France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study

20 years ago not many in Spain and France ( or even Germany ) would speak any English. May be they do, but may be they were too afraid, or refuse to speak as in the case of French.

20 years later literally everybody in ( Western ) Europe speaks English. I could go on the street and ask for directions, in places that are not cities or tourist attraction. Even the French. They may not be proficient at it, but they do understand and can do basic communication.

So I dont see any decline. And Thinking back I am surprised at how fast the world has evolved! ( Which also means I am getting old .... )

That's tricky. Years ago primary extended from 1st to 8th grades (6 to 14 y.o. aprox.) so English, that started in 6th was primary. Now 6th to 8th have been moved to ESO.

Anyway I just checked with my son and he started in Infantil, so it's really soon.

The real issue is qualification. To really understand and speak English you need to learn pronuntiation properly. And that's the weakest link in our system. Most teachers have no idea how English is really pronounced and wouldn't be able to understand a native speaker to save their lives. It's impossible to learn English from someone that can't understand or speak it.

I believe it was Aguirre that proposed a plan to invite thousands of native speakers to teach English in Madrid. Of course everybody attacked her as usual whatever she says... I don't like her either, but that was a good idea for once.

From this one man's experience, it is not that Spain has regressed in its proficiency with English, but I find that other southern European countries (particularly Portugal) has upped the ante - a LOT.

To compare Paris (I understand it does not represent all of France, but it is one view point), 20 years ago I would have difficult time in ordering in a restaurant. A hardship many English-speaking visitors today will find hard to empathize with. In most places in Paris today I can get by with English and get complex transactions done.

Portugal has truly baked-in English proficiency into their national psyche now. Zealotry aside, this enables Portugal to further their economic and cultural interests more, I think.

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.

That is how I learned the basics of the english language when I was a kid. Here in Portugal movies are subtitled.

Incidentally, I went to Milan once to participate in this thing, and neither Italians, Spanish, French, Polish and Russian people could understand each other. I speak a little bit of everything (almost, had to use pseudo-english with the polish and russian) so I had to do the translations. Talk abou information assimetry: I knew everything that happened because I was the unnoficial translator.

The "best" part of that trip was to have to watch Four weddings and a Funeral dubbed in Italian! It went some months before I was able to tolerate italian language again..

The country is split linguistically between Dutch speakers in the northern Flemish region, and French in the southern Walloon region.

The Flemish region's television stations and cinemas run mostly subtitled programs (really, anything outside of children's shows and content made in the region or in the Netherlands).

In the French-speaking areas, the media companies and cinemas buy their content from France, where the vast majority of it comes overdubbed.

As a result, the Flemish have a much stronger command of English than their French-speaking counterparts.

That said, the French-speaking Belgians, at least in my experience of living there for a long time, speak English much better than the French.

A lot of that has to do with how international the country is, where Brussels not only hosts many international institutions, but also a lot of companies have their EU HQs there. Many people need to speak English to get jobs with these firms, so it drives up the English competency among the local population.

Your theory definitely has some merit.

The Spanish market is huge and so are other big influential countries like Japan, Germany or France which is still spoken in many other countries, mainly in Africa. So there is less incentive to learn English because everything is available in the local language.

There are other factors like closeness of the language to English(north European countries) and colonialism(the sub continent). The advancement of the Latin American economies makes Spanish a much more viable and influential competition to English so English becomes less necessary. You can even see it in popular culture where Spanish music and tv shows become popular all over the world. As a non Spanish speaker my random vocabulary in this language increased a lot during the last couple of years.

I've learned traveling in foreign countries that simply learning the native words for please, thank you, hello, goodbye, yes and no goes a long way towards having a pleasant experience. The locals will go out of their way to be nice to you for making the effort.

It's also the reason why there's a moderate correlation (didn't actually research this) between small EU countries and English ability. Small countries are better, because they don't have the resources to dub their series.

This used to be more true than now. The Netherlands has been regressing a bit in their English speaking ability precisely because children tv shows aren't in English anymore (though there's still plenty of opportunity in NL, there simply used to be more).

From an outsider perspective, the time it took for British media and the political class to take note of the European sentiment on the issue of brexit was around 1 year. It was as if they just found out there was an non-English web out there..

