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Comment by petke | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

I'm fairly certain Spain dubs almost everything, at least when I lived there for 2 years, everything seemed to dubbed.

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.

It's not just emphasis, it's necessity. Smaller countries have to deal with other countries more, and so too do their citizens.

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..

You don't supply an argument why that's because of dubbing/subtitling. I think the real reason for the change is that English has become more important as a cultural language, at the expense of French, in this case.

Because we don't use dubbing, English is way more prevalent. Most kids have a somewhat basic grasp of English before being taught in school. Years of hearing English also made it easier to learn in school. You already know how to pronounce many words, it's also less foreign because you grew up with it. With French, you learn it in school and when you go home.. That's it, no more French influences. With English, you turn on the tv or radio and you're passively learning.

Personally, French was always a chore, something solely associated with school. English was fun, something you actively used.

So I agree with all your points, except that the subtitling/dubbing issue is the cause of all this. The subtitling/dubbing is an effect, not a cause. Mere exposure does not make you learn/enjoy a language. The status/prestige/coolness is a cultural thing, and this is what explains the difference in motivation to learn languages.

> Mere exposure does not make you learn/enjoy a language

Then how do babies ever learn to speak? The most fluent speakers of foreign languages are almost always immigrants, because exposure is the key to learning to speak.

> Then how do babies ever learn to speak?

How exactly that works is still a hotly debated topic, but there is a clear difference between mere exposure to TV versus interacting linguistically in an environment.

> The most fluent speakers of foreign languages are almost always immigrants, because exposure is the key to learning to speak.

In my experience it's hit and miss. Some people simply have a knack for it (or interest), others not so much. So you can just as well have a very fluent second language learner who hasn't spend significant time immersed in the language, as well as the opposite of an immigrant who still has a thick accent after 20 years.

> there is a clear difference between mere exposure to TV versus interacting linguistically in an environment.

Right. It wasn't clear to me that you meant that by "mere exposure", I was assuming both of those things as "exposure" versus actively being taught a language in school, and spending effort to practice.

Still, I think I learned more English from subtitles than I did in school.

I remember when I was about 10, I had learned a tiny bit of English in school, really nothing to speak of (it can't have been more than half a year). And a lot more from TV and subtitles. At some point my parents had some English-speaking friends over, whose kids were exactly my age. I could (partially) understand what they were saying, but I was a bit scared to talk back in English, because while I knew some English, I had never spoken it "for real" :)

So yes, interacting linguistically is important. But it felt to me more like "unlocking" the ability to converse in that language, after already knowing most of it by being exposed to it, daily, for most of my life.

I don't actually remember learning anything really new about English in school until years later in high school (some words I hadn't seen before, or used in a particular manner). Everything I already had seen on TV, it was more like remembering.

Anecdotally: my kid that grew up in the US in a spanish speaking home speaks fluent english. The other one that moved to the US at 4 speaks english with an accent.

No one speaks english at home, same people at home - only difference is the language on the TV. It works.

He probably has peers that speak English with him, that has a larger effect than the language spoken at home, or on TV.

> Mere exposure does not make you learn/enjoy a language.

It totally does. Especially when you're young. I think you thinking about a lower amount of exposure though. It needs to be quite a lot, not like hanging out at a French-speaking family once a week, but more like watching 30-45 minutes of subtitled cartoons/shows daily.

(maybe it was more, not sure how much TV I watched when I was little, and how much of it was subtitled. I do remember my parents didn't let me watch The A-Team because it was just about guns and violence ... :P :P)

Also, you can keep your position, but so far there are several people from all over Europe and elsewhere, confirming personal anecdotes about the difference subtitled TV shows make.

I want to emphasize the difference it makes whether you are young or not. The effortlessness by which young kids pick up languages, seemingly through osmosis, is just insane. I work with kids a lot, some of them come from crazy places, the younger they are, often after just a year in NL, hardly even an accent (translating for their parents at 8). On the other hand, adults that move here, even in their early twenties, if they don't make an explicit effort, forget it, after 3-5 years they still speak three Dutch sentences (I admit that it doesn't help that any Dutch person will immediately switch to English as soon as they hear you're having a tiny bit of trouble with the language. Not the case for small children, of course. Unless they already speak English).

Its the same in my case. Me and my class mates where taught Finnish from 1st grade, and English from 5th. (We where taught Finnish because we are Swedish speakers living in Finland).

Even after all those years of lessons. Few of us spoke even half decent Finnish by the time we where adults, but most of us spoke good English by that time. So I think school had little to do with it.

Me and my class mates watched hours of English cartoons or movies on TV, every day on our free time. Its not surprising it made a bigger difference.

English is a lot closer to Dutch though. We learn Dutch, French, English, German and even Latin in school, so we are culturally habituated to the importance of languages. I coincidentally also speak Finnish and Swedish (which feels almost like a Dutch-Limburg dialect), and like the other poster said, it's not a surprise to me the Swedish speaking population in Finland thinks English is easier to learn.

As to Antirez: if only my C would be as good as yours...

> English is a lot closer to Dutch though

I suspect this doesn't as much role in Europe. Sure, there are difficulties unique to learning any language, but English has a lot of shared ancestry with any germanic or romance language. It's not like, say, Mandarin or Punjabi.

A bit of anecdotal evidence that hopefully can be confirmed with more certainty

The number of subtitled movies in France (or at least in Paris), what they call VO/VOST, in the last 10 years in cinemas has increased considerably

That's pretty specific to Paris. In the smaller cities there's been a small increase of VO/VOST movies but it's still not that popular outside of the arthouse kind of cinemas. For example in Rennes, only one of the two main cinemas in the city ever offers VOST movies...

