5 ms·

That is not how it works. Coming from a Scandinavian country, we started learning English around the age of 8, and at the age of 15 my English was good enough

That is not how it works. Coming from a Scandinavian country, we started learning English around the age of 8, and at the age of 15 my English was good enough that I was reading the Harry Potter books in English as they were published, rather than wait six months for the translation. Then I was also learning a third language from age 13 to 19. And it's well documented that learning new languages, similar to playing sports or doing crafts or other stuff, is very beneficial for brain development in children and young adults. If your hypothesis made sense, the United Kingdom should have a huge advantage over other European countries within science and other fields where English is predominantly used. But it does not. You can e.g. look at metrics like "number of scientific publications per capita", where the UK is only number 20 in the world, and the US is number 33.

rvba 3y ago
Funny that you are making the mistake that everyone is offered the same opportunities as in Scandinavia. Public education in many countries is trash. In third world you probably have bad public education and you have to work. In say Poland if you speak good English it means you learned it on private lessons or on your own.
- RajT88 3y ago
  >In say Poland if you speak good English it means you learned it on private lessons or on your own. Or, in the case of a Polish programmer friend of mine, from Leisure Suit Larry games.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > In say Poland if you speak good English it means you learned it on private lessons or on your own. Really? I looked them up, and it says Polish students typically learn one or two foreign languages, and 67.9% do English. Unsurprisingly, German came next at 33.3%, and the rest on the list summed to another 33%, which also implies how many do two. Of course, "good" is subjective; I did French at school (in the UK) from 11-16, got a GCSE grade D, and had to be corrected IRL by a native speaker after saying "Je ne parle français"…
  - jamil7 3y ago
    Speculating on what OP meant, but it might be generational, in Germany often older people won't speak English that well. Younger people will generally have done a lot more English in school, however, and tend to be better. This is generalizing a fair bit, though.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Mmm. From what I've been told, the older generation around these parts (east Berlin) would've been forced to learn Russian at school as their second language, and then been completely unable to practice it with anyone as all of the native speakers were soldiers from the USSR who would've been banned from fraternising with the locals.
  - tester756 3y ago
    >Really? I looked them up, and it says Polish students typically learn one or two foreign languages, and 67.9% do English. Unsurprisingly, German came next at 33.3%, and the rest on the list summed to another 33%, which also implies how many do two. "Learn" If actually this many people manage to learn deutsch language, then why only tiny tiny tiny % of people take it on final exams after high school? 5000 people taking it vs 180 000 taking english on "advanced" exams (which are optional, just for scores)
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>You can e.g. look at metrics like "number of scientific publications per capita", where the UK is only number 20 in the world, and the US is number 33 Why is the metric of focus the number of papers and not their quality? I know Austrian universities also obsess with number of papers published to look good in statistics, even though many researchers I know admit that what they publish is pointless, they just do it to have published papers under their belt and to inflate the numbers to make the university look good. Maybe the US and UK are not leading by sheer number of papers, but they do lead certain fields such AI/ML research, drugs/medical, etc. So your focus on numbers seems pointless.
soldeace 3y ago
I understand that learning English may have not been that hard for you, and given that you come from a Scandinavian country, most likely you speak near-perfect English (I've been to Norway once, it's amazing how even the old lady in the yarn store speaks English so fluently!) Also, no one is contesting the benefits of learning something new. But keep in mind that different cultures face significantly different difficulties when it comes to pick up a foreign language. I'm based in Brazil and I can tell you with reasonable confidence: the average person in Latin America struggles A LOT to get past Harry Potter books and achieve full work proficiency. This can be due to significantly different grammatical structures, word roots, phonemes, and whatnot, or---most importantly---due to the fact that most of us can't afford quality language courses at affordable prices. In reality, good and affordable schools in our own native language is considered a privilege to many. So either due to structural differences between languages (especially those that don't share the same Germanic roots as English), or due to economical and social issues, some non-English speakers have to spend hours of deliberate practice to be on the same ground as people from a few other countries, in academia or in a multi-cultural IT team. I myself can't count the number of hours of pronunciation practice I amassed throughout the years for being too afraid of sounding dumb in my daily scrums. This is something I'm pretty sure a native speaker doesn't have to mind with when starting at a new job. That said, I don't see how the "UK vs. rest of Europe in numbers of papers" could support the claim that a head start doesn't exist. There are a number of infinitely more relevant variables that could explain scientific throughput by country.

