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Comment by tester756 | Hacker News Reader

There's also other issue: English as native language offers huge advantage

Think of it:

If you're from non-english speaking country, then you'll be spending like 14 years at school learning english.

Additionally you'll have to put a lot of effort outside the classes and you'll still be at probably good / very good, but not native level.

So, in order to compete with engineers, scientists, etc from english-first countries you not only have to be as good as they are, but all of that while paying this "english-learning tax"

It is like a few thousands of hours of effort required to get decent results and now think about it how many other things you could spend that time on.

It is actually crazy when you think about this. Almost every person in majority of countries needs to pay that huge penalty that's required to enter science, business, international world.

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That is not how it works.

Coming from a Scandinavian country, we started learning English around the age of 8, and at the age of 15 my English was good enough that I was reading the Harry Potter books in English as they were published, rather than wait six months for the translation. Then I was also learning a third language from age 13 to 19.

And it's well documented that learning new languages, similar to playing sports or doing crafts or other stuff, is very beneficial for brain development in children and young adults.

If your hypothesis made sense, the United Kingdom should have a huge advantage over other European countries within science and other fields where English is predominantly used. But it does not. You can e.g. look at metrics like "number of scientific publications per capita", where the UK is only number 20 in the world, and the US is number 33.

I understand that learning English may have not been that hard for you, and given that you come from a Scandinavian country, most likely you speak near-perfect English (I've been to Norway once, it's amazing how even the old lady in the yarn store speaks English so fluently!) Also, no one is contesting the benefits of learning something new.

But keep in mind that different cultures face significantly different difficulties when it comes to pick up a foreign language. I'm based in Brazil and I can tell you with reasonable confidence: the average person in Latin America struggles A LOT to get past Harry Potter books and achieve full work proficiency. This can be due to significantly different grammatical structures, word roots, phonemes, and whatnot, or---most importantly---due to the fact that most of us can't afford quality language courses at affordable prices. In reality, good and affordable schools in our own native language is considered a privilege to many.

So either due to structural differences between languages (especially those that don't share the same Germanic roots as English), or due to economical and social issues, some non-English speakers have to spend hours of deliberate practice to be on the same ground as people from a few other countries, in academia or in a multi-cultural IT team. I myself can't count the number of hours of pronunciation practice I amassed throughout the years for being too afraid of sounding dumb in my daily scrums. This is something I'm pretty sure a native speaker doesn't have to mind with when starting at a new job.

That said, I don't see how the "UK vs. rest of Europe in numbers of papers" could support the claim that a head start doesn't exist. There are a number of infinitely more relevant variables that could explain scientific throughput by country.

Funny that you are making the mistake that everyone is offered the same opportunities as in Scandinavia.

Public education in many countries is trash.

In third world you probably have bad public education and you have to work.

In say Poland if you speak good English it means you learned it on private lessons or on your own.

> In say Poland if you speak good English it means you learned it on private lessons or on your own.

Really? I looked them up, and it says Polish students typically learn one or two foreign languages, and 67.9% do English. Unsurprisingly, German came next at 33.3%, and the rest on the list summed to another 33%, which also implies how many do two.

Of course, "good" is subjective; I did French at school (in the UK) from 11-16, got a GCSE grade D, and had to be corrected IRL by a native speaker after saying "Je ne parle français"…

>Really? I looked them up, and it says Polish students typically learn one or two foreign languages, and 67.9% do English. Unsurprisingly, German came next at 33.3%, and the rest on the list summed to another 33%, which also implies how many do two.

"Learn"

If actually this many people manage to learn deutsch language, then why only tiny tiny tiny % of people take it on final exams after high school?

5000 people taking it vs 180 000 taking english on "advanced" exams (which are optional, just for scores)

Speculating on what OP meant, but it might be generational, in Germany often older people won't speak English that well. Younger people will generally have done a lot more English in school, however, and tend to be better. This is generalizing a fair bit, though.

Mmm.

From what I've been told, the older generation around these parts (east Berlin) would've been forced to learn Russian at school as their second language, and then been completely unable to practice it with anyone as all of the native speakers were soldiers from the USSR who would've been banned from fraternising with the locals.

>In say Poland if you speak good English it means you learned it on private lessons or on your own.

Or, in the case of a Polish programmer friend of mine, from Leisure Suit Larry games.