We already have many localised Englishes across the world, American, Australian, Indian, various pidgin English, but also in politics, business, social media there are "New Speak" version of English in those contexts.

One of these will evolve to be the lingua franca of the young connected people and dominate. And then be superseded by the next evolved language.

Once we colonize Mars and elsewhere there will be some interesting forks in languages I am sure.

So I guess we don't make the grade :-(

Standardized tests don't do well at assessing language fluency in general. For one example, my sister was born in the US, grew up in the US, was educated in English, spoke English (exclusively) at home, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She failed the State Department's test of fluency in English.

My point is, however, that I found learning Norwegian easier than learning Spanish, which I was fluent in at one point, years ago. There weren't 14 tenses to learn like in Spanish, sentence structure felt more familiar and closer to English, and there were many more cognates than I expected. Sure there were some new things like putting articles before or appended to nouns to denote indefinite or definite. Or even the gendered articles (my favorite thing about English is nearly all nouns are neuter).

French has a lot of words which are close or exactly the same as English, but doesn't sound the same or mean completely different things, which doesn't help. (example: 'argument' in English as in 'having an argument' and 'argument' in French as in 'ton argument ne mène nulle part' don't mean the same at all, other words can mean the same such as 'agile' but sounds like two different words when pronounced in French vs English)

And then you have pride (the wrong kind) coupled with the fear of sounding ridiculous, which is why 99% of French you hear speaking English has a very strong accent, they're not trying.

Whereas in Finland, subtitles on foreign TV programs are common and classes have less students (I think).

Thus I believe it entirely comes down to the government not being smart enough.

I hate it when I hear the stereotype "French people do speak English but they're not going to because they are so proud" (maybe not exactly what you're saying...). It's simply untrue. People who speak good English will very happy to practice whenever the opportunity shows up.

It's not easy to learn a foreign language, and most French people who didn't have the opportunity to study abroad, or who don't need English at their workplace don't speak English very well. However, I think most of them speak some English, as long as you're patient and don't expect them to be fluent. For many people, it's intimidating to speak English, even if they've learnt the basics at school.

> they have their own French speaking view of the planet

Indeed, they live in a country where they can get by using their own national language and most of them don't have enough opportunities to meet English speaking foreigners. Why should you expect them to learn your language, especially if you're the one moving there?

> Germany where English are much more/better spoken

English is hard for roman languages speakers. It seeems Italian, Spaniards, French have a harder time than Germans or Dutch...

Americans also live in their own universe. And so do many others...

But by raw number of languages standardising on English is probably not ideal. Probably some hybrid of Chinese grammar, Korean alphabet and Latin pronunciations would have been my pick for example.

http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/

India, due to its deeply colonial state apparatus, is well on its way to losing most of its languages in the coming century. I think this is also the case with African nations - which might explain why the sub-continent (not just India) and Africa share so much in terms of human development indicators.

No, if your samples aren't representative then any conclusion you draw can be flawed for thousands of different reasons and in all possible directions. Two examples.

1) Let's say that the top 1% of English speakers of countries A and B took the test. You say "the gaps then would be wider than reported". Wrong, even if in this 1% sample country A scores the highest, it might very well have lower overall proficiency. If proficiency is normally distributed, but has a much greater variance in country A than country B, the maximum of A will be higher than of B, even with a lower average.

2) Now you take the tests at time t and t+1. However, at time t the test was less popular, so only 0.5% of the top speakers took the test, while at t+1 1% of the top speakers took the test. You would conclude that a lower score a time t+1 implies that the skill got worse, while it might have very well improved by a lot.

(In fact, I'm pretty sure that's what happened. I never heard of EF before 2017, so I couldn't have taken the test before then)

Even weirder is this re-phrasing: „The more integrated into the global economy you are, the less you need english“

Greetings from Austria!

I found Spanish much easier to learn than German because the grammar is simpler and the words are often similar to Latin words which are in turn similar to English words.

I never had to use Flash Cards when learning Spanish, they were vital for German.

For example, Mano is similar to Manual which is related to the Hand, obviously in German it is simpler as the word is the same.

However, negocio is similar to negotiate which reminds me of business... Betrieb on the other hand - probably going to need the flash cards.