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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

#51

Post by alkonaut »

The solution to this (assuming you see it as a problem in search of a solution) is to stop watching dubbed media. Content targeted at anyone over say 10 years just shouldn't be dubbed, period.

Language isn't merely vocabulary, grammar and pronounciation. It's also nuance in expression, proverbs, slang, idioms. All of this is lost when content is translated and dubbed. When a person in a US sitcom uses an idiom, the spanish dubbed content translates to a similar Spanish idiom. With subtitles not only do I get the pronounciation and vocabulary, I also see in the subtitles a best-effort mapping from the english idiom to the corresponding idiom in my native language.

I think this is solving itself automatically as movies and traditional TV gives way for youtube and netflix where dubbed content isn't as common.

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

#52

Post by gpvos »

gsich wrote: post #3

No shit, learning English from a romanic language is hard. German to English is easy mode.

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.

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

#53

Post by nspattak »

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 are true for other countries, eg Germany where English are much more/better spoken, but apparently it's not like this and I have no explanation for that.

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

#55

Post by raxxorrax »

jventura wrote: post #44
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…

I was horrible in English while at school and internet access wasn't widely spread. Regular use is pretty important in my opinion.

Instantly switching languages is hard though. You end up with sentences that make absolutely no cheesecake and fail you grammar basic if you switch to your native tongue again. Often happens to me after work when I was consuming content in English for a longer period of time.

Nearly everything is localized here though and it is very true that dubbed content suddenly feels very artificial. Older generations have a comparably bad English proficiency, even if they once excelled in school.

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

#56

Post by akie »

toxik wrote: post #36
akie wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really not true. Many people I know also speak English, but that doesn't mean that they somehow forget how to speak their own language. If anything, small communities with an own language tend to be fiercely proud of that language, and do everything in their power to protect it [see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German ]. And if these languages do disappear, it tends to be because the national languag…

I’m a speaker of one of the smaller languages, and every educated person I know lament the inability to express themselves without resorting to English idioms. It isn’t that they don’t exist, some people are great at my language, it’s just that something like 99% of the movies I watch, podcasts I listen to, or papers I read are in English. I simply am much better at high level English than my own language. Colloquial…

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

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

#57

Post by ksec »

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…

Exactly.

20 years ago not many in Spain and France ( or even Germany ) would speak any English. May be they do, but may be they were too afraid, or refuse to speak as in the case of French.

20 years later literally everybody in ( Western ) Europe speaks English. I could go on the street and ask for directions, in places that are not cities or tourist attraction. Even the French. They may not be proficient at it, but they do understand and can do basic communication.

So I dont see any decline. And Thinking back I am surprised at how fast the world has evolved! ( Which also means I am getting old .... )

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

#58

Post by toxik »

akie wrote: post #56
toxik wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a speaker of one of the smaller languages, and every educated person I know lament the inability to express themselves without resorting to English idioms. It isn’t that they don’t exist, some people are great at my language, it’s just that something like 99% of the movies I watch, podcasts I listen to, or papers I read are in English. I simply am much better at high level English than my own language. Colloquial…

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.

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

#59

Post by jack_arleth »

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…

Though I'm willing to agree with this as a general idea, I would be cautious to state it as a fact.

I've encountered many Flemish Belgians who openly admit they can understand English but cannot speak it well. A member of my close familiy who works in aviation occasionally rants about "having to do everything in English", a position that I cannot begin to understand. Whereas I've worked for a Flemish Belgian company that also had Walloon Belgian customers who communicated not stubbornly in French (as the stereotype would suggest) but in professional English.

I believe that the language learning is affected by the generations. There has been a disregard, acceptance and now (what I believe) a new disregard of foreign languages in Flanders. Though I do not have any numbers to back that up. That said the news recently reported an all-time low for Flemish Belgian students with regard to reading and sciences (https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2019/12/03/_dutch-is-the-key-to...). So there might be a correlation between the two subjects.

It would be very interesting to have data on this subject as Belgium indeed is a great place to study this phenomenon.

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

#60

Post by aspaviento »

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 agree to a certain extent but keep in mind that Japanese grammar is completely different from any latin based language. That makes really difficult to asimilate full sentences, locate where the action or the subject are, etc.
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