8 ms·

Ever noticed how people from small countries in Europe often tend to speak English well, while people from big European countries dont? Think Sweden vs Italy.

by petke 11y ago

Ever noticed how people from small countries in Europe often tend to speak English well, while people from big European countries dont? Think Sweden vs Italy. Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on. Subtitles fly past way too quick for young kids to read though. So young kids dont read but just listen, and automatically learn to understand English at home in front of the TV. By the time they get to study English at school, they already know how to speak it. English spelling is another thing though. Im still struggling with that.

the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
> Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on. Counter argument: everything is dubbed in Austria and yet we're pretty good at English. Why? Education and a multi-cultural background in the last 30 years.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- codelike 11y ago
  Although when you compare the English that Austrians and Germans speak (I'm from Germany) to the English of Scandinavians and Dutch people, the latter are noticeably better than the German-speaking countries. So the argument probably has some merit. Edit: At the same time, Scandinavians, the Dutch and Germans/Austrians all have a language that is more closely related to English than the Romanic or Slavic languages.
  - the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
    > Although when you compare the English that Austrians and Germans speak (I'm from Germany) to the English of Scandinavians and Dutch people, they are noticeably better than the German-speaking countries. Historically sure, but if you look at people from my generation I doubt that's the case still. Focused English education in Austria only really started 15 years ago. When I went to school our first english lesson was with 10, now it's 5 or 6.
    - codelike 11y ago
      So you have the impression that young Austrians nowadays are better with English? In Germany they have started to teach English at a much younger age, too, but I haven't noticed a big improvement. Sure, at age 10 they already know more than the kids 10-20 years ago, because they've learned it for 3-4 years already. But I get the impression that a couple of years after leaving school, the language skills deteriorate again because they stop practicing it. And that seems to be the point where movies in English would help a lot: you stay used to the language (at least hearing it). On the other hand, that might be selective perception on my part and things might have gotten better. Or maybe Austria has improved more than Germany, which is entirely conceivable.
      - the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
        > So you have the impression that young Austrians nowadays are better with English? As someone who is married to a native Russian speaker and we both moved to Austria (me from the UK though born in Austria, my wife from Russia), we regularly have conversations with others in English rather than German because everybody seems to actively prefer that. So at least from general experience you can get the majority of services in English here. The exception seems to be immigrant taxi drivers and local hairdressers.
- eurg 11y ago
  As a fellow Austrian I have to strongly disagree. Outside of the frequently-english-using circle (higher management positions, software devs, language students...), English proficiency is terrible. Generation 40+ more likely answers in French or Latin rather understand the difference between beef and pork. I'd place myself in the 90% percentile of fluency in English here, but as soon as a native speaker forgets I'm participating I understand jack shit. Nada. Instant game over. Grammar, vocab, pronounciation, emotional expression, speed, comprehension, etc. -- everything takes a 50% hit compared to German. My coworkers are from Austria, US, Slovenia, Serbia etc. -- often the only shared language is English. It makes meetings excrutiatingly slow and painful (non-fluent talking bringing back memories of 1st year elementary school reading). And that is the experience in an highly educated multinational team in the software industry. Calling it "best-case" would overstretch it (that still goes to EU interpreters meeting at lunch), but compared to large parts of the population... If that is "pretty good", what is "mediocre"? Or "bad"? The inability to say hello?
- pinaceae 11y ago
  compared to the germans? sure. compared to swedes? nope. /schluchtenscheisser
angry-hacker 11y ago
For some reason, I thought every country subtitles movies/tv-shows that are not produced in their own language. When I moved abroad, to Spain, I found it amusing to play clips to movie fans in English and ask who is this? Based on the sound. Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio etc. - they didn't know any because the famous ones have even their personal voice doublants.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Germany is well known for dubbing their TV shows, many other countries do this too. The funny thing is that too can help you learn a language if you already know the program in your own language, but it doesn't really help expose 'the natives' to more languages.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    > Germany is well known for dubbing their TV shows, many other countries do this too. All of the large western european countries, basically all of western europe except for the nordics (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, possibly the Netherlands).
