Nationalism, which leads to dubbing or subbing every piece of English content that's on TV... this is one of the issues.
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
#32My pet theory is that English proficiency is much better in countries where movies are subtitled, not dubbed.
Incidentally it also explains why native english speakers tend to have no idea about other languages.
The rise of youtube talking heads should also help... i'm pretty sure my daughter got most of her english from there.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#33When you think about it, now that the cold war is over, The United States can only benefit from a reduction of the perception that the country is a singular, dominant super power.
The more America appears to be ruled by bufoons and rednecks, the smaller the target on its back will get.
When the British empire mattered, English adoption was driven by England. In the 20th century, English was adopted because of the cold war, NATO, and business with American companies.
The rules for language prevalence will change, and soon, technology itself will become the arbiter of communication. Those that travel might learn to become multilingual, but many times, technology adoption precludes and obviates even travel.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#34> EF Education First, a Swedish company based in Switzerland that manages more than 600 language schools across 50 countries.
Wow, I remember the English First billboards in Shanghai around 2009-2010. They showed a white guy and a Chinese woman raising their hands together, and their arms were shackled together at the wrist with a really heavy rope.
This must have worked for the Chinese target audience, but I found it hilarious.
> There are some concerns, as Quartz’s Nikhil Sonnad noted about last year’s report, about how representative the data it collects and analyzes is of the general population of each country. “The proficiency scores are based on free online tests, so the people taking them are self-selected,” he wrote, “They are not a representative sample of the country’s citizens, and may instead represent a group that is particularly interested in English and has access to the internet.” Even so, Sonnad says “it is the best dataset available for measuring English ability across countries.”
This is a weird concern to raise -- the idea that EF's data isn't representative because it's pulled from a sample of citizens extraordinarily interested in English would strongly imply that the true proficiency level in every country is much lower than reported, and to a lesser extent that the gaps between countries are probably wider than reported.
> correlation doesn’t necessarily prove causation. Is it, as EF and others argue, that better English skills facilitate global trade and investment, which leads to growth and new jobs? Or is it that rich countries can invest more in bilingual education?
Surely these are both true.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#35My pet theory is that English proficiency is much better in countries where movies are subtitled, not dubbed. Incidentally it also explains why native english speakers tend to have no idea about other languages. The rise of youtube talking heads should also help... i'm pretty sure my daughter got most of her english from there.
My personal observation of people who watch lots of anime with subtitles but only understand a handful of Japanese words and can't pronounce them correctly indicates that passive exposure to a language isn't enough to learn much. You also need to try and practice using it yourself.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#36English 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 languag…
I’m a speaker of one of the smaller languages, and every educated person I know lament the inability to express themselves without resorting to English idioms. It isn’t that they don’t exist, some people are great at my language, it’s just that something like 99% of the movies I watch, podcasts I listen to, or papers I read are in English. I simply am much better at high level English than my own language. Colloquial English not so much though.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#37My pet theory is that English proficiency is much better in countries where movies are subtitled, not dubbed. Incidentally it also explains why native english speakers tend to have no idea about other languages. The rise of youtube talking heads should also help... i'm pretty sure my daughter got most of her english from there.
You're right, here's my anecdotal evidence about it. I've already sent this comment here, but it's been 4 years ago so here it is again:
I live in a small town near the serbian-hungarian border and we can watch both Hungarian and Serbian TV stations. In Serbia movies are subtitled (so you can hear English language all the time) while in Hungary movies are dubbed (so you can't hear anything other than hungarian language on TV). Serbian families who live here watch mostly serbian TV and hungarian families watch mostly hungarian TV stations. Ask any English teacher here and they will all tell you that there is very clear distinction between level of knowledge in serbian vs hungarian kids. They all live in the same town, go to the same school, the only difference is that those kids who watched serbian TV stations had much bigger exposure to english language as opposed to those who watched hungarian TV stations.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#38No shit, learning English from a romanic language is hard. German to English is easy mode.
If you think that's hard, try coming from a Slavic language with no concept of an article and perfect and continuous tenses.
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#39English is just one of thousands of languages in this world.
Europe has many languages and most European countries trade most with their neighbours. IMHO it makes sense to learn the language of a neighbouring country before trying "fit the American mold" (and I say that from the UK).
Re: France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study
#40It’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.
I think it's partially what another commenter said - the EU market means that learning other EU languages is as much of a priority. Also, the romance languages can overlap quite a bit - my Spanish wife can have a reasonably detailed conversation with an Italian where they only speak their native languages.