The reason it might be true that people from smaller countries speak better English is emphasis - in a small country, people are fully aware that knowing foreign language (English, German, French in Europe) is super important. People in big countries (Spain, Italy, France) don't think it's that necessary, because they have a big country of their own, their own language should be the important one (and it partially is, although English has seemed to win as the international communication platform).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_%28filmmaking%29

Your reasoning that the size of the country matters doesn't hold water because both countries are small.

Anyway, in Romania we are speaking far better English than any of our neighbors, which includes Hungary and Ukraine. I used to think that happens because Romanian is a romance language, but that doesn't fully explain it. Oh, and people here learn Italian and Spanish as well, almost effortlessly, just by watching soap opera :-) And many of us have learned French in school, though I was not lucky to have good teachers.

BTW, English has some nice features for learners. For example it doesn't assign gender to objects, like all romance languages are doing. Those of us that speak in such languages forgot how hard it was to learn those genders when we were kids.

Young Flemish or Walloon people even speak English to each other..

Even after all those years of lessons. Few of us spoke even half decent Finnish by the time we where adults, but most of us spoke good English by that time. So I think school had little to do with it.

Me and my class mates watched hours of English cartoons or movies on TV, every day on our free time. Its not surprising it made a bigger difference.

As to Antirez: if only my C would be as good as yours...

I suspect this doesn't as much role in Europe. Sure, there are difficulties unique to learning any language, but English has a lot of shared ancestry with any germanic or romance language. It's not like, say, Mandarin or Punjabi.

Personally, French was always a chore, something solely associated with school. English was fun, something you actively used.

It totally does. Especially when you're young. I think you thinking about a lower amount of exposure though. It needs to be quite a lot, not like hanging out at a French-speaking family once a week, but more like watching 30-45 minutes of subtitled cartoons/shows daily.

(maybe it was more, not sure how much TV I watched when I was little, and how much of it was subtitled. I do remember my parents didn't let me watch The A-Team because it was just about guns and violence ... :P :P)

Also, you can keep your position, but so far there are several people from all over Europe and elsewhere, confirming personal anecdotes about the difference subtitled TV shows make.

I want to emphasize the difference it makes whether you are young or not. The effortlessness by which young kids pick up languages, seemingly through osmosis, is just insane. I work with kids a lot, some of them come from crazy places, the younger they are, often after just a year in NL, hardly even an accent (translating for their parents at 8). On the other hand, adults that move here, even in their early twenties, if they don't make an explicit effort, forget it, after 3-5 years they still speak three Dutch sentences (I admit that it doesn't help that any Dutch person will immediately switch to English as soon as they hear you're having a tiny bit of trouble with the language. Not the case for small children, of course. Unless they already speak English).

Then how do babies ever learn to speak? The most fluent speakers of foreign languages are almost always immigrants, because exposure is the key to learning to speak.

No one speaks english at home, same people at home - only difference is the language on the TV. It works.

How exactly that works is still a hotly debated topic, but there is a clear difference between mere exposure to TV versus interacting linguistically in an environment.

> The most fluent speakers of foreign languages are almost always immigrants, because exposure is the key to learning to speak.

In my experience it's hit and miss. Some people simply have a knack for it (or interest), others not so much. So you can just as well have a very fluent second language learner who hasn't spend significant time immersed in the language, as well as the opposite of an immigrant who still has a thick accent after 20 years.

Right. It wasn't clear to me that you meant that by "mere exposure", I was assuming both of those things as "exposure" versus actively being taught a language in school, and spending effort to practice.

Still, I think I learned more English from subtitles than I did in school.

I remember when I was about 10, I had learned a tiny bit of English in school, really nothing to speak of (it can't have been more than half a year). And a lot more from TV and subtitles. At some point my parents had some English-speaking friends over, whose kids were exactly my age. I could (partially) understand what they were saying, but I was a bit scared to talk back in English, because while I knew some English, I had never spoken it "for real" :)

So yes, interacting linguistically is important. But it felt to me more like "unlocking" the ability to converse in that language, after already knowing most of it by being exposed to it, daily, for most of my life.

I don't actually remember learning anything really new about English in school until years later in high school (some words I hadn't seen before, or used in a particular manner). Everything I already had seen on TV, it was more like remembering.

I think that's just what we tell ourselves to feel better and for national pride. I started watching movies in English many years ago and, even when my English was not yet very good and I had to use subtitles, I preferred watching the original version, the real actor is just much better. Now, after living in the US for a few years, when I hear dubbed movies they sound just ridiculous: everyone speaks with the same flat intonation, there is no emotion in the words, it all sounds fake and, funny detail, I'm now much more aware that the voice is out of sync with the lips. It's both hilarious and painful to endure.

