You're right, here's my anecdotal evidence about it. I've already sent this comment here, but it's been 4 years ago so here it is again:

I live in a small town near the serbian-hungarian border and we can watch both Hungarian and Serbian TV stations. In Serbia movies are subtitled (so you can hear English language all the time) while in Hungary movies are dubbed (so you can't hear anything other than hungarian language on TV). Serbian families who live here watch mostly serbian TV and hungarian families watch mostly hungarian TV stations. Ask any English teacher here and they will all tell you that there is very clear distinction between level of knowledge in serbian vs hungarian kids. They all live in the same town, go to the same school, the only difference is that those kids who watched serbian TV stations had much bigger exposure to english language as opposed to those who watched hungarian TV stations.

Similar experience here. Growing up in Bulgaria as kids, my friends and I mostly learned English from Discovery Channel and Cartoon Network. Because it was pirated or probably too expensive to be translated, the content wasn't dubbed and there were no subtitles for most shows.

A few years later in high school when visiting a school in Germany, I was shocked to find out that the kids there were watching Discovery Channel completely dubbed in German.

That's interesting. I wonder if the fact that Serbian is an Indo-European language and Hungarian is not has any influence? Not a linguist and not familiar with either language, so just a semi-random question.

Language families refer to the provenance of a language, the oldest vocabulary. That doesn't automatically mean it will be easy or hard to learn if you speak another language within or without that family. For instance if you speak Spanish you may find it easier to learn Tagalog than if you speak Malagasy (Madagascar), even though Malagasy and Tagalog are in the same family and Spanish is not.

I doubt it. To anyone other than a paleolinguist, Serbian and Hungarian are approximately equally distant from English. And the Finns don't have trouble learning English.

N = 1 here

I'm Dutch and have a close friend who's Hungarian. His English is as good as mine. The only impression I got is that he needed to actively seek out opportunities to speak English whereas in The Netherlands you're bombarded with opportunities.

I do think it helps a bit though, but it's easily trumped by opportunity itself.

Maybe but for kids that’s not important.

Very interesting! May I ask what the town called?

Belgium is a great test case for your theory.

The country is split linguistically between Dutch speakers in the northern Flemish region, and French in the southern Walloon region.

The Flemish region's television stations and cinemas run mostly subtitled programs (really, anything outside of children's shows and content made in the region or in the Netherlands).

In the French-speaking areas, the media companies and cinemas buy their content from France, where the vast majority of it comes overdubbed.

As a result, the Flemish have a much stronger command of English than their French-speaking counterparts.

That said, the French-speaking Belgians, at least in my experience of living there for a long time, speak English much better than the French.

A lot of that has to do with how international the country is, where Brussels not only hosts many international institutions, but also a lot of companies have their EU HQs there. Many people need to speak English to get jobs with these firms, so it drives up the English competency among the local population.

Your theory definitely has some merit.

Though I'm willing to agree with this as a general idea, I would be cautious to state it as a fact.

I've encountered many Flemish Belgians who openly admit they can understand English but cannot speak it well. A member of my close familiy who works in aviation occasionally rants about "having to do everything in English", a position that I cannot begin to understand. Whereas I've worked for a Flemish Belgian company that also had Walloon Belgian customers who communicated not stubbornly in French (as the stereotype would suggest) but in professional English.

I believe that the language learning is affected by the generations. There has been a disregard, acceptance and now (what I believe) a new disregard of foreign languages in Flanders. Though I do not have any numbers to back that up. That said the news recently reported an all-time low for Flemish Belgian students with regard to reading and sciences (https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2019/12/03/_dutch-is-the-key-to...). So there might be a correlation between the two subjects.

It would be very interesting to have data on this subject as Belgium indeed is a great place to study this phenomenon.

Maybe, you’ve also got to consider the fact that Flemish is more similar to English than French is, and cultural differences between French and Flemish/Dutch speakers overall (broadly overgeneralising, French people are salty that their language has been overtaken in relevance by English, while Dutch speakers are comfortable with the fact that their language was never all that important).

I know that this is true for Dutch speakers in The Netherlands. I wonder how Flemish people think about Dutch. I never asked :D

Wow.

> My pet theory is that English proficiency is much better in countries where movies are subtitled, not dubbed.

That is how I learned the basics of the english language when I was a kid. Here in Portugal movies are subtitled.