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      In the past only some kids shows were dubbed but even the cartoons for the most part had subtitles. Today it's a bit different.
    - junto 11y ago
      Germany dubs everything. Unless you invest in Sky, the German television broadcasters don't even bother broadcasting the original language as an alternative tone, which I assume over cable isn't a massive extra expense. Only Arté bothers to do so in both German and French. German home made programmes are also particularly dire. Their long running police drama series Tartort is their single saving grace.
      - nrr 11y ago
xixixao 11y ago
Yeah, what you noticed is correct, but the reason is completely wrong. edit: see the map on wiki[0] The reason it might be true that people from smaller countries speak better English is emphasis - in a small country, people are fully aware that knowing foreign language (English, German, French in Europe) is super important. People in big countries (Spain, Italy, France) don't think it's that necessary, because they have a big country of their own, their own language should be the important one (and it partially is, although English has seemed to win as the international communication platform). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_%28filmmaking%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_%28filmmaking%29
- angry-hacker 11y ago
  I'm fairly certain Spain dubs almost everything, at least when I lived there for 2 years, everything seemed to dubbed.
  - RBerenguel 11y ago
    On TV everything is dubbed (although you can watch the original audio tracks). Worth noting too that usually the dubbers are incredibly good, in following the flow of the movie/show and the way they talk. I've watched other's countries dubbing and it's cringeworthy. But I'd have loved original versions as the default since I was a kid: my English is decent, but that would have helped a lot and probably make it much better.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  It's not just emphasis, it's necessity. Smaller countries have to deal with other countries more, and so too do their citizens.
- Vomzor 11y ago
  I think you're wrong. Dubbing or subtitles make a big difference. In Flanders (Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) we have 8 years of French in school and only 5 years of English. Even though France is our neighbor and 40 % of Belgium's speaks French, most young people their English is still much better than their French. It's because we grew up surrounded by English; English songs, English tv shows and movies with subtitles. Older generations speak better French because the media used to be more focussed on France. Young Flemish or Walloon people even speak English to each other..
farmdve 11y ago
I am one of those who "learned" English from watching cartoons as a kid. Mainly, Scooby-doo(the one from the 60s) without any subtitles or dub. But like you said, it's not 100% perfect, nor is it even 80%, neither orally nor in writing.
ddorian43 11y ago
Most of Albanians speak/understand Italian by watching italian shows/movies when they were young (without subtitles).
legulere 11y ago
If you look at the countries in Europe that are good at speaking English it's actually two big factors you see: - The consumption of English media you mentioned - Other Germanic languages. Even though English has moved away quite far from the other Germanic languages, there's still quite some Germanic heritage in for instance in how to generally express yourself. The problems arise when things are actually different. Swedes for instance often have a problem pronouncing the /tʃ/ sound and pronounce chip like ship. But for speakers of Germanic languages the problems are fewer.
- syllogism 11y ago
  Finnish is not a Germanic language.
  - kyberias 11y ago
    Neither is Polish or Estonian. What is your point?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - mortehu 11y ago
      Probably that Finland, Poland and Estonia are right behind the small Germanic language countries on the English Proficiency Index[1], and above Germany and Austria. 1. http://www.ef.edu/epi/ http://www.ef.edu/epi/
kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
> English spelling is another thing though. Im still struggling with that. You're in good company since many native speakers can't spell either. English's greatest virtue is a high degree of fault tolerance.
- russell 11y ago
  I think the degree of fault tolerance depends on the age of the reader. My first computers used discrete transistors. My high school English teacher was a strict grammarian. I paid close attention because I was dating her daughter, also a strict grammarian. To this day the misuse of "to" for "too" will bring my brain to a full stop. I am moderately adapted to the confusion of "fewer" vs "less". (It's countable vs uncountable.) And I even use "they" as a gender neutral third person singular, but you should never do it in formal writing. I read an article sometime in the past year that maintained that all the prissy rules were imposed on a perfectly good language by self-imposed arbiters of the language. Sorry, I cant locate it at the moment.
