When my passport was stolen in Paris on a weekend night I went to the British embassy. It was shut, so I tried to ask the guy on the intercom where else I could go for help. He didn’t/wouldn’t speak English. Not a word. Yup, the guy working at the British embassy didn’t speak English. When I went back to get an emergency passport the doorstaff didn’t/wouldn’t speak English either, at least not enough to understand ‘which queue do British citizens join?’ Course, you could blame that on the embassy’s crappy hiring practices.
I have to second this. I had a similar thread about how come Scandanavians and Dutch seem to speak English so well. The consensus was, small populations and therefore they learn to read English to have access to more books, music and movies.
It sure has been my experience that the best speakers of English are the Dutch and Scandinavians. And the worst are the French and Belgians. I think the Belgians tend to learn French or Dutch as a second language first (depending on their mother tongue)
a5 years ago we had a German exchange student living with us. He had a accent. He made a return visit two years later and on that visit almost no accent.
In my experience the first statement is true. Proffesionals all spoke excellent English.
However the second statement varies quite a bit. In Frankfurt (Rhein) there are huge US military bases nearby, and pretty much everyone can speak darn good English (waiters, imbiss attendants, you name it). In fact in most of the former west part of Germany, except for the elderly, most people can speak English but many are self-concious about it and hesitant to do so, while others are indignant about doing it and avoid doing so.
Up the Rhein and in the Rhur valley, it became less common for non-professionals to speak English, but certainly it was not uncommon. Sure, the donut lady at the train station in Essen didn’t speak English, and the clerk at McDonalds required that you ordered in German, but the ticket sales people, the policemen, hotel clerks, waiters, etc still spoke pretty good English.
One problem with waiters is that some of them are foreigners trying to learn German themselves - and English may not be in their skill set.
In the former East part of the country, you may be out of luck unless you speak German.
OK I’ll give you my tuppence worth. This is initially anecdotal but you’ll find some facts towards the end. To set the scene a bit I’ve spent the last 15 or so years teaching English to business people in Poland, Estonia, Italy, Germany, Spain (Catalonia) & France - I’ve also taught Dutch, Finnish & Portuguese people doing language courses in the UK.
First impressions are very important, human nature dictates that we tend to judge language proficiency by how much work we have to do to understand the other person and, like it or not, speakers of some languages will find it easier to reproduce the sounds of English than others. I find the Dutch accent very recognisable but it is closer to a native speaker accent than say Italian-accented English so we might tend to assume that a Dutch speaker is “better” at English just from that first impression. (In contrast I had a much harder time understanding a Spanish-speaking waitress in the Bay area than my Californian cousins who were “tuned in”.)
A generalisation would be that people from northern Europe have a better level of English (and are perhaps more willing to give it a go) than those from the south (I’m including France in the south) then within any given country there would be more English spoken in urban centres and tourist areas. I get the impression that the situation is changing. 15 years ago English was far from widely spoken in the former Communist Bloc (as stated above, a good level was more common in the former West Germany than East Germany) but now your average teenager from Estonia is probably happier speaking English than your average French teenager. Similarly a recent holiday to Portugal revealed that French was more useful for dealing with people over the age of forty whereas the twenty-somethings were happier in English. In Croatia in 2002 I found I was using a mix of German & Polish (neither of which I really speak) as often as English while a French friend who went there last summer said “everyone spoke English”.
Now onto some “harder” facts. Current policy across the EU is to get kids leaving school with much better levels of English than their parents. Schools are staring to use The Common European Framework to set target levels. For example in France the aim is to get everyone to level B1 by the end of “compulsory schooling” and B2 as a target for those taking the baccalauréat. There are obviously intermediate targets such as A2 by age 15 etc. It’s my understanding that other countries have similar targets but I’m not sure if they are exactly the same. France is not on target to reach the desired level within the time available (part of the problem is lack of teachers). Italy is on track with her targets as I think are Poland and Germany. (If you’re interested I could probably lay my hands on more solid stats back at work on Monday)
The OP asked about younger people - in France and southern Europe I’d say the majority of current business people now have had a lot of post school English language training or have picked things up on the job - I’d say 60-70% of my learners use their English with other non-native speakers. Some companies use language proficiency as a factor in promotion/recruitment (a score of 750 on the TOEIC test for management positions) so a lot of managers find themselves under pressure to improve their English. Their kids have had a lot more exposure to English language/American led media and perhaps have fewer complexes about their abilities - parents seem to consider knowledge of English as important a life skill as driving or using a computer. As far as resources are concerned there are myriad free websites designed to help people learn English (the BBC* for example), technology can now offer you a choice of language to watch a TV show or film in and DVDs allow people to watch in English with the subtitles of their choice and English language training is thriving (the number of people taking the CELTA after having been made redundant elsewhere bears witness to this).
All that said, IME the following two things are more important to an individual’s language proficiency than their language background or any national policy : motivation & luck.
Motivation - this could be wanting to download and watch Heroes months before it will be aired in your country; going on a holiday to the States; understanding the lyrics of your favourite band. Not to mention the more serious stuff like better employment opportunities or politics - many of my learners in Barcelona preferred using English to Spanish OTOH my French learners generally resent being “forced” to use it and people from the Netherlands just assume that no one is going to try to speak their language.
