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A comment on France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decline: study. Parent comment

Re:France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decl... by herogreen on Thursday December 05, 2019 @04:13PM (#21716590)
My two explanations (as a French): all English contents on the TV is dubbed and English classes often have 24+ students which makes it hard for the teacher to have everyone speaking (even a bit).

Whereas in Finland, subtitles on foreign TV programs are common and classes have less students (I think).

Thus I believe it entirely comes down to the government not being smart enough.

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Re:France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decl... by dfawcus on Thursday December 05, 2019 @04:47PM (#21716955)
Or try the converse, in the UK almost all foreign language content is still dubbed.

Then for foreign language (French and German) classes in state schools in England around 1975 onwards:

We'd often have around 30 pupils. Time was spend on learning vocabulary and set phrases, but mainly in the written form. This would be from around age 10 (French) or 13 (German). It was the first exposure to grammar concepts (verb, noun, etc). Little time was spent on speaking the languages.

At the end of this most of us we still incapable to speaking the foreign language, let alone being literate in them!

I'm not sure to what extent it has improved since.

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Re:France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decl... by buckminster on Thursday December 05, 2019 @05:44PM (#21717509)
All my TV watching is on Freeview and I haven't seen anything dubbed in years. Where do you find dubbed media?

I agree that language teaching is terrible here though. The period you describe was particularly bad. The teaching of formal English grammar had become unfashionable but foreign languages continued to be taught using grammar concepts that nobody now understood in English. It was completely absurd.

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Re:France, Spain, and Italy’s English skills are on the decl... by jackjeff on Thursday December 05, 2019 @06:28PM (#21717813)
There is a lot of foreign series and movies on BBC4. Lots of Nordic noir crime stuff. There are also many French shows: Engrenage/Spiral season 7 has just finished.

Much easier to catch these on iPlayer than freeview.

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