- vacri 11y ago
  I was travelling through Vietnam and thought it funny just how many diacritic marks Vietnamese text makes, and thought that English was better because it doesn't need them. Then I realised that - holy shit! - English needs them big time. Look at wind (air movement) and wind (wrap around), or wound (injury) and wound (past tense wrap). Or even read (view text present tense) and read (view text past tense). Admittedly I'm only a monoglot, but Engish seems pretty brutal in expecting you to figure out the correct sounds from the context. A few diacritics sprinkled in could likely really help newcomers with appropriate sounds. On a tangent, one of the things I like about written Spanish is that you know at the beginning of a sentence whether it's a question or an exclamation. It's always a bit weird when reading a long sentence in a novel, to get to the end of it and think "oh, that was actually a question..."
phatbyte 11y ago
I'm From Portugal and can confirm this, and I'd say almost everyone especially people between 12-45 know how to speak english fluently. Most of this is because we grow up watching movies and tv shows with subtitles. Heck, I even remember watching Cartoon Network without any subtitles at all. Another thing I noticed is how good the english accent is from people from Portugal and Sweden.
andreasvc 11y ago
You make it sound too easy. You don't "automatically" learn a language by hearing its sounds on TV (although it most likely helps). You need to engage with a language, preferably by real life interaction. Not dubbing movies is not a silver bullet to second language learning. I think it's much more plausible to say that the smaller countries of Europe have more of a economic necessity to be proficient in a second language (which often happens to be English).
GolDDranks 11y ago
Dubbing / subtitling isn't everything, although it certainly helps. According to the theories of language acquisition, it is processing of linguistic input (connecting form to meaning to be able to understand the meaning) that makes the internal, unconscious representation of language to develop. Subtitling movies and TV shows essentially gives more opportunities to encounter linguistic input. However, as the viewers are able to get the meaning from the subtitles only, they don't necessarily PROCESS the foreign language. Some do, so the mileage varies a lot. (Watching without subtitles will force you process the meaning – or if the difficulty level is too high, just frustrate and ignore it. Or process partially.) I find that even more than TV shows, kids these days are learning English from games – in Finland, they don't translate games at all, so there's even greater incentive to actually try to understand the English input.
- song 11y ago
  I think the biggest impact of subtitling instead of dubbing is when kid shows are subtitled. Small kids cannot get the mean from the subtitles since they cannot read or if they can often cannot read fast enough. This means that those kids get a crash course in the language by associating actions with English words and getting used to the pronunciation of the English. Kids also tend to have more patience when it comes to watching something that they do not fully understand due to language issues so they're less likely to give up.
AlexeyBrin 11y ago
Personally I started to watch English and French movies without any kind of subtitles since about 2005. It certainly helped with my level of English.
DonaldFisk 11y ago
Not sure it's down to the size of the country. More likely, it's the size of the community speaking the language, and the closeness of the language to English, together with some other factors. During my time in Belgium, I found that few Liégeois spoke English, and one simply couldn't get by in Liège without being able to speak French. However, during visits to Antwerp, I could speak in English and people there were happy to reply in English. So why the difference? Dutch is a lot closer to English than French. Both are Germanic languages. I know English and French share a large common vocabulary, but grammar and basic vocabulary are quite different. Dutch isn't spoken much outside of the Netherlands and Flanders, so there's more incentive for the Dutch and Flemish to learn a second language, and the obvious one is English. Many people in Liège actively dislike speaking languages other than French. Not many tourists go to Liège. Brussels, though mostly French speaking, is more international, and gets more tourists, so English is spoken there, though French is preferred.
- Vomzor 11y ago
  Actually, French is the second language learned in Flanders. English is the third. Flanders uses subtitles, Wallonia dubs. Instead of learning Dutch as their second language most Walloons learn English. This is anecdotal, but I've noticed their English is worse than most people in Flanders. I think this is where the whole dubbing/subtitles also plays a part.
- rachbelaid 11y ago
