I am interested in first person experiences or statistical tidbits about distribution of English skills (especially speaking skills, ability to actually converse) amongst young people in non-English-speaking Western Europe, e.g. Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands etc. Some possible questions here may include:
by what age do European teenagers reach approximate English fluency? Or do people reach fluency already in college?
do many students master conversational fluency as part of their regular education or do most such people benefit from self-conscious additional practice e.g. with tutors, watching TV, interacting with people from other countries etc?
is being able to watch and understand TV/movies in English widespread? Or are young people not really interested in such media in any event?
From my fairly extensive experience of having travelled in much of Western Europe, both for business and pleasure:
You have to distinguish the ordinary people from business professionals. I never met a professional who didn’t speak decent English.
For the ordinary person on the street, it was a different story, and varied greatly from country to country. In the Netherlands everyone spoke English. In Germany hardly anyone did.
My experience with this is from 1978, so take it with a grain of salt. At that time I spent a year in Germany as an exchange student, and almost invariably my German friends and acquaintances spoke to me in German, even one or two of them who were majoring in English language studies. To me this suggests that in general they weren’t eager to use me as a chance to practice their English, or that they didn’t want to impress me with it, or that they simply weren’t that interested in it.
For obvious geographical reasons, foreign language study is much more encouraged over there than here. A lot more continental Europeans know some English than Americans know their languages, but the distinct impression I get is that the people who speak English well tend to be in the top tier of the arts, business, or politics; and they travel frequently to Anglophone countries or to other places where English is the lingua franca. Ordinary working bears not so much; although university students somewhat more.
My Dutch cousin spoke perfect English by age twelve and countless European young people I have met in my travels spoke perfect English, with better grammar than the average North American. It is not unusual to meet a young European who has a working knowledge of four or five languages.
Of my six German cousins (we were all teenagers between 1977 and 1987), the 3 girls spoke excellent English and the 3 boys refused to utter a word of English in my presence.
In 2003-04 my wife taught English at two high schools in small-town Austria, and reports that the students there were very capable English speakers. I visited her near the Christmas holiday and sat in on a few classes, and can confirm: it seemed that no one had much trouble understanding my American idiom. These weren’t university-prep schools either, more like trade schools for carpentry (boys) and tourism (girls).
In my experience, it’s a North/South or Germanic/Romance language thing: Scandinavians and Dutch are for the most part almost perfectly fluent in English by college age, while many French and Italians are nowhere near it. Germans and Swiss are somewhere in between.
The Dutch people I know say it has a lot to do with seeing English-language movies and television with subtitles rather than dubbing. Only young children’s entertainment is dubbed into Dutch; once you’re literate you’re expected to read the subtitles while listening to the spoken English of the dialogue, so you become very familiar with hearing the language.
However, you didn’t come in here to ask about my personal experiences, you’re looking for the Straight Dope! Here’s a digest of a report on a study of foreign-language instruction in various countries (though I can’t seem to get to the report itself, which would have the comparative data). You can also get a rough comparison by seeing which countries’ university entrance requirements include proficiency in English.
Ditto what has already been said about English language skills in Holland. I’m always amazed at how fluent people are there. Just as an example, I remember have an impassioned discussion with the bartender in a head - banger metal bar in Amsterdam a few years ago about Metallica having sold out. It wasn’t a tourist kind of place, nowhere that you’d expect more than rudimentary language skills, and yet the guy’s English was great.
It’s a different story in Italy, where I live. English is a required language in all schools now, but the level of competence is not very high.
After a recent trip to both Denmark and Sweden I found that most people spoke excellent English, be they bus-drivers, assistants in bread shops or travel clerks at the railway station. The only exception we found was when we went into a florist to ask directions and the two old ladies who ran the place hardly spoke English at all. So it does seem to be a generation thing.
Most Spanish universities don’t require a second language as part of your coursework: you’re supposed to be fluent in one by then. A foreign language is part of the country-wide University Access Exam (Selectividad). Doesn’t mean you necessarily are fluent, due to a lot of factors; among them:
teacher-student compatibility. I’ve had one (1) superb and one (1) good ESL teacher, out of over a dozen. The superb one was a Spaniard, the good one a Brazilian of Korean ancestry. If it hadn’t been for Micaela, I would probably have never reached my current level of fluency: it was a lucky fluke, but no everybody gets one. And not all my classmates liked Micaela’s methods: those who were happy with the rote memorization of most of our ESL teachers hated her; about half the class loved her, about half hated her, there were no in-betweens.
most high school graduates know more English than they dare speak. I’d been badgering Lilbro for over 5 years to take his 3rd-year Official Language School Exam (equivalent to a First Certificate) but he thought he wouldn’t be able to pass it - until he came to visit me in Philadelphia and realized how much he understood of what he saw and heard; he passed it on the first attempt. People are terrified of choosing the wrong word, using the wrong inflection, being told they have an accent. It’s like they’re back in school, instead of being in a street, trying to help some tourist find the Sagrada Familia.
some schools begin teaching a second language by two years of immersion preschool. Others have three hous of class per week starting in 4th grade.
I play eve online in a low security alliance [Not BOB or Goonsquad] and we are constantly on teamspeak so I chat with furriners all the time. Other than the glaswegan, they are all perfectly good at speaking. Some have heavier accents than others, but their vocabulary is quite good. We have icelanders, Dutch, Norwegians, Swedish, Polish, Romanian, one lonely russian and a sprinkling of brits, aussies, kiwis, irish, spanish, freinch and italians. We have people ranging from IT specialists, students, military, business and one pig farmer.
