81–90 of 200 posts
Another article on that page https://qz.com/1213443/the-world-is-getting-better-at-englis... lists English proficiency by country. English proficiency is measured by average score on a test by a certain English testing company, which is obviously a flawed measure but ^\_o_/^.
So I guess we don't make the grade :-(
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.
I had a vastly easier time learning Italian than German as a native English speaker. Of course there were confounding variables, but I just found Italian to have a lot more that I could latch on to in the modern world.
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…
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 pronuntiation properly. And that's the weakest link in our system. Most teachers have no idea how English is really pronounced and wouldn't be able to understand a native speaker to save their lives. It's impossible to learn English from someone that can't understand or speak it.
I believe it was Aguirre that proposed a plan to invite thousands of native speakers to teach English in Madrid. Of course everybody attacked her as usual whatever she says... I don't like her either, but that was a good idea for once.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers. Have some examples of these english words that native english speakers wouldn't know?
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.
Only occasionally is it used in a sense when a magnifying effect is implied.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
having done business with all Spanish/Italian/French businesses, I can guarantee you that nothing comes close to Italians as far as poor english
Our English is so bad that we make fun of our own ineptitude ourselves.
- Advanced English School?
- If if, between between.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going in the reverse direction - "a community speaks one language that then splits to two mutually unintelligible languages" seems so destructive that standardising on one language seems like an obvious and massive win for humanity at large. But by raw number of languages standardising on English is probably not ideal. Probably some hybrid of Chinese grammar, Korean alphabet and Latin pronunciations would have been m…
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…
And the language is explicitly standardized by the Accademia della Crusca.
Still you are not wrong, now that it is widely spoken, it is likely that the language will mutate quickly (and signs are already visible).
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.
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…
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…
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.
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, noun, etc). Little time was spent on speaking the languages.
At the end of this most of us we still incapable to speaking the foreign language, let alone being literate in them!
I'm not sure to what extent it has improved since.