  Coming from Belgium, petke is also right about the influence of small language community. In example, in the flamish part (where belgian speak dutch), a lot of tv program and cinema is dub from english and even some cartoon. Where in the Walloons part (where belgian speak only french), we have access to the big tv network from France so we never watch anything in English. But I remember reading that different languages use different sounds spectrum and hearing/understanding languages outside your spectrum is harder. Some languages have overlapping sounds spectrum which make learning different language easier. Now you have also the languages sharing the same roots and as you said somebody who know a germanic language then will have easier to guess/learn new vocabulary.
mariusc23 11y ago
That's exactly how I learned English when I was young, although most of my classmates didn't. Maybe those suckers actually spent time studying instead of watching cartoons!
rue 11y ago
No, kids don’t really start school pre-equipped with English skills. In fact, most preschooler shows are dubbed. The previous exposure helps some, especially those who can already read the subtitles, but more important is that when they actually start studying English, they’re also exposed to more grown-up shows—which do come subtitled. Or that’s how it was. Nowadays, of course, it seems that kids move pretty seamlessly to content without even subtitles (think youtube and whatever it is the kids use).
based2 11y ago
It may also involve the language roots : Saxon (easier path to English) versus Latin.
kwhitefoot 11y ago
Sounds plausible unless you happen to know that children's programmes are dubbed, at least they are in Norway and as far as I know in the rest of the Nordic area. As an adult subtitled programmes are very useful for locals learning English and foreigners, like me, learning Norwegian. English spelling is often a problem because people are told that it is simply irregular when the truth is that if you know a little etymology you can figure out a lot because when you know where the word comes from you can then find out what set of rules are to be used for it. I'll admit that there are still difficult words :-)
- gongador 11y ago
  As far as I can remember, that's a relatively recent trend though (dubbing childrens' programmes), at least in Sweden. I can't remember any being dubbed until possibly in the late 1990s, more likely the early 2000s.
  - kwhitefoot 11y ago
    Been in Norway 30 years now and all three children grew up here from the late 80s. Children's television has always been either dubbed or home grown.
- petke 11y ago
  Im not sure how it is today but when I grew up in Finland in the 80s all the most popular tv-series for kids where in English only. Of the top of my head: The Transformers, Inspector Gadget, M.A.S.K., He-Man, G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Care bears, Smurfs, Postman pat, DJ Kat show, and then non-cartoon shows like like MacGyver, Knight Rider, Airwolf, Quantum Leap, Rescue 911, etc. We also watched some some non-English tv shows like the Swedish "Bjornes magasin" and the Finnish "Pikku Kakkonen". But these shows where not as cool and not as plentiful as those English tv shows.
LoSboccacc 11y ago
From Italy here, can confirm. It is more than accent tho: has something to do by not being exposed to the full spectrum of sound the humans can produce. We Italians can't say the th right, because we cannot even _listen_ it right. We can't just process the sound, yet alone reproduce it. Then we get on internet and we learn written English, but since the rules are inconsistent we mostly are left to make wild guesses as their sounds and English pronunciation is extremely irregular. Most of the complexity comes from having to know if a word radix is or isn't saxon and apply a different set of pronunciation rules, so for example think -ice- which has very different sounds in different words in two groups or this about "A/I/E" https://i.imgur.com/zncINPy.gif https://i.imgur.com/zncINPy.gif but what gets me is you have people that speak like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 and tell foreigners they are not understandable
- tripzilch 11y ago
  > but what gets me is you have people that speak like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 and tell foreigners they are not understandable hah, IMO that's because they mixed the music way too loud in that clip :) I can make out most of it, but definitely not the very first bit. I guess if it had been Dutch, I'd also have trouble understanding everything--though perhaps a bit less because like you imply, I'm better trained at separating "Dutch sounds" from background noise. This is the reason why I really prefer to watch English TV or movies with (English) subtitles. It's one thing to understand what they say, it's another thing to be able to make it out in the first place.
th-ai 11y ago
Spelling English is a pain. Can modern text reduce this pain? How can you see the sound in text? Written and spoken English can sync CAPS in sylLABles while vocaliIZED. http://th.ai http://th.ai youtube CCaptions=ON, text=monospace, see syllables precisely while you hear them, playback SLOW. In theory, constant experience of SYNCHronous vocALized TEXT will help you spell better faster.

