Re:France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decl...
by tin7in on Thursday December 05, 2019 @08:27PM
(#21718519)
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.
Re:France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decl...
by davidw on Thursday December 05, 2019 @03:46PM
(#21716295)
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.
Re:France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decl...
by mantap on Thursday December 05, 2019 @08:51PM
(#21718621)
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.
Re:France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decl...
by dmurray on Thursday December 05, 2019 @08:49PM
(#21718606)
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.
Re:France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decl...
by mettamage on Thursday December 05, 2019 @09:41PM
(#21718824)
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.
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.