Nope, I think the reason that user "petke" has mentioned is correct. I know this is only anecdotal evidence, but here it is: I live in a small town near the serbian-hungarian border and we can watch both Hungarian and Serbian TV stations. In Serbia movies are subtitled (so you can hear English language all the time) while in Hungary movies are dubbed (so you can't hear anything other than hungarian language on TV). Serbian families who live here watch mostly serbian TV and hungarian families watch mostly hungarian TV stations. Ask any English teacher here and they will all tell you that there is very clear distinction between level of knowledge in serbian vs hungarian kids. They all live in the same town, go to the same school, the only difference is that those kids who watched serbian TV stations had much bigger exposure to english language as opposed to those who watched hungarian TV stations.

Your reasoning that the size of the country matters doesn't hold water because both countries are small.

Wow, that's an awesome natural experiment. Can you share the name of the town? Or would any town near the border do?

That is probably Subotica.

The name of the town is Senta, although I guess that any nearby town which has bilingual population would do.

In Romania, my country, we are also not dubbing movies, although there is a trend for that when it comes to cartoons for little kids. In Bulgaria on the other hand, our neighbors, they've been dubbing movies at least since I was little. Not sure what the deal is there, but Romania has almost 3 times the population of Bulgaria, so I don't buy that it's about size.

Anyway, in Romania we are speaking far better English than any of our neighbors, which includes Hungary and Ukraine. I used to think that happens because Romanian is a romance language, but that doesn't fully explain it. Oh, and people here learn Italian and Spanish as well, almost effortlessly, just by watching soap opera :-) And many of us have learned French in school, though I was not lucky to have good teachers.

BTW, English has some nice features for learners. For example it doesn't assign gender to objects, like all romance languages are doing. Those of us that speak in such languages forgot how hard it was to learn those genders when we were kids.

It is correct. First and foremost, in Italy we dub our movies so well, the dubbing itself could be considered a mastered art. We really like our dub actors. George Clooney, in Italy, has a very specific voice, for example, and that's the voice of Francesco Pannofino. That's so bad that when you hear the same actor dubbed by someone else, you feel like something's out of place in the movie. Italy has a very strong history of good Cinema, we're still quite proud of that. On top of it all, English in school is definitively not taught enough. My English, for example, comes from American songs and videogames.

> First and foremost, in Italy we dub our movies so well, the dubbing itself could be considered a mastered art.

I think that's just what we tell ourselves to feel better and for national pride. I started watching movies in English many years ago and, even when my English was not yet very good and I had to use subtitles, I preferred watching the original version, the real actor is just much better. Now, after living in the US for a few years, when I hear dubbed movies they sound just ridiculous: everyone speaks with the same flat intonation, there is no emotion in the words, it all sounds fake and, funny detail, I'm now much more aware that the voice is out of sync with the lips. It's both hilarious and painful to endure.

> but the reason is completely wrong

Or not. I know people who learned spanish just by watching TV (in Romania). Here in France people have no idea how english sounds because everything is dubbed, from the news on TV to series and movies...

Pretty sure I knew (a little) English even before learning it in school. My theory for that has always been subtitles as well. When we learned German in school (which is much more similar to my mother tongue Dutch), I found it very hard. German shows were also subtitled, but there were a lot fewer of them on TV.

Side-note: A few years ago, I read about a project for "same language subtitling" (of soap TV series, nonetheless) to improve literacy in India. Don't have a link for that, unfortunately.

Your reasoning makes sense, and probably plays a role, but I believe subtitling of English TV plays at least as much of a role. A lot of German TV is dubbed, and the effect of this also carries over to smaller German-speaking countries, like Austria. Now one could argue that this is, according to your reasoning, because they are part of the larger German-speaking community. But that really isn't the case, ask any Austrian, most of them will tell you their mother tongue is Austrian (which is not a written language, but also quite a bit more unique than merely German-with-a-dialect), and "high German" is definitely something they had to learn separately.

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

but what gets me is you have people that speak like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 and tell foreigners they are not understandable

> but what gets me is you have people that speak like this 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Finnish is not a Germanic language.

Neither is Polish or Estonian. What is your point?

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/

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

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.

Tatort (German for "the scene of the crime") is particularly interesting in that each one of ARD's regional broadcasters contributes some number of episodes to the pool. Considering that Germany is a very regional country, it's a good way to get a survey of accents and local word usage.

Not here in Portugal - only shows for children are dubbed.

But only recently.

I learned a lot of English just watching Cartoon Network (undubbed and unsubbed)!

Yeah, TV shows are a specific area I guess

Not so sure about Cinemas (in Berlin there is an English only movie theatre though)

If you could be Harry Callahan, Darth Wader, Captain Kirk, Terminator, 007, Blad Runner's Roy Batty and The king lion's Mufasa, all in one lifetime, you might look like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantino_Romero

Talking about interesting lives...

(I wrote "blad" runner?, ouch)

You also wrote Darth 'Wader' (clothes for walking in rivers, or this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdSJFrhb-HM).

Damned ánaquin escaigüalquer XDDD

One good example of the troubles with english. Is a tiresome encode, decode, encode... all the time. And this is only popular culture. A much worst problem has been created when english weird rules overpower universal languages, like taxonomy.

Lets take the maple genus for example: "Acer", named by a swedois from the latin "aciale". Should be pronounced as Linné intended /'azer/ but is changed to /ˈeɪsər/ instead, because english. This mean that a language created to be universal, is not universal anymore. Is tainted. For most people in the world there is not a clear rule to link "azer" with "eisa". Is broken unless you hear it and memorize it. Linné would not understand currently most of is own named genera.

> 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.

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.

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..."

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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?

compared to the germans? sure. compared to swedes? nope.

/schluchtenscheisser

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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

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!

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).

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.

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

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