Incidentally, I went to Milan once to participate in this thing, and neither Italians, Spanish, French, Polish and Russian people could understand each other. I speak a little bit of everything (almost, had to use pseudo-english with the polish and russian) so I had to do the translations. Talk abou information assimetry: I knew everything that happened because I was the unnoficial translator.

The "best" part of that trip was to have to watch Four weddings and a Funeral dubbed in Italian! It went some months before I was able to tolerate italian language again..

I was horrible in English while at school and internet access wasn't widely spread. Regular use is pretty important in my opinion.

Instantly switching languages is hard though. You end up with sentences that make absolutely no cheesecake and fail you grammar basic if you switch to your native tongue again. Often happens to me after work when I was consuming content in English for a longer period of time.

Nearly everything is localized here though and it is very true that dubbed content suddenly feels very artificial. Older generations have a comparably bad English proficiency, even if they once excelled in school.

Native English speaker (English) here and I've just had to wipe my screen after reading your second paragraph. Pretty much the only reason I can tell you are not a native writer is by the content and the points you are raising.

Non-native speakers are more easily recognizable in their language use when they need to use proper vocabulary during emotional conversations.

My favorite mistake (made by yours truly):

"I feel upset."

"Oh, I also feel angry."

"I said that I feel upset..."

"Yea, angry, me too"

"It's not the same."

"Wait, what? How isn't it?"

Emotional conversations with a native English speaker are harder because of this. I learned to get a bit better at it as my SO speaks Dutch as well.

Having the same conversation in Dutch with the same words and sentences yielded very different discussions. IMO, the research that people talk and think more rationally in a non-native language rings true.

I can see how that did not work out well! To be honest me and my SO can diverge like that without invoking another language. Usually it is me expressing bewilderment.

<quote>Instantly switching languages is hard though.</quote>

You don't say... when I'm in a situation where I have to speak two different languages to different people at the same time I sometimes end up using the wrong language with the wrong person. Really funny in retrospect but it greatly confuses everyone.

Things like this happen at the UN:

A Swede will tell a joke. The swedish congregation and maybe some other Scandinavians will laugh. Then a moment later the English-speakers will laugh when it's translated into Englisg, then everyone else gradually, depending on how long each other language's translation takes.

But you still had to have conversations with people to fully learn right? As someone learning Spanish I think I've hit a hard limit in terms of of my progress from just consuming media in Spanish and decided I need to start taking one on one tutoring lessons to really continue my progress.

My personal observation of people who watch lots of anime with subtitles but only understand a handful of Japanese words and can't pronounce them correctly indicates that passive exposure to a language isn't enough to learn much. You also need to try and practice using it yourself.

I studied Japanese for 10 years from Primary School until end of high school.

I can remember when we watched television in class there would be no subtitles. The teacher would pause the video every 2 minutes or so and then ask someone in the class to explain what had just happened during those 2 minutes.

Usually it would be stuff like a news broadcast or similar the teacher had taped from Japanese tv broadcast.

You could mostly translate things because they were talking about relatively mundane concepts which were similar to what we had been learning. "That clip was about the opening of a railway station in this prefecture etc."

I can remember one lesson the teacher played Mononoke Hime in class, this was a pretty big anime movie which had just come out at the time it was full of references to Japanese mythology and folklore, no one is class had any idea what was going on in the story because it was full of language we'd never heard before.

The other thing is that anime tends to use a lot of informal language, which differed a lot to the more formal speech we learnt in class. So I suspect it would be very difficult to learn Japanese from Anime alone.

The difference would be that the European countries where people are watching subtitled TV are also teaching English in school. So you have both the proper education, as well as repeated, practical reinforcement and exposure.

I agree to a certain extent but keep in mind that Japanese grammar is completely different from any latin based language. That makes really difficult to asimilate full sentences, locate where the action or the subject are, etc.

It's only visually different. Much like Russian. That is a relatively big barrier though.

Grammar and concepts are comparable. It's no Chinese for sure. Much less alien than Korean too.

(And let's not try comparing it with Hebrew, Indic languages or Arabic vs Latin group.)

It's way more than visual. For example, Japanese plurals aren't evident and need to be understood from context. Another example is the word order, in Japanese, the verb goes at the end of the sentence. Add to it Hiragana and Katakana characters and it becomes quite difficult to learn.