by petke 11y ago

the_mitsuhiko 11y ago

> Its mostly just a happy accident. You see, in small countries they usually dont dub movies or tv shows, simply because the market isn't big enough. They simply put subtitles on. Counter argument: everything is dubbed in Austria and yet we're pretty good at English. Why? Education and a multi-cultural background in the last 30 years.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
codelike 11y ago
Although when you compare the English that Austrians and Germans speak (I'm from Germany) to the English of Scandinavians and Dutch people, the latter are noticeably better than the German-speaking countries. So the argument probably has some merit. Edit: At the same time, Scandinavians, the Dutch and Germans/Austrians all have a language that is more closely related to English than the Romanic or Slavic languages.
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  > Although when you compare the English that Austrians and Germans speak (I'm from Germany) to the English of Scandinavians and Dutch people, they are noticeably better than the German-speaking countries. Historically sure, but if you look at people from my generation I doubt that's the case still. Focused English education in Austria only really started 15 years ago. When I went to school our first english lesson was with 10, now it's 5 or 6.
  - codelike 11y ago
    So you have the impression that young Austrians nowadays are better with English? In Germany they have started to teach English at a much younger age, too, but I haven't noticed a big improvement. Sure, at age 10 they already know more than the kids 10-20 years ago, because they've learned it for 3-4 years already. But I get the impression that a couple of years after leaving school, the language skills deteriorate again because they stop practicing it. And that seems to be the point where movies in English would help a lot: you stay used to the language (at least hearing it). On the other hand, that might be selective perception on my part and things might have gotten better. Or maybe Austria has improved more than Germany, which is entirely conceivable.
    - the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
      > So you have the impression that young Austrians nowadays are better with English? As someone who is married to a native Russian speaker and we both moved to Austria (me from the UK though born in Austria, my wife from Russia), we regularly have conversations with others in English rather than German because everybody seems to actively prefer that. So at least from general experience you can get the majority of services in English here. The exception seems to be immigrant taxi drivers and local hairdressers.
eurg 11y ago
As a fellow Austrian I have to strongly disagree. Outside of the frequently-english-using circle (higher management positions, software devs, language students...), English proficiency is terrible. Generation 40+ more likely answers in French or Latin rather understand the difference between beef and pork. I'd place myself in the 90% percentile of fluency in English here, but as soon as a native speaker forgets I'm participating I understand jack shit. Nada. Instant game over. Grammar, vocab, pronounciation, emotional expression, speed, comprehension, etc. -- everything takes a 50% hit compared to German. My coworkers are from Austria, US, Slovenia, Serbia etc. -- often the only shared language is English. It makes meetings excrutiatingly slow and painful (non-fluent talking bringing back memories of 1st year elementary school reading). And that is the experience in an highly educated multinational team in the software industry. Calling it "best-case" would overstretch it (that still goes to EU interpreters meeting at lunch), but compared to large parts of the population... If that is "pretty good", what is "mediocre"? Or "bad"? The inability to say hello?
pinaceae 11y ago
compared to the germans? sure. compared to swedes? nope. /schluchtenscheisser

angry-hacker 11y ago

For some reason, I thought every country subtitles movies/tv-shows that are not produced in their own language. When I moved abroad, to Spain, I found it amusing to play clips to movie fans in English and ask who is this? Based on the sound. Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio etc. - they didn't know any because the famous ones have even their personal voice doublants.

