Is there a European alternative for this website?
I haven't found anything public about where its hosted
or:
whois "$(ping -c 1 techposts.eu | awk -F'[()]' '/PING/{print $2}')"
You would be shocked at how well certain nationalities like the Dutch and Swedes speak English.
Totally. All Northern countries to be fair. And then in my experience at least some Eastern countries (like Slovenia).
Really it seems like the South of Europe is a bit weaker in English, my guess being that their native languages are latin and not germanic (so it's further away from English).
The bigger countries do dubbing and it is really noticeable.
Also in Holland we'd pride ourselves on speaking foreign languages much more than being proud of our own.
Being able to string together a couple of sentences is not "being fluent." By that standard, all of America would be fluent in Spanish.
I did hit a funny situation in rural France once where I was talking to a French restaurateur through one person who spoke French and Spanish, and then a second person who spoke Spanish and English. It was convoluted, but it worked enough to get me a meal. Alternatively, when I was in rural Spain, near the French border, a French speaking lady desperately tried to get me to help translate for her since she didn't speak Spanish and the merchant she wanted to talk to didn't speak French. Unfortunately, neither of them spoke English. The best I could do was communicate to the merchant in my broken Spanish that I couldn't help.
I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to me, I get it, and it's easier to refer to Europe as "the other" rather than having to use a longer phrase to describe traveling from the British isles to the mainland of continental Europe.
But still, it amuses me.
You're confusing Europe and the EU
You're forgetting about Ireland and Malta
You're thinking that because the UK left the EU it will change the main language countries use to speak to each others
In both countries English is only one of the official languages.
:P
Yes, and that's precisely the irony. Europeans still need to subject themselves to Anglo "cultural imperialism" or absolutely nothing works, starting with communication across national borders.
Do you have a single clue about Europe? That's not true at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English
Besides that, besides my native language and English, I had German and French in school (which are required topics in our country). So I can speak the native language of all nearby countries.
Auf Wiedersehen!
In short, it's just like Chinglish.
Your average educated European speaks at least three, one of which is English because it is a good language to have because it is the language of international commerce. This has been the case since many decades and has nothing to do with using the language internally.
But: many people do use it internally. French tourists abroad are more likely to use English than French. European colleagues usually standardize on English, both for their communications as well as for their documentation needs.
Scientific literature is predominantly in English (at least, for now).
So there are many reasons to use English which have nothing to do with allegiance or dependence.
ok ok I get the point but let's not exaggerate
But I think two languages is probably not exagerating. And not only in Europe. People have their native language and usually an international one (in Europe that would be English).
And then there are similar languages. Say a Spanish person will speak Spanish and English, and possibly French/Italian/Portuguese, so that quickly goes up to 3. Also in many countries there are already multiple languages (a portion of Spain speaks Catalan and Spanish as native languages, then probably English as international language, and they are probably not bad in French/Italian because of the similarity).
Same in the northern country that are all germanic languages: Swedish is pretty similar to Norwegian for instance, both are not too far to German, and everybody there speaks English fluently.
And then if you go in the Eastern Europe... like in Slovenia people seem to all speak 5 languages, it's insane :-).
However, I'd agree with that the average educated person can somewhat communicate ideas in a second language. This is what polls usually show, around 30% to 50% of people.
Have you tried any Scandinavian country for instance?
The two Americans, not knowing a fraction of German, stared blankly at the driver. “Sorry, but we have no idea what you are saying.”
The driver tried again in French and again was met with blank stares and shakes of the head from the two tourists.
Getting frustrated, he tried again in Italian, in Spanish, each time receiving nothing but sheepish smiles from the two of them. Finally, he cursed under his breath and drove away angrily.
The first American asked his partner:” Maybe we should learn a second language.” His partner shrugged and replied:” Why? That dude knew four languages and it didn’t help him.”