as economics.

- The International Englishes (plural) are different from both UK and US English. The scientific community has its own 'dialect', and the EU political/administration/diplomatic English is different still. Standard tests based on US/UK spelling/grammar/vocabulary might not capture these nuances.

Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study

#24

Post by antupis » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:35 AM UTC

donkeyd wrote: post #9

gsich wrote: post #3

No 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…

Also smaller languages usually don't have a lively community around niche topics (specific games, cartoons, startups, programming, etc) so you end up in discussing things in English. Personally I learned English from fantasy books and WOW.

Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study

#25

Post by rossng » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:36 AM UTC

squiggleblaz wrote: post #22

toxik wrote: post #5

English 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.

English still hasn't eaten up Irish, Scottish and Welsh. What languages are threatened, aside from those already rendered weak by settler invasions (e.g. in the US and Australia) which are surely not part of your concern mentioned here. (I think they must be excluded since it's not relevant to the topic of the article and because you refer to "mass communication bring[ing] the world closer".)

> English still hasn't eaten up Irish, Scottish and Welsh.

Yes, it definitely has. Ireland has (optimistically) ~1-2% native Irish speakers.

Welsh is spoken by maybe 20-30% of people living in Wales. I couldn't find a number for native/fluent speakers, but it is certainly much less than that figure - probably similar to the Irish one.

Scottish isn't even a language. There are languages called 'Scots' and 'Gaelic'. Again, both a spoken by a small minority.

Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study

#26

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:36 AM UTC

gsich wrote: post #3

No shit, learning English from a romanic language is hard. German to English is easy mode.

It's not that straightforward. Finnish is wildly different from English, yet basically everybody there speaks English. And as late as the 1990s English proficiency in Germany was abysmal, particularly on the eastern side.

Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study

#27

Post by GreeniFi » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:39 AM UTC

It’s interesting that the countries which score lowest are where the Romance languages are spoken. I wonder what the reasons for that are. FYI I’m an English speaker who speaks 2 other Germanic languages and Spanish. The Spanish I find by far the hardest and that could also be reversed. Just an hypothesis.

Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study

#28

Post by yorwba » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:43 AM UTC

squiggleblaz wrote: post #16

L_Rahman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The pronunciation may be deterministic for any given speaker, but different speakers can pronounce the same words differently. Not only differences in the national standards of North and South Korea, but also non-standard speech in different regions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_dialects

Orthography becomes irrelevant as soon as you use Hangul to write a language entirely different from Korean, which wouldn't have the same inflected forms.

Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study

#29

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:43 AM UTC

PeterStuer wrote: post #23

2 remarks: - of course Europe's largest economies are going to be the least incentivized to adopt English due to their larger internal market both in terms of culture as well as economics. - The International Englishes (plural) are different from both UK and US English. The scientific community has its own 'dialect', and the EU political/administration/diplomatic English is different still. Standard tests based on US…

> Standard tests based on US/UK spelling/grammar/vocabulary might not capture these nuances.

Standardized tests don't do well at assessing language fluency in general. For one example, my sister was born in the US, grew up in the US, was educated in English, spoke English (exclusively) at home, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She failed the State Department's test of fluency in English.

Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study

#30

Post by wannabag » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 8:44 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #19

It 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.

I have a similar background and the wealth of the content that's not in English is incredible and often missed.

From an outsider perspective, the time it took for British media and the political class to take note of the European sentiment on the issue of brexit was around 1 year. It was as if they just found out there was an non-English web out there..