rvba 3y ago

Funny that you are making the mistake that everyone is offered the same opportunities as in Scandinavia. Public education in many countries is trash. In third world you probably have bad public education and you have to work. In say Poland if you speak good English it means you learned it on private lessons or on your own.

RajT88 3y ago
>In say Poland if you speak good English it means you learned it on private lessons or on your own. Or, in the case of a Polish programmer friend of mine, from Leisure Suit Larry games.
ben_w 3y ago
> In say Poland if you speak good English it means you learned it on private lessons or on your own. Really? I looked them up, and it says Polish students typically learn one or two foreign languages, and 67.9% do English. Unsurprisingly, German came next at 33.3%, and the rest on the list summed to another 33%, which also implies how many do two. Of course, "good" is subjective; I did French at school (in the UK) from 11-16, got a GCSE grade D, and had to be corrected IRL by a native speaker after saying "Je ne parle français"…
- jamil7 3y ago
  Speculating on what OP meant, but it might be generational, in Germany often older people won't speak English that well. Younger people will generally have done a lot more English in school, however, and tend to be better. This is generalizing a fair bit, though.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Mmm. From what I've been told, the older generation around these parts (east Berlin) would've been forced to learn Russian at school as their second language, and then been completely unable to practice it with anyone as all of the native speakers were soldiers from the USSR who would've been banned from fraternising with the locals.
- tester756 3y ago
  >Really? I looked them up, and it says Polish students typically learn one or two foreign languages, and 67.9% do English. Unsurprisingly, German came next at 33.3%, and the rest on the list summed to another 33%, which also implies how many do two. "Learn" If actually this many people manage to learn deutsch language, then why only tiny tiny tiny % of people take it on final exams after high school? 5000 people taking it vs 180 000 taking english on "advanced" exams (which are optional, just for scores)

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>You can e.g. look at metrics like "number of scientific publications per capita", where the UK is only number 20 in the world, and the US is number 33 Why is the metric of focus the number of papers and not their quality? I know Austrian universities also obsess with number of papers published to look good in statistics, even though many researchers I know admit that what they publish is pointless, they just do it to have published papers under their belt and to inflate the numbers to make the university look good. Maybe the US and UK are not leading by sheer number of papers, but they do lead certain fields such AI/ML research, drugs/medical, etc. So your focus on numbers seems pointless.

soldeace 3y ago

I understand that learning English may have not been that hard for you, and given that you come from a Scandinavian country, most likely you speak near-perfect English (I've been to Norway once, it's amazing how even the old lady in the yarn store speaks English so fluently!) Also, no one is contesting the benefits of learning something new. But keep in mind that different cultures face significantly different difficulties when it comes to pick up a foreign language. I'm based in Brazil and I can tell you with reasonable confidence: the average person in Latin America struggles A LOT to get past Harry Potter books and achieve full work proficiency. This can be due to significantly different grammatical structures, word roots, phonemes, and whatnot, or---most importantly---due to the fact that most of us can't afford quality language courses at affordable prices. In reality, good and affordable schools in our own native language is considered a privilege to many. So either due to structural differences between languages (especially those that don't share the same Germanic roots as English), or due to economical and social issues, some non-English speakers have to spend hours of deliberate practice to be on the same ground as people from a few other countries, in academia or in a multi-cultural IT team. I myself can't count the number of hours of pronunciation practice I amassed throughout the years for being too afraid of sounding dumb in my daily scrums. This is something I'm pretty sure a native speaker doesn't have to mind with when starting at a new job. That said, I don't see how the "UK vs. rest of Europe in numbers of papers" could support the claim that a head start doesn't exist. There are a number of infinitely more relevant variables that could explain scientific throughput by country.