>You can e.g. look at metrics like "number of scientific publications per capita", where the UK is only number 20 in the world, and the US is number 33

Why is the metric of focus the number of papers and not their quality?

I know Austrian universities also obsess with number of papers published to look good in statistics, even though many researchers I know admit that what they publish is pointless, they just do it to have published papers under their belt and to inflate the numbers to make the university look good.

Maybe the US and UK are not leading by sheer number of papers, but they do lead certain fields such AI/ML research, drugs/medical, etc. So your focus on numbers seems pointless.

I can't agree with you. Learning new languages improves your thinking with new grammar, new vocabulary, new culture, etc. And the people from non-english countries usually speak more than 2 languages because once you start to learn new languages it’s easier to get proficiency, specially on reading.

I consider an advantage for me not to be from a monolingual country, even if I have a hard time following some speakers because my English isn't native.

Alternatively maybe being dual language means you're overall smarter.

It used to be seen as a cognitive drag mostly because language development is near inevitably delayed.

But by the time you're getting into your teens bilinguals pretty outperform monolinguals nearly everywhere.

The mistake people make is try and assess cognition in non-native language. But you can't do that because nearly all tests are standardised to the first language (and actually English usually).

No doubt being bilingual L1 English L2 Chinese is likely powerful and much better than being Swahili/Laotian in terms of opportunities

I’m half Swedish, and of an age such that my parents were discouraged from raising my brother and I as bilingual. That still rankles, though in a way Swedish is the world’s most pointless language. I can’t speak it without being answered in near-perfect English!

Not really? Unless you specifically work in an international setting, you'll be just fine not speaking English. Also, learning another language isn't really a "tax" as much as it is something cool and fun to do as a kid that opens your mind to other ways of expressing yourself. Also you learn a lot about your own native language in the process. In that way, I find people in English-first countries that never learned another language (more common in the US than the UK or Canada) are in some ways at a disadvantage.

It depends, I think.

> If you're from non-english speaking country, then you'll be spending like 14 years at school learning english.

It's not that you get N hours free per week if you don't need to learn English, isn't it? English-speakers probably fill those "English as a second language hours" at school with something else. So, all in all, more or less kids in western countries spend the same time in school.

> So, in order to compete with engineers, scientists, etc from english-first countries you not only have to be as good as they are, but all of that while paying this "english-learning tax"

Depends as well. At least in Europe nobody really cares how good your English is past a certain level (ofc, if people can hardly understand you, then yeah you're in trouble). And, among Europeans, the most difficult accent to understand is the British one :)

> It is actually crazy when you think about this. Almost every person in majority of countries needs to pay that huge penalty that's required to enter science, business, international world.

At least based on my experience and on the experience of others (e.g., family, friends), it is not a huge penalty I would say. You either are good at it (for whatever reason) and then you have no trouble working as an engineer/scientist speaking English, or you are not good at it and you actually don't work as engineer/scientist (edit: in international environments). Cannot comment about other fields.

>It's not that you get N hours free per week if you don't need to learn English, isn't it? English-speakers probably fill those "English as a second language hours" at school with something else. So, all in all, more or less kids in western countries spend the same time in school.

The difference is, in my opinion that you don't have to care about other languages as hard as you have to care about english.

So yea, other kids can have french language lessons, but their life isn't kinda dependent on it right? unless they pick specific career

Meanwhile: tutorials, books (tutorials), research, discussions on the internet - almost all of it is english-driven,

business is english-driven, international communities around topics e.g programming, gym, etc, etc are mostly about english

then it is pretty close to being necessary

I learned how to read/write in my native language in 2 weeks. I learned half of alphabet first, then I figured out second part on my own, because our language has simple rule: "read what you see, write what you hear".

AFAIK, English native speakers needs about 2 years to properly read and write in English at average, which is high barrier to entry.

Group dynamic suggests that average education level will be higher in first case, while education level of elite will be higher in second case.

> huge penalty

I think it's more like, a few people get the (dubious) bonus of speaking the lingua franca as their mother tongue. (The downside being they almost inevitably only speak the one language).

Calling it an advantage is more correct, as, if US/UK folks disappeared over night, it would still make sense for everyone to learn a shared language for commerce/science/whatever.

This is a poor, tone deaf take. My English is better than yours, and I just so happen to be one of the people you casually insulted here.

I don't understand

What do you mean by "insulted" and who is who here?

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