7 ms·

There's a few more factors besides the ones in the article. -Most of the languages high on the list are similar to English -The countries don't dub movies. Th

• rsaarelm 16y ago
  Finland is the odd one out in the language similarity thing. Scandinavian languages and Dutch are pretty close to English, but Finnish isn't even Indo-European.
  • xiaoma 16y ago
    Strictly speaking, in terms of grammar, Finnish is an Altaic language, like Korean and Japanese. However, in terms of vocabulary, culture and just about everything else, Finnish is closer to English. It has not just a great number of loan words (as Japanese does), but also cognates. Possibly more importantly, Finland shares a common history and religious background with Europe. There are many, many idioms and ways of looking at things that stem from historical and religious influences. Grimm's fairy tales, for example, spread through Europe widely, but not through Asia or the middle East. On result is that while Chinese often has sayings with a similar meaning as English ones, their literal meanings are very different. In European languages, on the other hand, the sayings are often literal translations.
    • JoachimSchipper 16y ago
      That will help when interacting with the British or even the Americans, but I'm not sure it helps on standardized tests.
    • DrJokepu 16y ago
      Please note that the theory that Uralic languages such as Finnish or Hungarian and Altaic languages such as Turkic or Mongolese are somehow related is highly controversial and not supported by the large majority of the linguicists today. Japanese is not even considered to be an Altaic language.
      • xiaoma 16y ago
        Actually the inclusion of Finnish was the error! Its inclusion is very questionable, but the language group was proposed by a Finn. That's why I misremembered (former lingustics/Japanese major here). The inclusion of Japanese, on the other hand has been steadily gaining momentum for decades. Linguists whose focus is on Japanese generally do generally consider it an Altaic language. This includes the most prominent, such as Marshall Unger (under the name Macro-Tungusic). The classification is still somewhat controversial, but I think it's largely for historical reasons. Local Japanese language scholars, who are not linguists, have traditionally subscribed to the view that Japanese is special and separated from all other languages. Modern linguists do not generally subscribe to that view, regardless of whether a proto-Altaic existed or not. In any case the points about shared cultural, historical and religious heritage still apply. Finns learning English have far more of a shared cultural framework to work from than Asians learning English do.
    • tincholio 16y ago
      Finnish is in the Finno-Ugric family, not an Altaic language (at least according to the wiki, there are no mentions of Altaic for the Finnish entry, or vice versa). In any case, it's completely different than anything most people ever heard (I've been living in Finland for close to 5 years, and it just hasn't clicked for me yet, despite being very fluent in 3 languages and dabbling in 3 others).
      • cemregr 16y ago
        Do you live in Helsinki? You should maybe change the people you hang out with. I befriended "Finnish rednecks" for a year but that helped me go from 0 to fluent (YKI 5) in 2 years.
        • tincholio 16y ago
          I don't, I live in Oulu. My main problem is that I work in a very English-friendly environment, so I don't really have the pressure to learn the language beyond supermarket and restaurant "use cases".
  • peritpatrio 16y ago
    On another note regarding Finnish language: The word-forms of the Finnish noun kauppa 'shop' (N=2,253), generated automatically by Fred Karlsson http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/genkau2.html http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/genkau2.html
    • sheffield 16y ago
      The word with the most forms, also the longest word in the world is the English 'strawberry'. strawberry strawberry-less strawberry-less-ness strawberry-less-ness-less strawberry-less-ness-less-ness . . . ∞
      • Maakuth 16y ago
        Except that all the forms listed there actually mean something and could be used in everyday conversations (some of them are pretty rare, of course). In English those would be communicated by a lot of prepositions. Take "kauppoinennekaan" [1], that would roughly mean "not even with your (plural) shops". [1] Dashes are on the page for clarity, they're not part of Finnish language
  • cemregr 16y ago
    As a foreigner who went to high school in Finland for a year, I'd say their English skills weren't that good. They probably do well in standardized tests because their education is geared towards tests and perfect grammar, not actual communication skills. My friends in high school would attempt to construct perfect sentences in their head before speaking a word, which made them poor conversationalists.
• pwim 16y ago
  Japan doesn't normally dub movies, but it doesn't score well. On the other hand, it does have a strong domestic film industry, so perhaps that is part of the reason.
  • JCB_K 16y ago
    and Japanese isn't similar to English.
    • studiomohawk 16y ago
      Japanese people don't want to make mistake in front of people. That's why we are not good at English.
