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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

#141

Post by [deleted] »

learner124 wrote: post #130
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 con…

[deleted]

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

#142

Post by AareyBaba »

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.

In India, Australian game shows on TV are subtitled ... in English!

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

#143

Post by bobloblaw45 »

asdasdasdasdwd wrote: post #101
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 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 :)

It's funny because as American kids are learning to read and ask what a word is we are told "sound it out". It usually works. But it definitely doesn't work the other way around, trying to spell a word by how it sounds. I had a Portuguese friend online once that spelled "awesome", "hawsom" and we had a good laugh because he felt embarrassed but we had to assure him it's still spelled wrong but still sounds right if you read it out loud.

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

#144

Post by somberi »

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…

I have visited Spain a few times over the last 20 years. I do not speak Spanish and I try to get by speaking English (these are few days at a time visit, and not long term stay).

From this one man's experience, it is not that Spain has regressed in its proficiency with English, but I find that other southern European countries (particularly Portugal) has upped the ante - a LOT.

To compare Paris (I understand it does not represent all of France, but it is one view point), 20 years ago I would have difficult time in ordering in a restaurant. A hardship many English-speaking visitors today will find hard to empathize with. In most places in Paris today I can get by with English and get complex transactions done.

Portugal has truly baked-in English proficiency into their national psyche now. Zealotry aside, this enables Portugal to further their economic and cultural interests more, I think.

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

#145

Post by tin7in »

perakojotgenije wrote: post #37
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.

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 langua…

Similar experience here. Growing up in Bulgaria as kids, my friends and I mostly learned English from Discovery Channel and Cartoon Network. Because it was pirated or probably too expensive to be translated, the content wasn't dubbed and there were no subtitles for most shows.

A few years later in high school when visiting a school in Germany, I was shocked to find out that the kids there were watching Discovery Channel completely dubbed in German.

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

#146

Post by golemiprague »

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.

It could be a correlation rather than a causation. Small countries don't have the financial justification to dub movies and they also must rely on english for professional reading material since there are not enough people to justify publication of local language books. They also tend to rely more on other countries for import and export. Therefore people have to know English just to be able to study and communicate.

The Spanish market is huge and so are other big influential countries like Japan, Germany or France which is still spoken in many other countries, mainly in Africa. So there is less incentive to learn English because everything is available in the local language.

There are other factors like closeness of the language to English(north European countries) and colonialism(the sub continent). The advancement of the Latin American economies makes Spanish a much more viable and influential competition to English so English becomes less necessary. You can even see it in popular culture where Spanish music and tv shows become popular all over the world. As a non Spanish speaker my random vocabulary in this language increased a lot during the last couple of years.

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

#147

Post by jacobush »

davidw wrote: post #75
perakojotgenije wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 langua…

That's interesting. I wonder if the fact that Serbian is an Indo-European language and Hungarian is not has any influence? Not a linguist and not familiar with either language, so just a semi-random question.

Maybe but for kids that’s not important.

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

#148

Post by WalterBright »

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.

> Incidentally it also explains why native english speakers tend to have no idea about other languages.

I've learned traveling in foreign countries that simply learning the native words for please, thank you, hello, goodbye, yes and no goes a long way towards having a pleasant experience. The locals will go out of their way to be nice to you for making the effort.

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

#149

Post by dmurray »

davidw wrote: post #75
perakojotgenije wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 langua…

That's interesting. I wonder if the fact that Serbian is an Indo-European language and Hungarian is not has any influence? Not a linguist and not familiar with either language, so just a semi-random question.

I doubt it. To anyone other than a paleolinguist, Serbian and Hungarian are approximately equally distant from English. And the Finns don't have trouble learning English.

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

#150

Post by mantap »

davidw wrote: post #75
perakojotgenije wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 langua…

That's interesting. I wonder if the fact that Serbian is an Indo-European language and Hungarian is not has any influence? Not a linguist and not familiar with either language, so just a semi-random question.

Language families refer to the provenance of a language, the oldest vocabulary. That doesn't automatically mean it will be easy or hard to learn if you speak another language within or without that family. For instance if you speak Spanish you may find it easier to learn Tagalog than if you speak Malagasy (Madagascar), even though Malagasy and Tagalog are in the same family and Spanish is not.
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