jacquesm 11y ago
Germany is well known for dubbing their TV shows, many other countries do this too. The funny thing is that too can help you learn a language if you already know the program in your own language, but it doesn't really help expose 'the natives' to more languages.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > Germany is well known for dubbing their TV shows, many other countries do this too. All of the large western european countries, basically all of western europe except for the nordics (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, possibly the Netherlands).
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    In the past only some kids shows were dubbed but even the cartoons for the most part had subtitles. Today it's a bit different.
  - junto 11y ago
    Germany dubs everything. Unless you invest in Sky, the German television broadcasters don't even bother broadcasting the original language as an alternative tone, which I assume over cable isn't a massive extra expense. Only Arté bothers to do so in both German and French. German home made programmes are also particularly dire. Their long running police drama series Tartort is their single saving grace.
    - nrr 11y ago

xixixao 11y ago

Yeah, what you noticed is correct, but the reason is completely wrong. edit: see the map on wiki[0] The reason it might be true that people from smaller countries speak better English is emphasis - in a small country, people are fully aware that knowing foreign language (English, German, French in Europe) is super important. People in big countries (Spain, Italy, France) don't think it's that necessary, because they have a big country of their own, their own language should be the important one (and it partially is, although English has seemed to win as the international communication platform). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_%28filmmaking%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_%28filmmaking%29

angry-hacker 11y ago
I'm fairly certain Spain dubs almost everything, at least when I lived there for 2 years, everything seemed to dubbed.
- RBerenguel 11y ago
  On TV everything is dubbed (although you can watch the original audio tracks). Worth noting too that usually the dubbers are incredibly good, in following the flow of the movie/show and the way they talk. I've watched other's countries dubbing and it's cringeworthy. But I'd have loved original versions as the default since I was a kid: my English is decent, but that would have helped a lot and probably make it much better.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
It's not just emphasis, it's necessity. Smaller countries have to deal with other countries more, and so too do their citizens.
Vomzor 11y ago
I think you're wrong. Dubbing or subtitles make a big difference. In Flanders (Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) we have 8 years of French in school and only 5 years of English. Even though France is our neighbor and 40 % of Belgium's speaks French, most young people their English is still much better than their French. It's because we grew up surrounded by English; English songs, English tv shows and movies with subtitles. Older generations speak better French because the media used to be more focussed on France. Young Flemish or Walloon people even speak English to each other..

farmdve 11y ago

I am one of those who "learned" English from watching cartoons as a kid. Mainly, Scooby-doo(the one from the 60s) without any subtitles or dub. But like you said, it's not 100% perfect, nor is it even 80%, neither orally nor in writing.

ddorian43 11y ago

Most of Albanians speak/understand Italian by watching italian shows/movies when they were young (without subtitles).

legulere 11y ago

If you look at the countries in Europe that are good at speaking English it's actually two big factors you see: - The consumption of English media you mentioned - Other Germanic languages. Even though English has moved away quite far from the other Germanic languages, there's still quite some Germanic heritage in for instance in how to generally express yourself. The problems arise when things are actually different. Swedes for instance often have a problem pronouncing the /tʃ/ sound and pronounce chip like ship. But for speakers of Germanic languages the problems are fewer.

syllogism 11y ago
Finnish is not a Germanic language.
- kyberias 11y ago
  Neither is Polish or Estonian. What is your point?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - mortehu 11y ago
    Probably that Finland, Poland and Estonia are right behind the small Germanic language countries on the English Proficiency Index[1], and above Germany and Austria. 1. http://www.ef.edu/epi/ http://www.ef.edu/epi/

kevin_thibedeau 11y ago

> English spelling is another thing though. Im still struggling with that. You're in good company since many native speakers can't spell either. English's greatest virtue is a high degree of fault tolerance.

russell 11y ago
I think the degree of fault tolerance depends on the age of the reader. My first computers used discrete transistors. My high school English teacher was a strict grammarian. I paid close attention because I was dating her daughter, also a strict grammarian. To this day the misuse of "to" for "too" will bring my brain to a full stop. I am moderately adapted to the confusion of "fewer" vs "less". (It's countable vs uncountable.) And I even use "they" as a gender neutral third person singular, but you should never do it in formal writing. I read an article sometime in the past year that maintained that all the prissy rules were imposed on a perfectly good language by self-imposed arbiters of the language. Sorry, I cant locate it at the moment.
vacri 11y ago
I was travelling through Vietnam and thought it funny just how many diacritic marks Vietnamese text makes, and thought that English was better because it doesn't need them. Then I realised that - holy shit! - English needs them big time. Look at wind (air movement) and wind (wrap around), or wound (injury) and wound (past tense wrap). Or even read (view text present tense) and read (view text past tense). Admittedly I'm only a monoglot, but Engish seems pretty brutal in expecting you to figure out the correct sounds from the context. A few diacritics sprinkled in could likely really help newcomers with appropriate sounds. On a tangent, one of the things I like about written Spanish is that you know at the beginning of a sentence whether it's a question or an exclamation. It's always a bit weird when reading a long sentence in a novel, to get to the end of it and think "oh, that was actually a question..."

