Incidentally it also explains why native english speakers tend to have no idea about other languages.
The rise of youtube talking heads should also help... i'm pretty sure my daughter got most of her english from there.
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.
I'm Dutch and have a close friend who's Hungarian. His English is as good as mine. The only impression I got is that he needed to actively seek out opportunities to speak English whereas in The Netherlands you're bombarded with opportunities.
I do think it helps a bit though, but it's easily trumped by opportunity itself.
A few years later in high school when visiting a school in Germany, I was shocked to find out that the kids there were watching Discovery Channel completely dubbed in German.
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.
I've encountered many Flemish Belgians who openly admit they can understand English but cannot speak it well. A member of my close familiy who works in aviation occasionally rants about "having to do everything in English", a position that I cannot begin to understand. Whereas I've worked for a Flemish Belgian company that also had Walloon Belgian customers who communicated not stubbornly in French (as the stereotype would suggest) but in professional English.
I believe that the language learning is affected by the generations. There has been a disregard, acceptance and now (what I believe) a new disregard of foreign languages in Flanders. Though I do not have any numbers to back that up. That said the news recently reported an all-time low for Flemish Belgian students with regard to reading and sciences (https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2019/12/03/_dutch-is-the-key-to...). So there might be a correlation between the two subjects.
It would be very interesting to have data on this subject as Belgium indeed is a great place to study this phenomenon.
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..
Instantly switching languages is hard though. You end up with sentences that make absolutely no cheesecake and fail you grammar basic if you switch to your native tongue again. Often happens to me after work when I was consuming content in English for a longer period of time.
Nearly everything is localized here though and it is very true that dubbed content suddenly feels very artificial. Older generations have a comparably bad English proficiency, even if they once excelled in school.
You don't say... when I'm in a situation where I have to speak two different languages to different people at the same time I sometimes end up using the wrong language with the wrong person. Really funny in retrospect but it greatly confuses everyone.
My favorite mistake (made by yours truly):
"I feel upset."
"Oh, I also feel angry."
"I said that I feel upset..."
"Yea, angry, me too"
"It's not the same."
"Wait, what? How isn't it?"
Emotional conversations with a native English speaker are harder because of this. I learned to get a bit better at it as my SO speaks Dutch as well.
Having the same conversation in Dutch with the same words and sentences yielded very different discussions. IMO, the research that people talk and think more rationally in a non-native language rings true.
A Swede will tell a joke. The swedish congregation and maybe some other Scandinavians will laugh. Then a moment later the English-speakers will laugh when it's translated into Englisg, then everyone else gradually, depending on how long each other language's translation takes.
Grammar and concepts are comparable. It's no Chinese for sure. Much less alien than Korean too.
(And let's not try comparing it with Hebrew, Indic languages or Arabic vs Latin group.)
Personally, I don't think grammar is a large hurdle to learning to understand a new language. You can learn once that Japanese usually has the verb at the end of the sentence, and afterwards use a dictionary whenever you don't understand the word at the end of a sentence to learn a new verb. But using a dictionary is already a step up from passive consumption. Most people just want to enjoy the show, so they're not learning much.
Knowing grammar helps. I'm Italian and Spanish and French have such similar grammars that learning to read them was mostly a matter of building a vocabulary. Listening to French is more complicate as its hard to find spaces between words. Talking is both simple (similar sounds except a few ones) and complex (subtle differences in how to build sentences.) Writing is the most difficult skill. Everything has to be almost perfect.
English wasn't only a matter of vocabulary. The differences in grammar are large enough that building and understanding a sentence requires to think in a really different way. I got a shot at German a couple of times. The differences are an order of magnitude larger and I never had the time to go beyond the basics.
This sounds wrong to me…
(Though i think the correct pseudo translation would be “In English also verb can end go”. Subtle difference, but more like German - und auf den Punkt.)
I can remember when we watched television in class there would be no subtitles. The teacher would pause the video every 2 minutes or so and then ask someone in the class to explain what had just happened during those 2 minutes.
Usually it would be stuff like a news broadcast or similar the teacher had taped from Japanese tv broadcast.
You could mostly translate things because they were talking about relatively mundane concepts which were similar to what we had been learning. "That clip was about the opening of a railway station in this prefecture etc."
I can remember one lesson the teacher played Mononoke Hime in class, this was a pretty big anime movie which had just come out at the time it was full of references to Japanese mythology and folklore, no one is class had any idea what was going on in the story because it was full of language we'd never heard before.
The other thing is that anime tends to use a lot of informal language, which differed a lot to the more formal speech we learnt in class. So I suspect it would be very difficult to learn Japanese from Anime alone.
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).
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.
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.