The number of subtitled movies in France (or at least in Paris), what they call VO/VOST, in the last 10 years in cinemas has increased considerably

Side-note: A few years ago, I read about a project for "same language subtitling" (of soap TV series, nonetheless) to improve literacy in India. Don't have a link for that, unfortunately.

Your reasoning makes sense, and probably plays a role, but I believe subtitling of English TV plays at least as much of a role. A lot of German TV is dubbed, and the effect of this also carries over to smaller German-speaking countries, like Austria. Now one could argue that this is, according to your reasoning, because they are part of the larger German-speaking community. But that really isn't the case, ask any Austrian, most of them will tell you their mother tongue is Austrian (which is not a written language, but also quite a bit more unique than merely German-with-a-dialect), and "high German" is definitely something they had to learn separately.

Or not. I know people who learned spanish just by watching TV (in Romania). Here in France people have no idea how english sounds because everything is dubbed, from the news on TV to series and movies...

We Italians can't say the th right, because we cannot even _listen_ it right. We can't just process the sound, yet alone reproduce it.

Then we get on internet and we learn written English, but since the rules are inconsistent we mostly are left to make wild guesses as their sounds and English pronunciation is extremely irregular. Most of the complexity comes from having to know if a word radix is or isn't saxon and apply a different set of pronunciation rules, so for example think -ice- which has very different sounds in different words in two groups or this about "A/I/E" https://i.imgur.com/zncINPy.gif

but what gets me is you have people that speak like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nj5MMURCm8 and tell foreigners they are not understandable

hah, IMO that's because they mixed the music way too loud in that clip :)

I can make out most of it, but definitely not the very first bit. I guess if it had been Dutch, I'd also have trouble understanding everything--though perhaps a bit less because like you imply, I'm better trained at separating "Dutch sounds" from background noise.

This is the reason why I really prefer to watch English TV or movies with (English) subtitles. It's one thing to understand what they say, it's another thing to be able to make it out in the first place.

During my time in Belgium, I found that few Liégeois spoke English, and one simply couldn't get by in Liège without being able to speak French. However, during visits to Antwerp, I could speak in English and people there were happy to reply in English.

So why the difference?

Dutch is a lot closer to English than French. Both are Germanic languages. I know English and French share a large common vocabulary, but grammar and basic vocabulary are quite different.

Dutch isn't spoken much outside of the Netherlands and Flanders, so there's more incentive for the Dutch and Flemish to learn a second language, and the obvious one is English.

Many people in Liège actively dislike speaking languages other than French.

Not many tourists go to Liège.

Brussels, though mostly French speaking, is more international, and gets more tourists, so English is spoken there, though French is preferred.

But I remember reading that different languages use different sounds spectrum and hearing/understanding languages outside your spectrum is harder. Some languages have overlapping sounds spectrum which make learning different language easier. Now you have also the languages sharing the same roots and as you said somebody who know a germanic language then will have easier to guess/learn new vocabulary.

Flanders uses subtitles, Wallonia dubs. Instead of learning Dutch as their second language most Walloons learn English. This is anecdotal, but I've noticed their English is worse than most people in Flanders. I think this is where the whole dubbing/subtitles also plays a part.

- The consumption of English media you mentioned

- Other Germanic languages. Even though English has moved away quite far from the other Germanic languages, there's still quite some Germanic heritage in for instance in how to generally express yourself. The problems arise when things are actually different. Swedes for instance often have a problem pronouncing the /tʃ/ sound and pronounce chip like ship. But for speakers of Germanic languages the problems are fewer.

1. http://www.ef.edu/epi/

When I moved abroad, to Spain, I found it amusing to play clips to movie fans in English and ask who is this? Based on the sound. Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio etc. - they didn't know any because the famous ones have even their personal voice doublants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantino_Romero

Talking about interesting lives...

One good example of the troubles with english. Is a tiresome encode, decode, encode... all the time. And this is only popular culture. A much worst problem has been created when english weird rules overpower universal languages, like taxonomy.

Lets take the maple genus for example: "Acer", named by a swedois from the latin "aciale". Should be pronounced as Linné intended /'azer/ but is changed to /ˈeɪsər/ instead, because english. This mean that a language created to be universal, is not universal anymore. Is tainted. For most people in the world there is not a clear rule to link "azer" with "eisa". Is broken unless you hear it and memorize it. Linné would not understand currently most of is own named genera.

The funny thing is that too can help you learn a language if you already know the program in your own language, but it doesn't really help expose 'the natives' to more languages.

All of the large western european countries, basically all of western europe except for the nordics (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, possibly the Netherlands).

