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Comment by devolve | Hacker News Reader

As a person who was raised with two different household languages at different times, I can offer anecdotal evidence that this holds true. My refugee parents decided that their native language (Romanian) would be an obstacle for me in their new country (Thailand) and went for English instead. Then we got asylum in Sweden and I learned Swedish in kindergarten and so on.

In Sweden my parents started speaking Romanian at home, which I also picked up. It became a coherent triangle of languages, where home we spoke Romanian, outside of home Swedish, and English on TV and in school.

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So you learned English from TV? I thought I've always heard that didn't work.

Works really well if you are a kid. You get really solid foundations then and you gradually improve.

This is why its important for your kids to watch Cartoon Network in English. I think this is how I and a whole lot of other 20-somethings learned the language.

I learned most of my early english from TV. I grew up in the Netherlands, speaking Frisian at home and Dutch at school. At the time dutch tv did not offer much programming aimed at children, the more interesting cartoons to be found on cable tv were on english language channels. I would tape Transformers episodes and watch them over and over.

Later on I started consuming other media (video games + video game magazines, american comics), so that by the time they started teaching english to me at school I was already relatively fluent.

Just another anecdote, but every Dutchman and Swede I've met has a much better grasp of the English language than any other country, and they all attribute it to how much American TV they watch. Probably just a corollary relationship given how English classes start at an early age, but I can't imagine the practice hurts.

I find it quite easy to find a correlation between countries that dubs their TV/movies with poor English comprehension.

It really helps and without it people wouldn't be in contact with English that often (at least before the internet) and if you never refresh your knowledge it will most definitely fade. Yes, we start learning English at an early age but a lot of students excel way faster than teaching allows once they get over the initial hurdle (much thanks to TV and internet).

As a Swede I feel that we are quite good at understanding English but we are quite poor (comparatively) at speaking it (although we can often make ourselves understood it isn't pretty), which isn't that surprising considering how seldom most people in Sweden need to talk in English (but we constantly consume it).

Compare France and Germany with Sweden and I think the biggest advantage that Sweden has is that we don't dub any movies or TV (except for cartoons and movies targeted towards small children). That and that people in France tend to get upset every time the are reminded that french isn't the only language in the world.

That's an observation i've made myself a dozen times too, i'm from Flanders (Belgium) where basically not a single show on public television is dubbed, all shows are subtitled and I'm confident that it has been a great stimulation in my ability to speak and understand english, even though it's not perfect. When I look at the other side of the country (Wallonia) where they speak french natively almost all shows on public TV networks are dubbed in french. The wallonians I know are pretty hard to understand when they speak english, they might grasp the grammar and spelling but their pronunciation is really bad.

PS: I don't mean to generalize here, it's just my personal observation, of course there are a lot of french talking people who speak perfectly understandable english fluent. I just feel that the fact that I've watched english spoken television shows all my life has helped me a huge amount in learning english.

I don't think it's quite as simple. Poland has been dubbing foreign TV/movies since the early 90s (in addition to having a rich homegrown tradition of children's entertainment) and English among younger generations is widespread and quite good, if not Scandinavia/Netherlands good.

I'd be willing to bet a correlation with country's population and relative economic power would be much stronger.

It might be then good to analise another country, a poorer one and not in the north, say Portugal. Almost nothing is dubbed in Portugal and you can see quite a difference between Portuguese and Spanish people speaking English. Same for French or Italian people.

Still, Scandinavian youth seem to have almost perfect English and that is not true about Portugal where it's mostly good enough. I'm sure education has a role here somewhere.

A Dutch friend of mine said watching English-language TV was a great help learning english. Just hearing the language a lot does wonders for recognising the sounds of words. Plus she said a lot of shows would have Dutch subtitles, so you get the link between sound & meaning.

An ex-girlfriend of mine moved to the US from Romania at the age of ten without any knowledge of English. As an adult she speaks completely fluent English with no hint of an accent. She claims that she learned English by watching TV.

Though of course, she was also living in a country where most people speak English, so I'm sure that must have helped. I'll have to ask her how long it was before she started school again, and how well she understood English by that point.

In Romania movies on TV and at the movie theaters are also aired in English with Romanian subtitles. English is also learned from school, sometimes from the second grade.

When I was 11, I was watching Cartoon Network in English (yeah, I still love cartoons) and I could understand everything. My spoken English is still not so great, but it's nothing that couldn't be fixed with a month living in the US or UK.

No. I learned English at home, and I kept up with it through TV and school. Also, I've always preferred to read in English, which probably helped a lot.

I had learned a good amount of English by playing NES games at the age of six. I watched and understood Akira four years later. The film was in Japanese, subbed in English. Note, I don't speak a word of Japanese.

Watching English TV shows at an early age will give you an advantage later on.

When I lived in Antwerp, I learned a fair bit of Dutch by watching Dutch TV with English subtitles. I have lost it all since then but I got to the point that I could generally make out basic conversation in shops and so on.

It doesn't work well if you just put a TV on around a very young child. But if you're paying attention (and a bit older) it should work OK.

tv is a very effective medium for improving command on english. in my case i started with english when i was around 10 and then slowly built up my language skills starting with disney cartoons > national geographic > tv and movies

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