      • Entlin 16y ago
        Don't you think the whole "lose face" part of the japanese culture is a run down model? With all the mistakes made in the Fukushima plant pre and post incident due to not wanting to lose face (or not controlling enough so that the other party doesn't lose face), it's hard to overlook all the bad things that this concept brings... Or to ask differently: what do you think is good about the concept?
        • berntb 16y ago
          The old nuclear plant was hit with both an earthquake and a tsunami over the design limits. It seems to have gone well, considering... Disclaimer first: I'm absolutely no expert, by very far, on Japan or Japanese culture. I am writing this mostly to get answers from those who know better. >>Don't you think the whole "lose face" part of the japanese culture is a run down model? I don't know if I believe the face thing is the bad part. I admire the hard work and dedication of the Japanese worker. I'd guess (see disclaimer!) that the present problems rest with the higher levels of organisation in their society. A lack of accountability, from top to bottom. Japan has, simplified, had a recession for close to two decades. I really don't want to know how a Western society would look in similar circumstances.
        • 16y ago
• drpgq 16y ago
  Yes, I noticed as a Canadian living in Germany, that the Germans seemed to dub almost anything, even some pretty small indie films.
• RuadhanMc 16y ago
  Being an English speaker who has moved to Sweden and has completed the SFI course -- Swedish For Immigrants -- I can tell you it was a lot easier for the English, French, German, etc, speakers to learn Swedish than it was for the Arabic, Chinese, etc, speakers. It is a bit of a no-brainer I guess. The best thing about the Scandinavians is that they not only speak fantastic English, but they also adopt the accent of the English speaking country that they've spent the most time in or watched the most TV from. Compare that to the French, Italian, etc, who can learn English very well but who never seem able (or willing) to shake the accent.
  • berntb 16y ago
    This is probably a question of phonemes; Swedish has most of other language's strange sounds. :-) (A phoneme Swedish lacks is the "th" of "think", that was a problem to learn.)
    • RuadhanMc 16y ago
      Yes, fair point. The hardest part of learning Swedish for me was learning how to pronounce å ä ö and associated words. Took about 6 months of frustration, but after that it got quite a bit easier.
  • pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >they also adopt the accent of the English speaking country that they've spent the most time in or watched the most TV from If it's Britain, which accent ... http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3ldyx_comedy-tour-of-british-accents-uk-d_fun http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3ldyx_comedy-tour-of-briti... I think his North Yorkshire and Blackburn are a bit off, others are a bit caricatured but generally he has them pretty well. "Alright my booties?"
    • RuadhanMc 16y ago
      A Swedish friend of my was an au pair for 2 years with a posh family, so it is quite amusing to hear her speak.
    • 16y ago
• riffraff 16y ago
  Also: the languages of the top 5 countries have a ridiculously small speaking population, which means there are more chances to come across untranslated sources of any kind, not only movies. I'd say it's a generic trait of niche populations, that they gain better knowledge of languages in which information sources are available. For example, I've consistently noticed programmers speak a better english than architects, and people who use some $RANDOM_NICHE_PLATFORM speak a better english than people who use $REALLY_POPULAR_PLATFORM, due to being forced to use english references.
  • anghyflawn 16y ago
    >the languages of the top 5 countries have a ridiculously small speaking population Dutch has over twenty million native speakers, Swedish has ten million. That is not ridiculously small. Even Norwegian's four and a half million is, on a global scale, very respectable. To say nothing of the fact that the number of "translated sources" is not a function of the number of speakers, but of the wealth of the country and the spread of written culture (which is very high in all of these cases).
    • notahacker 16y ago
      Ridiculously small is a relative thing; compare with the hundreds of millions of Mandarin and Spanish speakers or even the 130 million Japanese speakers and you're talking about a much smaller market to target. Moreover the wealth and cultural influence of these countries is a function of their willingness to interact beyond their linguistic sphere of influence.
      • riffraff 16y ago
        exactly. Mandarin, english, spanish, the arabic family, portuguese, russian, urdu and probably others all have speaking populations of more than 200 millions.
    • riffraff 16y ago
      my argument of the lack of translated sources was not related to the inability of translating, so wealth and literacy are not relevant. I was referring to the economics of going after a much smaller market. A publisher is more likely to target french and german before going after norwegian, thus a non mainstream author may appear in a finnish translation much after the publication in english, if ever. Or a movie distribution company may have less incentive to target the niche of TROMA aficionados in dutch than it does for the spanish ones. They both would have relatively similar costs for the translation, but a much lower possible return.