German home made programmes are also particularly dire. Their long running police drama series Tartort is their single saving grace.

I learned a lot of English just watching Cartoon Network (undubbed and unsubbed)!

Not so sure about Cinemas (in Berlin there is an English only movie theatre though)

You're in good company since many native speakers can't spell either. English's greatest virtue is a high degree of fault tolerance.

Admittedly I'm only a monoglot, but Engish seems pretty brutal in expecting you to figure out the correct sounds from the context. A few diacritics sprinkled in could likely really help newcomers with appropriate sounds.

On a tangent, one of the things I like about written Spanish is that you know at the beginning of a sentence whether it's a question or an exclamation. It's always a bit weird when reading a long sentence in a novel, to get to the end of it and think "oh, that was actually a question..."

I read an article sometime in the past year that maintained that all the prissy rules were imposed on a perfectly good language by self-imposed arbiters of the language. Sorry, I cant locate it at the moment.

Counter argument: everything is dubbed in Austria and yet we're pretty good at English. Why? Education and a multi-cultural background in the last 30 years.

I'd place myself in the 90% percentile of fluency in English here, but as soon as a native speaker forgets I'm participating I understand jack shit. Nada. Instant game over. Grammar, vocab, pronounciation, emotional expression, speed, comprehension, etc. -- everything takes a 50% hit compared to German.

My coworkers are from Austria, US, Slovenia, Serbia etc. -- often the only shared language is English. It makes meetings excrutiatingly slow and painful (non-fluent talking bringing back memories of 1st year elementary school reading).

And that is the experience in an highly educated multinational team in the software industry. Calling it "best-case" would overstretch it (that still goes to EU interpreters meeting at lunch), but compared to large parts of the population...

If that is "pretty good", what is "mediocre"? Or "bad"? The inability to say hello?

Edit: At the same time, Scandinavians, the Dutch and Germans/Austrians all have a language that is more closely related to English than the Romanic or Slavic languages.

Historically sure, but if you look at people from my generation I doubt that's the case still. Focused English education in Austria only really started 15 years ago.

When I went to school our first english lesson was with 10, now it's 5 or 6.

On the other hand, that might be selective perception on my part and things might have gotten better. Or maybe Austria has improved more than Germany, which is entirely conceivable.

As someone who is married to a native Russian speaker and we both moved to Austria (me from the UK though born in Austria, my wife from Russia), we regularly have conversations with others in English rather than German because everybody seems to actively prefer that.

So at least from general experience you can get the majority of services in English here. The exception seems to be immigrant taxi drivers and local hairdressers.

/schluchtenscheisser

Most of this is because we grow up watching movies and tv shows with subtitles. Heck, I even remember watching Cartoon Network without any subtitles at all.

Another thing I noticed is how good the english accent is from people from Portugal and Sweden.

But like you said, it's not 100% perfect, nor is it even 80%, neither orally nor in writing.

Subtitling movies and TV shows essentially gives more opportunities to encounter linguistic input. However, as the viewers are able to get the meaning from the subtitles only, they don't necessarily PROCESS the foreign language. Some do, so the mileage varies a lot.

(Watching without subtitles will force you process the meaning – or if the difficulty level is too high, just frustrate and ignore it. Or process partially.)

I find that even more than TV shows, kids these days are learning English from games – in Finland, they don't translate games at all, so there's even greater incentive to actually try to understand the English input.

Kids also tend to have more patience when it comes to watching something that they do not fully understand due to language issues so they're less likely to give up.

As an adult subtitled programmes are very useful for locals learning English and foreigners, like me, learning Norwegian.

English spelling is often a problem because people are told that it is simply irregular when the truth is that if you know a little etymology you can figure out a lot because when you know where the word comes from you can then find out what set of rules are to be used for it. I'll admit that there are still difficult words :-)

We also watched some some non-English tv shows like the Swedish "Bjornes magasin" and the Finnish "Pikku Kakkonen". But these shows where not as cool and not as plentiful as those English tv shows.

I think it's much more plausible to say that the smaller countries of Europe have more of a economic necessity to be proficient in a second language (which often happens to be English).

Written and spoken English can sync CAPS in sylLABles while vocaliIZED. http://th.ai youtube CCaptions=ON, text=monospace, see syllables precisely while you hear them, playback SLOW.

In theory, constant experience of SYNCHronous vocALized TEXT will help you spell better faster.

The previous exposure helps some, especially those who can already read the subtitles, but more important is that when they actually start studying English, they’re also exposed to more grown-up shows—which do come subtitled.

Or that’s how it was. Nowadays, of course, it seems that kids move pretty seamlessly to content without even subtitles (think youtube and whatever it is the kids use).