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Comment by tapland | Hacker News Reader

The number of Swedes who self report being fluent in English is absolutely nuts. When hired a lot of them have problems talking about anything other than situations you'd encounter as a tourist.

Sure, they are _pretty_ good, and can manage, but I find calling it fluent silly.

Maybe I have a very high expectation of what 'fluent' means, but when a person can't explain anything more advanced than what they did over the weekend I start to worry about them coming away from meetings with a full understanding of what was said.

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I consider myself fluent, but I rarely talk outside of what happened on the weekend. For some reason it's harder to think outside the box when using a foreign language. I however understand 99% of what would be said on a meeting. Understanding is much easier than explaining.

To add on to what you said - understanding is a subset of fluency. You also need to be able to adequately explain/communicate your thinking in order to be considered fluent. This requires a sound "theory of mind for language" in order to be able to figure out when someone is misunderstanding you, and avoiding potentially confusing diction choices, which a lot of non-fluent speakers struggle with.

Then it comes to definition of fluent. To me 90% of Swedes are fluent. What you're talking about is "native", in my book.

I've worked with Swedes, and they were all basically bilingual in English. Except for a bit of an accent, their English was better than many native speakers. Of course, my sample size is only 20, but I was impressed. I was told that many schools in Sweden dedicate one school day a week to English with all subjects being taught in English during that day. Those students end up fluent.

That is not at all common practice. It's the first I've ever heard of it.

My fiancée moved here to Sweden and trying to get by with English when in contact with the tax office, doctors, municipalities etc has been impossible. The tech workers I work with are very good at English compared to the average person here, but would self-assess their skills about the same.

I think it very much depends on the population. Online quiz takers will skew young, whose English is a lot better than that of middle aged and older Swedes, on average. Most Swedes I know have at least competency in English, and I know a lot of them, from being in Sweden too, but I'm sure my sample is also biased. Nonetheless, I'm not suprised at the fluency of Swedes in foreign langauges compared with other countries. As with the Netherlands, they are not an inward-looking culture particularly.

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