Hacker News Reader

Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

Uhh, about that English skill ranking... I wouldn't take that very seriously.

I mean sure, Japan is quite infamous when it comes to English proficiency. But looking at the list, some countries are quite interesting in the "High proficiency" group. I know that in some of these countries most people would die of thirst if they had to ask a glass of water in English (or any other foreign languages, to be exact).

View on HN

> But looking at the list, some countries are quite interesting in the "High proficiency" group.

The labels are somewhat arbitrary cutoffs (every 50 points), but which country in the “high” category would you say is worse than HK or Honduras (the two top countries in the “moderate” category)?

I could definitely see an argument for a few ranks up or down, especially if you change the ranking criteria.

That said, this list seems directionally correct.

agreed. the newest data is here:

https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/

there is absolutely no way that Austria has "Very high proficiency".

I wonder what makes you say this? In my (limited) anecdotal experience, I've noticed that Austrians seem to have far higher levels of English competency than Germans, for example.

Not sure how it’s graded but it is very rare to meet an Austrian who can’t speak basic English and kids in the cities these days are often practically bilingual!

are you sure you're not making that judgement just based on accents? As a German, Austrians and us tend to stand out a bit compared to Swedes or the Dutch in my experience when it comes to spoken English but otherwise proficiency is high, always seems like a bit of an outdated stereotype to me.

I'm guessing Portugal must have improved a lot since I was there in 2019 and didn't have a great time trying to use English. I had better success rate with my extremely atrophied high school Spanish.

I’ve been to Portugal over 20 times in the last 10 years. In Lisbon and Porto, the Portuguese people speak English very well and most with an American accent. Foreigners who come to Portugal [1] and may work service jobs (a more recent phenomenon) may not speak English as well as the native population, while many of them still do still speak English well.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Portugal

Austria has a big tourist industry sector.

That's debatable, but there are some other howlers. The world's #1 tourist destination Thailand is near the bottom of pack 10 spots below Afghanistan, Finland is below Germany, Switzerland is below Serbia, and South Korea is almost 50 ranks above Japan.

The general population in Thailand has very limited English skills. As a tourist, you’ll encounter Thais whose jobs involve interacting with foreigners, and they can speak some English (not much). As for the rest of the population, english is practically non-existent ("hello", "good bye", and that's it).

There is no way Hong Kong has moderate proficiency and German has high proficiency. It's a bullshit list.

This is coming from a German living in Hong Kong.

I would say that the Dutch think they are a lot more proficient at English than they are.

Crazy to hear as a person who lived there for 7 years and had to conduct 0 conversations in Dutch in business, daily commerce, or interactions with the government. There are trilingual bums.. The only people who didn’t speak English didn’t speak Dutch either.

I wonder if this means that English proficiency rates subject vary a lot by locality.

I have worked there too.

Have you been to some other non English country that spoke better English?

The Philippines should be much higher. The majority of the population can do conversational English. A lot of their media is also American media in English.

The Philippines is already considered "Very high proficiency", second in Asia only after Singapore

Yes, but it’s also higher than many of the European countries listed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com