phatbyte 11y ago

I'm From Portugal and can confirm this, and I'd say almost everyone especially people between 12-45 know how to speak english fluently. Most of this is because we grow up watching movies and tv shows with subtitles. Heck, I even remember watching Cartoon Network without any subtitles at all. Another thing I noticed is how good the english accent is from people from Portugal and Sweden.

andreasvc 11y ago

You make it sound too easy. You don't "automatically" learn a language by hearing its sounds on TV (although it most likely helps). You need to engage with a language, preferably by real life interaction. Not dubbing movies is not a silver bullet to second language learning. I think it's much more plausible to say that the smaller countries of Europe have more of a economic necessity to be proficient in a second language (which often happens to be English).

GolDDranks 11y ago

Dubbing / subtitling isn't everything, although it certainly helps. According to the theories of language acquisition, it is processing of linguistic input (connecting form to meaning to be able to understand the meaning) that makes the internal, unconscious representation of language to develop. Subtitling movies and TV shows essentially gives more opportunities to encounter linguistic input. However, as the viewers are able to get the meaning from the subtitles only, they don't necessarily PROCESS the foreign language. Some do, so the mileage varies a lot. (Watching without subtitles will force you process the meaning – or if the difficulty level is too high, just frustrate and ignore it. Or process partially.) I find that even more than TV shows, kids these days are learning English from games – in Finland, they don't translate games at all, so there's even greater incentive to actually try to understand the English input.

song 11y ago
I think the biggest impact of subtitling instead of dubbing is when kid shows are subtitled. Small kids cannot get the mean from the subtitles since they cannot read or if they can often cannot read fast enough. This means that those kids get a crash course in the language by associating actions with English words and getting used to the pronunciation of the English. Kids also tend to have more patience when it comes to watching something that they do not fully understand due to language issues so they're less likely to give up.

AlexeyBrin 11y ago

Personally I started to watch English and French movies without any kind of subtitles since about 2005. It certainly helped with my level of English.

DonaldFisk 11y ago

Not sure it's down to the size of the country. More likely, it's the size of the community speaking the language, and the closeness of the language to English, together with some other factors. During my time in Belgium, I found that few Liégeois spoke English, and one simply couldn't get by in Liège without being able to speak French. However, during visits to Antwerp, I could speak in English and people there were happy to reply in English. So why the difference? Dutch is a lot closer to English than French. Both are Germanic languages. I know English and French share a large common vocabulary, but grammar and basic vocabulary are quite different. Dutch isn't spoken much outside of the Netherlands and Flanders, so there's more incentive for the Dutch and Flemish to learn a second language, and the obvious one is English. Many people in Liège actively dislike speaking languages other than French. Not many tourists go to Liège. Brussels, though mostly French speaking, is more international, and gets more tourists, so English is spoken there, though French is preferred.

Vomzor 11y ago
Actually, French is the second language learned in Flanders. English is the third. Flanders uses subtitles, Wallonia dubs. Instead of learning Dutch as their second language most Walloons learn English. This is anecdotal, but I've noticed their English is worse than most people in Flanders. I think this is where the whole dubbing/subtitles also plays a part.
rachbelaid 11y ago
Coming from Belgium, petke is also right about the influence of small language community. In example, in the flamish part (where belgian speak dutch), a lot of tv program and cinema is dub from english and even some cartoon. Where in the Walloons part (where belgian speak only french), we have access to the big tv network from France so we never watch anything in English. But I remember reading that different languages use different sounds spectrum and hearing/understanding languages outside your spectrum is harder. Some languages have overlapping sounds spectrum which make learning different language easier. Now you have also the languages sharing the same roots and as you said somebody who know a germanic language then will have easier to guess/learn new vocabulary.

