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

#101

Post by asdasdasdasdwd » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 10:18 PM UTC

narag wrote: post #83

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #21

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…

English is studied in primary school, which wasn't the case 20 years ago... That's tricky. Years ago primary extended from 1st to 8th grades (6 to 14 y.o. aprox.) so English, that started in 6th was primary. Now 6th to 8th have been moved to ESO. Anyway I just checked with my son and he started in Infantil , so it's really soon. The real issue is qualification. To really understand and speak English you need to learn…

This is true. While I learned English in the written form in my teens and was able to somewhat understand movies in English, I only became proficient in it in spoken form after I joined a guild in an online MMO game and everybody talked through TeamSpeak. Good times :)

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

#102

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

mikk14 wrote: post #69

thaumasiotes wrote: post #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 i…

> 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. No, if your samples aren't representative then any conclusion you…

> 2) Now you take the tests at time t and t+1. However, at time t the test was less popular, so only 0.5% of the top speakers took the test, while at t+1 1% of the top speakers took the test. You would conclude that a lower score a time t+1 implies that the skill got worse, while it might have very well improved by a lot.

I agree with this in full. I don't see what it's responding to in my comment, though.

> 1) Let's say that the top 1% of English speakers of countries A and B took the test. You say "the gaps then would be wider than reported". Wrong, even if in this 1% sample country A scores the highest, it might very well have lower overall proficiency. If proficiency is normally distributed, but has a much greater variance in country A than country B, the maximum of A will be higher than of B, even with a lower average.

I'm not following you here. I claimed that when the test pool for each country is strongly self-selected for interest in English, the gap between the countries' average proficiency levels (in reality) is very likely to be larger than the gap between those countries' average test scores. The test scores are suffering from restriction of range.

An example in which country A has higher test scores than B at the same time it has lower proficiency looks like an example of that phenomenon, not a counterexample.

If A and B have the same mean proficiency and different variance, and selection into the test pool is driven only by proficiency, then the country with higher variance will test better under this system while having the same mean proficiency, that's true.

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

#103

Post by davidw » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 10:24 PM UTC

dfawcus wrote: post #99

davidw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly; what English shares with German is mostly words from a small village in the year 1000. You can talk about water, bread, beer and brothers, but anything more complex is out of the question. "Complex" and "question" are both latin-origin words for instance. So are "instance" and "origin". I had a vastly easier time learning Italian than German as a native English speaker. Of course there were confounding varia…

'understand' is from German, 'comprehend' is from French. We get 'Fort' from French, but the equivalent concept 'Stronghold' has Germanic root words and construction. What does that prove? Yet your central point remains, the core of the language is Germanic.

"Yet your central point remains, the core of the language is Germanic."

Of those words, the ones with latin origins are:

* central

* point

* remains

* core

* language

* Germanic

I guess you can run some statistics on all this, but subjectively, to me, Italian felt much easier to learn because much if it - including the grammar - felt more familiar than German.

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

#104

Post by Arete314159 » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 10:26 PM UTC

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #21

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…

If an American or Brit has passable Spanish, but (of course) excellent English skills, would this help them in the Spanish job market? Assuming of course they could get an appropriate visa?

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

#105

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 10:27 PM UTC

wahern wrote: post #76

aspaviento wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's way more than visual. For example, Japanese plurals aren't evident and need to be understood from context. Another example is the word order, in Japanese, the verb goes at the end of the sentence. Add to it Hiragana and Katakana characters and it becomes quite difficult to learn.

In English also verb end can go. Plurality--they can usually be disregarded, too.

> In English also verb end can go.

This sounds wrong to me…

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

#106

Post by mschuetz » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 10:28 PM UTC

I'm surprised to see Singapore behind some other countries. It's the main official language. When I visited Singapore, every person and group we overheard spoke english by default and with the same level of proficiency as american or british people (no accent). Also, everything is labeled mainly in english and only optionally in one of the other 3 official languages.

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

#107

Post by Tainnor » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

sweeneyrod wrote: post #92

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…

Germans speak pretty good English though, the young ones that I've met basically seem like natives with an accent.

Definitely better than e.g. Italian or French people, but we do observe that e.g. most Scandinavian people speak better English.

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

#108

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #29

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.

Similarly, I know a number of fluent Spanish speakers who got caught up in high school Spanish because they didn’t have an understanding of grammar to the level of what was required in the class…

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

#109

Post by maximente » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 10:35 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #49

pyrale wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

this makes no sense when "the ruling body" is located in a country that's different than where a large body or even the majority of speakers are located. see spanish or french.

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

#110

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 10:43 PM UTC

thrwe434234 wrote: post #42

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 discriminat…

> 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).

Oh, come on: you’re saying that teaching English to Indian students makes them illiterate in both their regional dialect and in English? You’re going to need to cite something like that, and a link that tries to correlate “poor countries often speak European languages” to “they’re poor because they’re not speaking whatever they originally used to” (instead of “their language is probably a byproduct of being colonized, and they’re poor because of that and not because European languages have some inherent linguistic deficiency”). And if we’re talking about anecdotal evidence, I suggest you take a look at the graduates of top “English-medium” institutions of India: many of them are multilingual.