We do teamspeak mainly because when things are happening at the speed of virtual light, involving billions of ISKies of cubage thre isn’t time for a lot of typong and reading. Everybody when not in combat is literate in english, though I have noticed that there can be a bit of grammer kerfluffel as odd slavic sentence structure can creep in now and again =)
The prof for our Computational Math (in the 80’s) was fresh off the boat from Norway, with a noticeable accent but nothing swedish-chef thick. He mentioned one time that once you got into anything technical, especially computers back then, all the text material was in English; very little was translated into the local language, so professionals had little choice but to learn english. When he got to graduate school, the prof offered the choice of lectures in english or norweigian and the classes mostly took the english option.
I agree from my experience the Dutch seemed to have much more intelligible English compared to the French in Paris or Italians in even the more touristy parts of Italy or the inhabitants of some areas fo the British Isles; never been to Germany yet.
I suspect it depends on critical mass speaking the local language… not just subtitles, but quantity of local media - music, films and TV, books and magazines, educational materials and now the internet. Even in Italy, for example, about half the songs on the pop radio were in English. Add to that the educational requirements, and no surprise they understand more of our language than we do of theirs. Plus I’m sure many languages are very similar to some of the neighbours’. Dutch, for example sounds like swedish-chef-mangled english sometimes. (“hoose” for house…)
For example, if you grow up in Canada, even in the purely English parts, the combination of schooling and media means you get a good exposure to French and many pick up enough to get by; the same I’m sure is true of Spanish in some areas of the USA.
Sort of like the scene in “What Did You Do In the War, Dad?” when the Germans meet up with the Italian troops…
German Commander: “Sprechen-zie Deutsch?”
Italian Commander: “Nein. Parla italiana?”
GC: “No. Do you speak English?”
IC:“Of-a Course!”
For the rest of the movie, the Italians and Germans speak in accented English.
Heh. I’m perfectly capable of dropping into strong local dialect that would be incomprehensible (to start with anyway) to any native English speaker from outwith the British Isles, and difficult for loads of folk from there too. Many British and Irish people can. I have trouble with an Aberdonian in full flow, and I’m only 100 miles away from Aberdeen.
That’s been my experience too. Some Scandinavian high school and college courses are even taught in English because there are tons of textbooks that have never been translated into Swedish/Danish/Norwegian. In Gothenburg I did meet a few people whose English was quite basic - shop assistants, mainly - but that’s rare.
West Germans still have better English than East Germans, because East Germans who grew up in the Soviet era would have learnt Russian at school rather than English. If you took ten random Germans you’d probably find one who was advanced (Common European Framework level C1), one who could pretty much only say hello and how are you (working towards level A1), five who could order food and have really simple conversations (level A2) and the rest would have conversational English but still make lots of mistakes (levels B1 and B2). I went to university in Berlin in the nineties and the majority of the students there spoke very little English.
People in Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy are slightly more proficient than that on average, espcially in the big touristy areas, or obvious reasons. France is worse than Germany, which really surprised me; I’m told the English teaching at schools there is pretty bad.
I remember a comedian talking about his time in England during the war - he came across a crowd of people standing around someone and asked what happened. One replied “fallah fallah fallarie…” Everyone he asked gave the same answer. “Do you know,” he said, “it took me half an hour to find out some guy had fallen out of a truck!”
I lived in Italy for many years and interacted with a great many Scandinavians during a time in Saudi Arabia. Many young Italians take English in school but tend to be hesitant to speak it; fears of wrong words, shyness, and such - much like my Italian. After a few wines, grappa, and lemoncello; our cross-language skills improved markedly. The older generation and business people in Northern Italy which was an American sector after WWII seemed the most fluent. English seems to be the international business language. The Scandinavians in Saudi Arabia all were fluent in English. Their explanation, besides the business angle, was that, “Not much to do on those long nights except watch TV and most of the programming was in English – so”.
As I mentioned, it makes a difference who you talked to. I never met a German engineer who didn’t speak perfect English. On the other hand, I never met a German waiter who spoke more than a few words.
The old joke was that when putting together the European Union, the Germans refused to speak French and the French refused to speak German, so they both settled on English for a lot of EU business…
In my experience, that is generally true of Germany (although I am sure there are a great many waiters who speak good English), but not in the Netherlands, Sweden, or Finland. In those countries most people speak excellent English, many with near-native fluency.
As was noted by others, some countries have dubbing (France, Germany) where others have subtitling (Netherlands, Sweden). People in the latter countries tend to speak English very well.
As people have mentioned it varies from country to country, but on the whole the English in Western Europe is good, they speak English much better than British people speak other languages.
In the Netherlands and Scandinavia, the English is near-perfect. The first time I was in Amsterdam I walked into a shop and asked the guy behind the counter if he spoke English. He replied, in fluent English, “You never need to ask that question, everyone speaks it here!”. In Belgium I got the impression that everyone spoke very good English as well, partly because there’s 3 different national languages there so English is a useful universal.
In France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Greece it’s a bit different - schoolchildren study a lot of English from a very young age, so they speak it much better than we in England speak French, German, etc. And yes, kids there tend to self-consciously try to learn it because it’s so useful. I remember going to France on a French exchange and my exchange partner wanted to talk in English the whole time because he was keen to learn it. But sometimes the language does become a problem in those countries: you do encounter people that speak no more than a few words of English, and if you only speak a few words of French or Spanish, it’s tricky. The French in particular are very proud of their language (a great video of rugby player Sebastien Chabal refusing to answer a question in English) and sometimes waiters will refuse to speak English even though they can - they’ll make you struggle through the French instead.
Took me a minute to parse that, but yes, that’s the sort of thing I meant.