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Idk about the rest but Spanish people suck at English.
Italians have more or less the same level.
It is probably due to the fact that Romance languages are further from English than Germanic languages like Dutch and German.
Portuguese can speak english just fine.( I'm clearly biased since I am portuguese.)
I think a major difference is that Portugal has the original audio on every movie/show except kid shows, which improves our english accent.
Bingo, while the affinity that the local language has with English grammar and how hard foreign languages are pushed at school are contributors, this is the main one. This is why relatively uneducated people in the Netherlands and north of it are all fluent in English, and why Italians, Spanish and French are not. I Grew up with all Hollywood movie dubbed and in general Italian television in the 80s and 90s was 100% in Italian, didn't do me any favour. It's changing, and kids now rely less on TV and more on the internet.
Anedoctally,I've been bitching about the French for a very long time, like in the meme, but in my last few visits to France in the last decade or so I had no issue interacting in English everywhere (used to be fluent in French but no more)
Indeed, I added the sub/dub aspect in another comment
Portuguese is also a Latin laguange and Portuguese are much more proficient in English than Spanish, French and Italians. The main reason, imo, is that these countries dub all movies, series, etc, so they basically never listen to English nor are they interested to. In Portugal we rarely dub anything and just use subtitles. So it's much easier for us to understand and speak english because we're much more used to listen to it. It's probably the same thing for the eastern countries as mentioned above. Now, why do these countries dub everything I don't know but if they didn't we'd probably be on the same level
Now, why do these countries dub everything I don’t know
Keeping the language alive and available to other people outside of face-to-face conversations.
One of the frustrating aspect of learning a language has a lower number of speakers (let's say under 20 millions) and dubs everything is that you can't really find content in that language to learn it. I learned Dutch for many years, and it's always kind of frustrating to not being able to find that many content (e.g. Youtube video essays for instance) as Dutch speakers would naturally produce that content in English to have a broader audience.
Which makes sense for them, but then brings the question of how relevant the language is. The Netherlands are experiencing the progressive disappearance from Dutch even more as more and more people are coming to Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, and aren't motivated to learn the language, as English is so widespread everywhere. Young Dutch speakers also tend to use more and more English in their slang.
I kind of have the same situation as I'm learning Catalan, as most of the Catalan Youtubers produce content in Castillano rather than Catalan to reach a broader audience, but then the language becomes less and less relevant. That's one of the reasons Catalans want to keep movies dubbed in Catalan, as it is a way to keep it relevant.
I'm really torn between the two approaches. I get people who say that everyone in Europe should just use English and be done with it, but at the same time, Romance languages just hit differently. It's part of the local culture, and I think it would be a waste to just let all of that disappear. Another example I have is someone I know who's perfectly proficient in English (lived in an English speaking countries for many years), but still wants to raise their children in Dutch. So at the end of the day, is that language still relevant or not?
Dubbing is usually a thing in countries with large populations. I assume it started when English proficiency was much lower and someone thought it was worth doing it instead of subtitles and then they just kept doing it. These days in Germany the big cinemas offer showings of some movies in the original language, in the past (well, for some movies still today) you had to go to special cinemas to see a movie in the original, so things are slowly changing.
I just commented above you on dubbing, that might interest you
Finnish and Estonian are basically completely unrelated to English yet the native speakers of those languages are pretty good at English for the most part.
Yet for some reason, in Hungary, it's either Hungarian or bust (guess what, it's related to the two languages I mentioned at the beginning). So... honestly I have no idea what's happening here.
Also, Germany and Austria speak the same native language; German, yet there are more L2 English speakers in Austria than in Germany. It's the same as comparing France with francophone Belgium.
Finnish and Estonian are basically completely unrelated to English yet the native speakers of those languages are pretty good at English for the most part.
There is the second factor that influences how necessary English becomes to your population: the number of speakers. France, Spanish and Italian have at least 60 millions speakers, which allows them to have a dubbing industry with a significant market.
Hungary should indeed follow the same path, I don't know what's happening there either, maybe someone else would know more.
Also, Germany and Austria speak the same native language; German, yet there are more L2 English speakers in Austria than in Germany. It’s the same as comparing France with francophone Belgium.
As a Belgian, I always thought that as we are a country with a low population (French-speaking Belgians are around 4 millions), combined with being bordered by other languages (Dutch and German, English if you count the Channel) and having three national languages just naturally encourages people to be more open about learning at least one other language. Maybe a few of those similarities are also applicable to Austria.
I guess that makes sense.
and also because we couldn't give less of a shit about english
Feel free to join !esp!esp@lemm.ee para hablar castillano
Or because Italians are ignorant
It doesn't always work the same both ways, but the US Foreign Service Insititute (the government agency that teaches languages to diplomatic workers) claims that the easiest languages for native english speakers to learn are the romance languages, nordic languages, and dutch.
German is category 2.
Reasons for this are that English has a huge amount of influence from romance languages (mostly French), so a large portion of the vocabulary is similar. It tends to be that the 'small' words are germanic, while the 'meaty' or 'meaningful' words are romance.
Also the modern grammar is generally more similar to romance languages than German, as German retains much more of the old germanic case system.
Thank you for the insight, but I indeed meant it in the other direction.
German might be harder to learn for an English speaker, but that does not mean that English is not easier for a German speaker than a Romance language speaker.
Another example of this phenomenon (one language being easier to learn from one language, but not in the other way): Romanian. Romanian is a Romance language but with a lot of Slavic influence, so for Romanian speakers it is easy to learn Spanish or Italian, but for Spanish or Italian speakers, it is harder to learn Romanian due to the additional Slavic aspects.