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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

#111

Post by buckminster »

dfawcus wrote: post #90
herogreen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My two explanations (as a French): all English contents on the TV is dubbed and English classes often have 24+ students which makes it hard for the teacher to have everyone speaking (even a bit). Whereas in Finland, subtitles on foreign TV programs are common and classes have less students (I think). Thus I believe it entirely comes down to the government not being smart enough.

Or try the converse, in the UK almost all foreign language content is still dubbed. Then for foreign language (French and German) classes in state schools in England around 1975 onwards: We'd often have around 30 pupils. Time was spend on learning vocabulary and set phrases, but mainly in the written form. This would be from around age 10 (French) or 13 (German). It was the first exposure to grammar concepts (verb, n…

All my TV watching is on Freeview and I haven't seen anything dubbed in years. Where do you find dubbed media?

I agree that language teaching is terrible here though. The period you describe was particularly bad. The teaching of formal English grammar had become unfashionable but foreign languages continued to be taught using grammar concepts that nobody now understood in English. It was completely absurd.

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

#112

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

Arete314159 wrote: post #104
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?

I suppose you mean in the tech job market? Sure, I think it would help and it would be easy for them to find jobs. Although an American or Brit would find the salaries here very low, and work hours (at least in most companies) too long. Many Spanish tech graduates do the reverse, migrating to the UK (or, to a lesser extent, the US) for better salaries and conditions. Although Brexit is making many of those who went to the UK return or migrate elsewhere.

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

#113

Post by bleuedejapan »

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.

Portugal is on the top score list.

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

#115

Post by syrrim »

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.

Order care can being if understood like you use you don't any you about.

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

#116

Post by narag »

ricw wrote: post #93
narag wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! The reason Germany has a high level of proficiency for a country that doesn’t translate media (movies, tv shows etc don’t act as language learning agent), it has a deep and well trained set of teachers. How? Famously the last German emperor insisted that every kid learn English in school. Over 100 years later and this has lead to well trained teachers, who can teach kids properly. I guess the take away is that…

It's more general than for learning a language. For a whole country, teaching quality is a virtuous circle, you can't simply put a lot of money and expect inmediate results, but need to iterate through generations. That's why I think importing a lot of native speakers was a good idea: you can step ahead iterations.

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

#117

Post by dfawcus »

davidw wrote: post #103
dfawcus wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

That is largely down to the choice of multiple words to express similar concepts in English (due to its mongrel roots), and those having subtly different meanings, hence the high information density in English.

So in one having access to an expansive enough vocabulary, one will often use fewer of the core words. Partially as a way to remove ambiguity in written English (which can be very difficult), partially to write a shorter sentence than would be the case using Germanic root words alone.

For the second phrase you quoted, I could have written 'the heart of the tongue', but that could be read to imply a different meaning.

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

#118

Post by gerdesj »

toxik wrote: post #58
akie wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the national language in your country English, or another language?

It is a different language, notably it's a northern Germanic language so the compatibility is fairly high. It also isn't mutually intelligible with English at all. I should maybe just say it's Swedish.

English started out life as a Germanic language but has changed somewhat over the last 1500 years. For example scir gerefe which becomes shire reeve and eventually sheriff. Yes, Rosco P Coltrane and company have a job title that is over 1500 years old. A shire is roughly a county in modern terms. For example Devonshire, Lanarkshire, Sir Fynwy etc in Britain. That last is Welsh.

Look at words like day, tag, dag and so on in the various Germanic languages. When you see that in English, the letter g morphed into y in a lot of words, it makes sense and of course we have to allow for some rather random spelling in the past and a great vowel shift or two. I live in Yeovil which was recorded as gifle (a fork in a river) in about 900. The nearby river Yeo seems to be named after the town which is named for its location on a feature of the river ...

These islands from 55 BC to 1066 AD became a revolving door to various invasions, some of which included Swedes and Danes generally as vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Italians (Romans) and any other tom, dick or harry that could find a boat and fancied duffing up a few Britons and settling down and raise a few apples and chickens! When the Northmen - Norsemen - Normans ie Duke William of Normandy turned up in 1066 they eventually did the job properly and ... eventually became English themselves and simply gave the language a bit of a twist. For example we have both Saxon and Frankish (French) words for many things eg meat: cow and beef, sheep and mutton, chicken and errr chicken, pig and pork.

I think that because English has had so many influences in the past that it has developed a certain flexibility that many languages do not. It is also a relatively new language - only 1500 years old! I learned Latin at school for several years, along with French and lived in Germany for 10 years (off and on). English can be warped and twisted and generally abused and yet the meaning remains intact better than some other languages.

The ultimate irony here is that I am talking about the new kid language on the block on HN!

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

#119

Post by bigger_cheese »

yorwba wrote: post #35
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 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.

I studied Japanese for 10 years from Primary School until end of high school.

I can remember when we watched television in class there would be no subtitles. The teacher would pause the video every 2 minutes or so and then ask someone in the class to explain what had just happened during those 2 minutes.

Usually it would be stuff like a news broadcast or similar the teacher had taped from Japanese tv broadcast.

You could mostly translate things because they were talking about relatively mundane concepts which were similar to what we had been learning. "That clip was about the opening of a railway station in this prefecture etc."

I can remember one lesson the teacher played Mononoke Hime in class, this was a pretty big anime movie which had just come out at the time it was full of references to Japanese mythology and folklore, no one is class had any idea what was going on in the story because it was full of language we'd never heard before.

The other thing is that anime tends to use a lot of informal language, which differed a lot to the more formal speech we learnt in class. So I suspect it would be very difficult to learn Japanese from Anime alone.

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