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Comment by seek3r | Hacker News Reader

The thing is most Italian schools don’t do a great job at teaching English [1]. Students either pay for courses, self-study, or forget.

I’m Italian and I don’t agree with the author’s premise that non-native speakers have an additional translation layer (e.g. Italian -> English -> Ruby). It depends on your knowledge of the English language. As you master the language your brain becomes better at context switching; you don’t even notice it anymore (Myers and Cotton, 2002).

We should fix our schools, not translate programming languages. The technology sector speaks English. You can’t escape this language.

[1] https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/conoscenza-dell-inglese-alta...

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> We should fix our schools,

A large part of the english language problem in the southern Europe (it's not just an italian problem) is cultural.

The english language is considerably more embedded in the culture of the northern European countries; for example, there's considerably less dubbing.

If Italy stopped dubbing (which will never happen, because it's a tradition), italians would speak a considerably better English, just because of familiarity.

I'm not sure if there is a realistic improvement that could be applied. I'm not so critical of the italian schools; without significant immersion, it's hard to improve or retain a language meaningfully.

I suspect that a considerable factor of the problem is that Italy is not a significantly cosmopolitan country (intended as amount of "traffic" of international people), so that there is very little exercise (or "immersion", using my previous term).

The Germans are dubbing and they usually speak English quite well. My experience with Italian as well as French don’t like to learn or speak English.

Germany is a bit more complex, because historically speaking, there has been cultural separation.

In my experience:

  - middle aged people speak an ok english
  - elderly speak a poor or no english
  - young people speak a very good one

Something also worth considering is, as I've previously mentioned, the exposure to international traffic. In big German cities, there are a lot of foreigners; much less in Italy.

Finally, it's correct, as mentioned in a sibling post, that German has (some) roots in the English language.

Regarding Italians I've hardly met people who actively refuse (in the sense of "dislike") the language per se, but I can't exclude the option you've mentioned of "cultural laziness".

There's a cliche of the French culture being proud of their language, so I can imagine a sort of active refusal in this case.

> that German has (some) roots in the English language.

More accurately, English, like German, is a Germanic language. German doesn't have roots in English.

Also don't forget the east/west split. And while it's been 30 years (oh wow) some Germans who are now as young as 45 had Russian in school and not English.

I think that's also slowly changing as 10-15 years ago everyone was watching dubbed german TV shows on TV while now kids are just on social media with a lot more international content and influencers.

German language is much more similar to English language than Italian language

You make good points, especially this one: “without significant immersion, it's hard to improve or retain a language meaningfully.”

It also does not help that YMMV depending on what region or city you’re living in.

> We should fix our schools, not translate programming languages. The technology sector speaks English. You can’t escape this language.

Seconded. Additionally I never met anyone who could learn the concepts of programming, but who would be stopped by 20 keywords because they're in English. Half of the words when Italians discuss IT are already in English (Internet, Router, Switch, Server, Wireless/Wifi, Smartphone), or some bastardized mix ("formattare", "reboottare", "debuggare").

And honestly, despite how it might disgust the purists of the language (who will even insist on using "Instradatore" for router, "Servente" for server, etc), I believe this is a good thing. It reduces the barrier to communication and collaboration, and you are ALREADY learning "the language" of IT, may as well have it nearly universal and get more out of your effort.

Writing code in a language other than English (I mean translating the actual code keywords, not the strings and comments) also reduces the chances someone will help you on StackOverflow by a good 95%. And many excellent books or tutorials will be less accessible to you until someone translates them.

While I agree that decent English skills are a great thing to have in today's world, you can still escape English quite well, at least in Germany, as long as you don't go into IT, scientific research and simliar niches that do require English; it's taught reasonably well in schools, so most people speak at least some English, but I guess most hardly ever need it.

> The technology sector speaks English. You can’t escape this language.

Writing the occasional Excel formula is probably the most advanced thing most people do on their computers, and those are translated. All mainstream smartphone apps and websites are available in German, all mainstream productivity software is available in German, Movies are in German by default, everyday life is conducted in German, work communication is done in German even in large parts of the tech sector. You can live a long, fruitful life and hardly need any English after graduation, I guess. I imagine it's similar in Italy.

I should have been more precise. My comment focused on those who want to get in IT and scientific research, or wherever English is a must.

I didn’t specify it because of the submission being about programming. My bad.

Anyway, yes, your experience matches mine in Italy.

You should see how terrible the French classes we had here in Ontario public schools. It was an additional recess for kids in the 3 different schools I went to, for all 8 mandatory years.

The french teachers were a rotating course of young women doing the class no one other teacher wanted, suffering the worst abuse from kids.

French classes should be killed off in Canadian anglo provinces IMO. I highly doubt they have any measurable positive outcome besides teaching kids to count in french (actual competent French speaking rates are really low here despite being legally bilingual). We waste so much tax money in Canada on purely-performative bi-lingual exercises outside of Quebec and some east-coast areas.

If people really want to learn a language you really need to dedicate yourself and/or be around others native speakers at a young age.

This would enable kids to learn programming soon after they learn to write. Could bring the country some competetive advantage. Now the country is at a disadvantage compared to many others because people don't know English very well and that additionally hurts the ability to pick up programming.

You simply can’t be effective in programming without knowing English. Having few words translated in your language wouldn’t help much. Moreover it is much easier to learn English than learning how to code.

> Moreover it is much easier to learn English than learning how to code.

I know many, many people who would disagree.

Human languages are intuitive, share some aspects and we have centuries of knowledge on how to learn them. Programming is still a relatively new activity in comparison and requires a set of knowledge that you don’t already get in your youth like speaking does. I also know basic Greek and I can swear it was easier to learn than coding at a professional level.

You can't compare basic Greek to professional coding, learning Greek well enough to make a living from it (translation/writing/etc) is what you should compare to. Learning basic Greek is definitely harder than basic coding, and a language's difficulty also depends on where you're coming from (Portuguese is going to be much easier for Spaniards than for Greeks).

Stavros, you said it yourself. It depends on the language you already speak. Learning a programming language doesn’t have any starting point whereas a human language has. Regardless of how different the languages, you can still find similarities in sounds, phrase constructions, etc. Learning to code doesn’t have this

Learning how to code is trivial next to the years it takes to learn a natural language. Tiny unambiguous vocabulary and syntax. Objectively, a programming language is a much smaller thing to learn that's simple by design.

If you polled people who learning programming and a second language in adulthood, I'd wager the vast majority of them would say learning the natural language was harder.

Of course "learning to program" is extremely imprecise. Learning enough of a language to use its control flow constructs is a much different bar than learning enough to write an Emacs plugin or whatever you might have in mind here.

Based on what do you say this? I have my browser set to non-geographically specific, and when I ask programming questions to it, there are many, many answers in chinese and japanese. If the programming languages statements themselves were in those languages, a chinese or japanese speaker (in my field) would not need english at all.

From my experience the amount and the quality of resources available in English is simply not comparable with any other language. Surely it is possible without but much harder. I am Italian, during my studies I had the chance to read technical books both translated and in original language. The translation is usually very poor. On a daily basis work scenario, no Italian online resource would come close to stackoverflow to help diagnose issues quickly. Moreover, it takes time for official documentations to be translated in other languages. Even years in some times. It really depends on your sector. If you work in a niche area where you don’t necessarily need to be up to date with the industry you could survive without English.

I am italian as well, and I was specifically talking about chinese and japanese.

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