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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

#41

Post by raverbashing »

wannabag wrote: post #30
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..

Yes, if countrie's abilities to speak English are lower than what would be ideal, proficiency of any other language in English speaking countries is abysmal.

Maybe the US has a higher number, but a lot of those are due to family, not to education.

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

#42

Post by thrwe434234 »

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.

Can confirm that this is the case in India. In fact it's much worse - due to a long history of colonization, most govt. services and education are exclusive to English speakers. Due to this unchallenged linguistic apartheid, public education is slowly switching over to "English medium", which is increasingly creating a class of nowhere men, who neither know their own languages nor English. This structural discrimination has knock on effects on the economy which are as yet unknown, and unexplored (due to geopolitical reasons IMO).

http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/

India, due to its deeply colonial state apparatus, is well on its way to losing most of its languages in the coming century. I think this is also the case with African nations - which might explain why the sub-continent (not just India) and Africa share so much in terms of human development indicators.

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

#44

Post by jventura »

nottorp wrote: post #32

My 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 pet theory is that English proficiency is much better in countries where movies are subtitled, not dubbed.

That is how I learned the basics of the english language when I was a kid. Here in Portugal movies are subtitled.

Incidentally, I went to Milan once to participate in this thing, and neither Italians, Spanish, French, Polish and Russian people could understand each other. I speak a little bit of everything (almost, had to use pseudo-english with the polish and russian) so I had to do the translations. Talk abou information assimetry: I knew everything that happened because I was the unnoficial translator.

The "best" part of that trip was to have to watch Four weddings and a Funeral dubbed in Italian! It went some months before I was able to tolerate italian language again..

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

#45

Post by unclesams-uncle »

nottorp wrote: post #32

My 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.

Belgium is a great test case for your theory.

The country is split linguistically between Dutch speakers in the northern Flemish region, and French in the southern Walloon region.

The Flemish region's television stations and cinemas run mostly subtitled programs (really, anything outside of children's shows and content made in the region or in the Netherlands).

In the French-speaking areas, the media companies and cinemas buy their content from France, where the vast majority of it comes overdubbed.

As a result, the Flemish have a much stronger command of English than their French-speaking counterparts.

That said, the French-speaking Belgians, at least in my experience of living there for a long time, speak English much better than the French.

A lot of that has to do with how international the country is, where Brussels not only hosts many international institutions, but also a lot of companies have their EU HQs there. Many people need to speak English to get jobs with these firms, so it drives up the English competency among the local population.

Your theory definitely has some merit.

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

#46

Post by usr1106 »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #26
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.

Because Finnland is a small country (5 million native speakers). They cannot afford to dub TV or movies, so every kid gets exposed to English every day. As soon as you have a somewhat rare hobby you need to read about it in English. There are many books not available Finnish, so people read the English one.

In Germany none of those are an issue, there is little exposure to English. English is a theoretical thing in school.

Quite some Finns over 40 years old have difficulties to speak fluent and somewhat correct English. (Source: I have worked in the high tech sector in Finland for 20+ years) That is caused by completely different grammar of Finnish compared to anything Germanic, Nordic, or Romanic and the fact that speaking was traditonally not taught a lot in Finnish schools.

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

#47

Post by acchow »

pyrale wrote: post #12
roenxi wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

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 t…

> and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers.

Have some examples of these english words that native english speakers wouldn't know?

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

#48

Post by alexgmcm »

GreeniFi wrote: post #27

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.

Weird, I had the opposite experience - I moved to Spain after Uni but during Uni I worked in Germany for half a year.

I found Spanish much easier to learn than German because the grammar is simpler and the words are often similar to Latin words which are in turn similar to English words.

I never had to use Flash Cards when learning Spanish, they were vital for German.

For example, Mano is similar to Manual which is related to the Hand, obviously in German it is simpler as the word is the same.

However, negocio is similar to negotiate which reminds me of business... Betrieb on the other hand - probably going to need the flash cards.

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

#49

Post by yorwba »

pyrale wrote: post #12
roenxi wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

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 t…

Of course language standardization is something that exists.

You get a ruling body to declare a particular manner of speaking as the preferred one, mandate that it be taught to children in school and prevent anyone who speaks differently from appearing in mass media. After a generation, you have children who grew up speaking non-standard with their parents but standard with their peers in school. Many of them will speak standard with their children, so non-standard becomes something you use to speak to your grandparents. Then the grandparents die and almost everyone who speaks non-standard fluently doesn't use it regularly, so they forget. The next generation grows up barely aware that the standard way to speak is not the only way.

All of that doesn't completely stop natural language change from occurring, but it strongly constrains the range of possible variation. Locutors may create languages, but ruling bodies can tell them which language to create.

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

#50

Post by tiagopc »

pjmlp wrote: post #20
tiagopc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense when you factor Portugal in, for example.

Yeah, but we love English, have centuries of relationship with UK (since 1386) and use subtitles. :)

I wouldn't say it is because of that relationship with the UK that I learned English xD
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