Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

qz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 200 posts

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

#121

Post by dfawcus »

davidw wrote: post #82
gpvos wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English grammar has diverged a lot from the other Germanic languages, and its vocabulary is about 50/50 Germanic/Romance. And maybe things are different for Spanish and Italian, but French has had a huge Germanic influence (it is even named after the Franks that ruled it for a long time); e.g., there are many turns of phrase that you can translate word for word.

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…

I would say that anything harder is not beyond the ask.

It is just that our word list is now bigger, meanings have split, and we often use the newer words.

We can still say and ask the same things with the old words, but the extra vocabulary makes for richer discourse; and we're now more used to those choices.

In a situation where brevity and clarity is necessary (e.g. dangerous environments, modern warfare), the language quickly strips itself to its core - without having to think about it. Even "mind the gap".

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

#122

Post by jackjeff »

buckminster wrote: post #111
dfawcus wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a lot of foreign series and movies on BBC4. Lots of Nordic noir crime stuff. There are also many French shows: Engrenage/Spiral season 7 has just finished.

Much easier to catch these on iPlayer than freeview.

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

#123

Post by Narishma »

dfawcus wrote: post #84
pyrale wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find some at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pseudo-anglicism . Even more of them can be found in business language, which did not become loan words.

Corporate speak: 'leverage' when 'use' is perfectly functional, and less of a mouthful. Only occasionally is it used in a sense when a magnifying effect is implied.

Same thing for 'performant' instead of 'fast'.

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

#124

Post by larnmar »

unclesams-uncle wrote: post #45
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 ci…

Maybe, you’ve also got to consider the fact that Flemish is more similar to English than French is, and cultural differences between French and Flemish/Dutch speakers overall (broadly overgeneralising, French people are salty that their language has been overtaken in relevance by English, while Dutch speakers are comfortable with the fact that their language was never all that important).

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

#126

Post by briandear »

thbr99 wrote: post #100

That's good news for Québec where they have made laws to treat English speakers as second class citizens. Businesses in Québec are advised not to greet customers with "Bonjour-Hi" but just "Bonjour" to preserve the identity & French culture in Québec.

It feels like French speaking people in Canada and France are extremely insecure.

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

#127

Post by jackjeff »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #73
yorwba wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. In a liberal democracy?

This is what France does.

The Académie Française is responsible for defining the proper spelling of words and update the intricate grammar rules.

At some point the Éducation Nationale adopts the changes and requires that all children learn using the new rules.

Eventually style guides of major newspapers and TVs are updated as well.

This has worked mostly until the reform of the 1990s which is controversial. I think the Éducation has only recently started to enforce it (15 years later). Many publications still use or tolerate the old style. Microsoft office gives you two dictionaries to chose from.

So basically this has worked until people started to actively go against it...

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

#128

Post by yodsanklai »

nspattak wrote: post #53

I moved to France a few years ago. I did know that French don't know English as much as they do not want to speak English yet I am still amazed by how much. I think that the main reason for that is that they have their own French speaking view of the planet in which they happily live. There are French businesses, French universities and research, French (ex-)colonies, French tourism etc. One could say that the same a…

> I did know that French don't know English as much as they do not want to speak English yet I am still amazed by how much.

I hate it when I hear the stereotype "French people do speak English but they're not going to because they are so proud" (maybe not exactly what you're saying...). It's simply untrue. People who speak good English will very happy to practice whenever the opportunity shows up.

It's not easy to learn a foreign language, and most French people who didn't have the opportunity to study abroad, or who don't need English at their workplace don't speak English very well. However, I think most of them speak some English, as long as you're patient and don't expect them to be fluent. For many people, it's intimidating to speak English, even if they've learnt the basics at school.

> they have their own French speaking view of the planet

Indeed, they live in a country where they can get by using their own national language and most of them don't have enough opportunities to meet English speaking foreigners. Why should you expect them to learn your language, especially if you're the one moving there?

> Germany where English are much more/better spoken

English is hard for roman languages speakers. It seeems Italian, Spaniards, French have a harder time than Germans or Dutch...

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

#129

Post by jackjeff »

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.

For a native English speaker, Italian is easier to learn than German according to the Foreign Service Institute.

https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/languag...

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

#130

Post by learner124 »

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.

Can people really fully learn a language this way? I've been learning Spanish and taken this approach of consuming media (music and videos) and I'm even at a level where I can follow a well spoken Spanish speaker in a video but I have realized I'm still at a beginner stage in terms of having actual conversations with people. I don't think most people can really fully learn a language without a good deal of direct conversation with other speakers of the language.
Post reply on HN