You're listing differences between Japanese and English, but my sample of anime fans who don't understand Japanese also includes Chinese and Korean speakers, for whom writing system or verb-final word order, respectively, are shared features. Different grammar from English isn't unique to languages with non-Latin writing system either. Latin itself has much freer word order, enabled by a more complex case system than English.

Personally, I don't think grammar is a large hurdle to learning to understand a new language. You can learn once that Japanese usually has the verb at the end of the sentence, and afterwards use a dictionary whenever you don't understand the word at the end of a sentence to learn a new verb. But using a dictionary is already a step up from passive consumption. Most people just want to enjoy the show, so they're not learning much.

I like to watch anime in Japanese because of the sound, but I don't know any Japanese so I look at subtitles, usually in English. I don't expect to learn any language in this way.

Knowing grammar helps. I'm Italian and Spanish and French have such similar grammars that learning to read them was mostly a matter of building a vocabulary. Listening to French is more complicate as its hard to find spaces between words. Talking is both simple (similar sounds except a few ones) and complex (subtle differences in how to build sentences.) Writing is the most difficult skill. Everything has to be almost perfect.

English wasn't only a matter of vocabulary. The differences in grammar are large enough that building and understanding a sentence requires to think in a really different way. I got a shot at German a couple of times. The differences are an order of magnitude larger and I never had the time to go beyond the basics.

In English also verb end can go. Plurality--they can usually be disregarded, too.

Order care can being if understood like you use you don't any you about.

> In English also verb end can go.

This sounds wrong to me…

Point this is.

(Though i think the correct pseudo translation would be “In English also verb can end go”. Subtle difference, but more like German - und auf den Punkt.)

Chinese grammar is refreshingly simple. I'm currently learning Chinese and it was shocking to me how easy it is to sensibly express ideas with very basic grammar (and some really funny idiosyncratic phrasings like… dong bu dong).

Not only that, there are certain things that need to be taught because you will never figure them out on your own. For instance, in English the voiced/voiceless distinction in consonants involves differences in vowel length and aspiration in addition to voicing. If your mother tongue relies entirely on voicing, as all Romance languages do, then you will interpret the other features as an affectation when in fact they have an important phonemic role.

In India, Australian game shows on TV are subtitled ... in English!

I'm an example of your pet theory.

It's also the reason why there's a moderate correlation (didn't actually research this) between small EU countries and English ability. Small countries are better, because they don't have the resources to dub their series.

This used to be more true than now. The Netherlands has been regressing a bit in their English speaking ability precisely because children tv shows aren't in English anymore (though there's still plenty of opportunity in NL, there simply used to be more).

Not only English: we had subtitled French, German (with English subs mostly :) and English when I grew up; I watched a lot of English (BBC) and German tv which made me quite fluent in both from a young age. French less so as I did not like French programs (now I do); I still understand most and when I am in France for a couple of weeks I can make myself understandable. Also; because I picked things up from listening, my pronunciation is good especially after spending some time in the region.

Can people really fully learn a language this way? I've been learning Spanish and taken this approach of consuming media (music and videos) and I'm even at a level where I can follow a well spoken Spanish speaker in a video but I have realized I'm still at a beginner stage in terms of having actual conversations with people. I don't think most people can really fully learn a language without a good deal of direct conversation with other speakers of the language.

> Incidentally it also explains why native english speakers tend to have no idea about other languages.

I've learned traveling in foreign countries that simply learning the native words for please, thank you, hello, goodbye, yes and no goes a long way towards having a pleasant experience. The locals will go out of their way to be nice to you for making the effort.

It could be a correlation rather than a causation. Small countries don't have the financial justification to dub movies and they also must rely on english for professional reading material since there are not enough people to justify publication of local language books. They also tend to rely more on other countries for import and export. Therefore people have to know English just to be able to study and communicate.

The Spanish market is huge and so are other big influential countries like Japan, Germany or France which is still spoken in many other countries, mainly in Africa. So there is less incentive to learn English because everything is available in the local language.

There are other factors like closeness of the language to English(north European countries) and colonialism(the sub continent). The advancement of the Latin American economies makes Spanish a much more viable and influential competition to English so English becomes less necessary. You can even see it in popular culture where Spanish music and tv shows become popular all over the world. As a non Spanish speaker my random vocabulary in this language increased a lot during the last couple of years.