Luck - how good your teacher was at school; how often do you came into contact with people who didn’t speak your language (friends of parents, tourists, summer camps, cross border trips etc.); are Eng. Lang. films dubbed or subtitles ?; how easy you find learning languages; personality; does your employer work internationally ? how many languages you already speak, attitude to your national language etc.
*Incidentally the French government has negotiated the use of BBC programmes in schools
Is it really? The Dutch language has guttural sounds and inflections which are unheard of in English. I think Dutch people are judged to be better at English, on average, than Italians because they are, not because we recognize their accents more easily.
I don’t understand your point - you’re disagreeing with the generalization that northern Europeans speak better English than the rest of Europe, on the grounds that Estonian teenagers speak better English than French ones, and because Portuguese teenagers are starting to use English as a second language whereas elder Portuguese people use French? Both of those things might be true, but they say nothing about whether the Dutch and Scandinavians speak better English than the rest of Europe. And as far as Croatia goes, I think your point is very anecdotal - I was in Crotia a few years ago and while most people spoke a little bit of English, they were leagues behind the Dutch or the Swedish. And the Communist bloc is still a long way behind northern Europe: I found a lot of Hungarians, for instance, don’t speak a word of English. That never seems to happen in the Netherlands.
I suspect a lot of these anecdotes are HIGHLY skewed by our own experiences. You travel to Dubrovnik, Croatia, and everyone speaks English? Not surprising - Dubrovnik is a tourist destination. I seriously doubt you would find the same result in a small town tourists don’t visit. If you visit Sofia, you will probably come away with the impression that older Bulgarians don’t speak English at all, but many younger ones do. In actuality, this is the case only in larger cities. I was literally the only English-speaker in my town in rural Bulgaria in 2006-2008, but when I went to Sofia, I would occasionally have people address me in English before I could even open my mouth.
One of my best friends is French, from a rural part of Normandy. She took English in school, but how often did she use it? Not too often, and she freely admits that her English was terrible when she first came to the US to do a year abroad as an undergrad. (Her English is excellent now; she scored higher on the verbal section of the GRE than her native-speaker boyfriend.) I’m sure if she had grown up in Paris, where she would have dealt with tourists, her English would have been better.
Northern Europeans are better at English, I suspect, in part because their languages (except Finnish) are more similar to English than Southern European languages, and in part because their education system emphasizes studying English. They tend to speak languages that are very localized - very few non-Dutch people speak Dutch, and the Netherlands is very small, so if a Dutch person wants to do pretty much anything involving traveling more than a few hundred kilometers or dealing with people from farther away than a few hundred kilometers, s/he’d better learn another language. OTOH, French and Spanish, for instance, are world languages, and their countries are much larger.
Here in France, it really varies a lot from one guy to the next.
Teenagers are required to take up a foreign language at age 11, a second one at age 13, and both will be taught to them until they’re 18. For obvious reason, most kids take English as the first, followed by either Spanish, German or Russian.
However, German 1st English 2nd is also popular, because German is “harder”, therefore it has a good academic reputation, and the better students tend to flock to it. Thus, if you take German 1st, you have a higher chance of landing in a better class, with fewer slackers, troublemakers etc… The end result of this curious situation is that the better students tend to have weaker English. True elitists will go German/Russian :).
That said, I’m afraid the English spoken at the end of those 6/8 years is far from fluent in the majority of cases, and the accent seems very hard to lose, esp. to those who haven’t the means to go on trips abroad to further their skills. Most of us will be able to get by, understand simple texts such as the news, ask where the loo is or what time the train leaves Waterloo station, but not to discuss philosophy.
From the end of high school onwards, it really depends on which higher education path the students take, although most of them will either have a token English class or at least an optional course. But my experience there is that, because of the wide disparity in English skills of the students (who may be former English 1st language, or English 2nd language, or no English at all), those classes are essentially worthless - lots of “mai tehleur iz reesh” students dragging everybody down to their level. It goes further downhill for people who don’t use English in their daily lives, and thus progressively lose what they learned in high school.
Which is fine by me - as an English-to-French translator, my livelyhood pretty much depends on my fellow Frenchmen barely speaking English 
As I warned at the start of my post.
Not my anecdote - this was the impression of a French person.
I was illustrating that the situation can change quite rapidly not to extrapolate on the overall level of English fluency in Croatia. Earlier in my post I did say “then within any given country there would be more English spoken in urban centres and tourist areas.”
I don’t think she would have dealt much with tourists growing up in Paris (unless she worked in a restaurant or bar in one of the more tourist areas) however she would probably have had freer access to films in their original version and English language books or magazines. She basically illustrates some of the elements of “luck” I mentioned.
I fully agree with the first part of this paragraph, your lest sentence less so but I think we’d be moving further away from the OP if we got into that.