mariusc23 11y ago

That's exactly how I learned English when I was young, although most of my classmates didn't. Maybe those suckers actually spent time studying instead of watching cartoons!

rue 11y ago

No, kids don’t really start school pre-equipped with English skills. In fact, most preschooler shows are dubbed. The previous exposure helps some, especially those who can already read the subtitles, but more important is that when they actually start studying English, they’re also exposed to more grown-up shows—which do come subtitled. Or that’s how it was. Nowadays, of course, it seems that kids move pretty seamlessly to content without even subtitles (think youtube and whatever it is the kids use).

based2 11y ago

It may also involve the language roots : Saxon (easier path to English) versus Latin.

kwhitefoot 11y ago

Sounds plausible unless you happen to know that children's programmes are dubbed, at least they are in Norway and as far as I know in the rest of the Nordic area. As an adult subtitled programmes are very useful for locals learning English and foreigners, like me, learning Norwegian. English spelling is often a problem because people are told that it is simply irregular when the truth is that if you know a little etymology you can figure out a lot because when you know where the word comes from you can then find out what set of rules are to be used for it. I'll admit that there are still difficult words :-)

gongador 11y ago
As far as I can remember, that's a relatively recent trend though (dubbing childrens' programmes), at least in Sweden. I can't remember any being dubbed until possibly in the late 1990s, more likely the early 2000s.
- kwhitefoot 11y ago
  Been in Norway 30 years now and all three children grew up here from the late 80s. Children's television has always been either dubbed or home grown.
petke 11y ago
Im not sure how it is today but when I grew up in Finland in the 80s all the most popular tv-series for kids where in English only. Of the top of my head: The Transformers, Inspector Gadget, M.A.S.K., He-Man, G.I. Joe, My Little Pony, Care bears, Smurfs, Postman pat, DJ Kat show, and then non-cartoon shows like like MacGyver, Knight Rider, Airwolf, Quantum Leap, Rescue 911, etc. We also watched some some non-English tv shows like the Swedish "Bjornes magasin" and the Finnish "Pikku Kakkonen". But these shows where not as cool and not as plentiful as those English tv shows.

LoSboccacc 11y ago

From Italy here, can confirm. It is more than accent tho: has something to do by not being exposed to the full spectrum of sound the humans can produce. We Italians can't say the th right, because we cannot even _listen_ it right. We can't just process the sound, yet alone reproduce it. Then we get on internet and we learn written English, but since the rules are inconsistent we mostly are left to make wild guesses as their sounds and English pronunciation is extremely irregular. Most of the complexity comes from having to know if a word radix is or isn't saxon and apply a different set of pronunciation rules, so for example think -ice- which has very different sounds in different words in two groups or this about "A/I/E" https://i.imgur.com/zncINPy.gif https://i.imgur.com/zncINPy.gif but what gets me is you have people that speak like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 and tell foreigners they are not understandable

tripzilch 11y ago
> but what gets me is you have people that speak like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 and tell foreigners they are not understandable hah, IMO that's because they mixed the music way too loud in that clip :) I can make out most of it, but definitely not the very first bit. I guess if it had been Dutch, I'd also have trouble understanding everything--though perhaps a bit less because like you imply, I'm better trained at separating "Dutch sounds" from background noise. This is the reason why I really prefer to watch English TV or movies with (English) subtitles. It's one thing to understand what they say, it's another thing to be able to make it out in the first place.

th-ai 11y ago

Spelling English is a pain. Can modern text reduce this pain? How can you see the sound in text? Written and spoken English can sync CAPS in sylLABles while vocaliIZED. http://th.ai http://th.ai youtube CCaptions=ON, text=monospace, see syllables precisely while you hear them, playback SLOW. In theory, constant experience of SYNCHronous vocALized TEXT will help you spell better faster.