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>I have no idea how you measure fluency, but most of the population we are concerned with learned a foreign language until the age of 16. I live in the UK and
by hermitcrab 4y ago
>I have no idea how you measure fluency, but most of the population we are concerned with learned a foreign language until the age of 16.
I live in the UK and I am struggling to think of more than 1 or 2 British born people I know personally that speak anything other than English with any fluency.
- notahacker 4y agoThere are quite a few, it's just that none of them learned it from two hours a week between the ages of 11 and 16. (Mostly they learned it because their parents and many members of their local community speak Welsh or Punjabi or Urdu...)
- skippyboxedhero 4y agoTwo hours a week between 11 and 16? I love this place. People speak with total authority about stuff they clearly do not understand.
- notahacker 4y ago> I love this place. People speak with total authority about stuff they clearly do not understand. Well if I lack the authority to comment on my own education, please feel free to share your greater understanding of the years and hours my classmates and I devoted to learning a second language. Perhaps you can even convince me my A* GCSE made me fluent and not utterly incompetent in it!
- hermitcrab 4y ago>Two hours a week between 11 and 16? That pretty much describes my foreign language education (learning French in England, 1970s/1980s).
- dfawcus 4y agoFrom the 2011 census, around 30% of Scots are fluent in a second language. https://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/census-results/at-a-glance/languages/ https://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/census-results/at-a-glanc... (We don't yet have the results for the 2022 census)
- hermitcrab 4y agoI don't see a 30% figure on that page. Also the figures on that page include people born abroad. I know a few people who can speak 5+ languages. But they weren't born in the UK.