Yes, like most languages, Dutch does have unique sounds however there are a lot of overlaps too (and just think of the variety of English accents there are amongst native speakers it’s kinda hard to say a single sound doesn’t occur in spoken English somewhere). In any case, I did not mean this example to refer to the Italian people versus the Dutch people in general, rather I wanted to illustrate that if your average Native Speaker Brit heard a Dutch person say something in English then an Italian person say the same thing with the same number of grammatical and lexical errors the perception would likely be that the Italian spoke worse English simply because of the extra effort required to decode any pronunciation issues.
Yes, that’s my fault, I wasn’t clear enough, I was actually agreeing with the generalisation but then (as requested by the OP “I am interested in first person experiences”) gave some illustrations of the way things are starting to change. Nowhere, at least the way I intended my post to be read, did I suggest that anyone could rival the Dutch or the Scandinavians for widespread English proficiency. The OP asked about “high school and college students” hence my referring to generational differences in attitude and exposure to English. (And once again when I was in Croatia I found English far from useful - the “Everyone speaks English” was French person.)
Missed the edit window sorry. Kyla maybe I’m being over sensitive but the OP did ask for “first person experiences” as well as “statistical tidbits”. You know, my post didn’t actually mention Dubrovnik - as it happens I did go there but spent more time in Zagreb & Split. As an off-season lone traveller I had quite a lot of interaction with ticket sellers, left luggage staff, tourist office staff, people in shops & on the ferry, overnight bus, overnight train … I wasn’t really in a “tourist bubble”. Nor was the French friend I mentioned based in Dubrovnik, IIRC she was in the north near Pula - touristy perhaps but your reaction does remind us how easily (false) assumptions can be made.
Hey Kobal2 - have a look at this site, you may be able to pick up some hours helping France turn the language corner 
Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by bringing up Dubrovnik. I only mentioned it as a hypothetical of a touristy place where people outside of the area would be significantly less likely to come into contact with tourists. I’ve never actually been to Croatia (well, I technically have, but it doesn’t really count), so it’s hard for me to say. I have spent a lot of time in other Balkan countries, though, so I’m basing my impression on that.
In my experience, I find that the English skills of many of my European colleagues is wonderful. Belgium and the Netherlands, people understand the English language is wonderful, and I did not change my way of speaking when we talk about it, even if the grammar is not perfect. Hungary, a few Englishmen, but those who do not speak so beautifully. Every person I know, speaks in Scandinavia (except Finland), fluent English in a shocking. In France, a very few exceptions, does not speak in Germany, Italy and Spain, which is English. It has never been an unsolvable problem for my lack of ability in the language of the above-mentioned countries.
Dubrovnik is probably not as good as you’d expect. I’ve been there twice, once in '96 and once in '02 and I’d say you’re probably slightly better off knowing German (overall. With the younger crowd, English would be my choice–I found this to hold true throughout most of Slavic Europe and Hungary). Most of the restaurants and tourist places have some English knowledge, but it’s not fluency. But it may have gotten better since then. But your point is well-taken.
The best, by far, is the Netherlands. I was amazed at how good Dutch English is. They probably speak better English than native English speakers. I’m usually very apologetic when I don’t speak the native language, but in the Netherlands, I very quickly just came to assume everybody spoke English, something I’ve never done in any other non-English speaking country. And I don’t remember ever running across a Dutch native who did not speak English.
My experiences with Germany were quite different than many of the ones expressed here. In the early 2000s, I used to play with a touring indie rock band and we played a good number of shows throughout Germany, and I found the level of English proficiency among teenagers to 20-somethings to be at worst, adequate but, more often than not, pretty much fluent. And this was true in Dresden, Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Erfurt, Freiburg, Chemnitz, Magdeburg, etc… Perhaps the older set weren’t as good, but high-school and college-aged students I would actually expect a majority to speak passable English.
When I was in Norway for a NATO exercise we were stationed around Narvik for three weeks. We had a few days of liberty in town and everyone seemed to speak English, even the older generation. I was really surprised by that. Also everybody from the Belgian army spoke perfect English.
It was just a strange experience since it was my first time overseas and the people there spoke better English than most of the people I grew up with in redneckville. 
Often a foreign speaker is a more effective teacher of a foreign language, having had to go through the conscious effort of mastering its peculiarities. When I had my year in Germany, we first spent six weeks in intensive German classes. We had native speakers for the conversational practice sessions, but the grammar sections were all taught by non-native speakers.
In my European visits I deal with a lot of college aged people. I’ve never had a situation where we could not work out a transaction due to language barrier. It has hardly been uncommon for me to run into non-English speakers. I am not proficient in any language besides English but know enough key words in multiple languages to do business.
In Europe I find even if they don’t speak English, they have a skill set to improvise with other languages or gestures for us to do business.
i have taught english in Spain for the past 25 years. the level is pretty poor. first of all they dub all foreign media, films and tv series. ergo young children never hear the sounds until fully developed. the “english” teachers in the schools are all Spanish nationality with very low levels themselves. it is really a case of the blind leading the blind and the mistakes of the fathers being imprinted on the sons…
What can I say, bardos, if the teachers they’ve had are as good at English grammar and spelling as you are, no wonder their English is bad. I also love the generalizations and the disconnect with things like the popularity of Dora, “bilingual” toddler toys, etc.