I’m curious which countries in the world have the best foreign language programs. I can’t ask which countries have the highest percentage of multilingual citizens, because most everyone I know from a region that has been populated for several thousand years speaks a regional language, an official langauge, and English. So, what I want to know is what countries have the best performing and most efficient integrated language education systems. That’s to say, a high percentage of students study a foreign language, and graduate with a proficient knowledge of that langauge.
That knocks out the US, where many people might speak more than one langauge, but only 44 percent of high school students even study a foreign language, and nearly 80 percent of the high schools that have a foreign langauge program say that their purpose in foreign language instruction is not proficiency, rather a vague understanding of the langauge (these delightful statistics and more here ).
My guess is that certain (or all) Scandinavian countries are up there, but I know that this is a major initiative in Asian countries as well.
If English counts, then India might be in the running. Almost all middle-class students in India go to schools where the medium of instruction is English. But I suspect that this isn’t what you meant.
English counts, for me, if it’s a second language. I say “for me” because when a good Swedish friend of mine and I were studying French together, one time she said, “It’s so incredible to be speaking a second language!”
Russia starts teaching foreign languages in a lot of elementary schools. By the time pupils graduate, many have 11 years of language study under their belt. In addition to English, German and French are common and increasingly Chinese.
> I can’t ask which countries have the highest percentage of multilingual citizens,
> because most everyone I know from a region that has been populated for
> several thousand years speaks a regional language, an official langauge, and
> English.
You know, when you make statements like this, it would really help if you mentioned where you live. Otherwise, this just confuses the rest of us. But in answer to your question, it might be the Scandanavian countries or the Netherlands. I recall a Dutch man saying that everyone graduating from high school knew English, French, and German.
From my limited and subjective European perspective surely the Dutch must be up with the Scandinavians at least - on top of English the number of people who speak German (with a cuuute accent ) is really embarassing to us Germans (embarassing because we don’t reciprocate much, preferring French as a second foreign language).
In Germany there is a general move to start English (in border areas, French) in 1st or 3rd grade and the second foreign language (in the higher, Gymnasium track) in 5th grade, as opposed to 5th grade and 7th grade, respectively, some decades ago. [with the other tracks it’s another story entirely - inner-city schools struggle with teaching proper German.] I suspect most other European countries are changing their systems in that direction. Bilingual kindergartens (age 3-6) are few and experimental only at present (my brother and his wife plan on sending my niece to one when she turns 3).
To echo what my neighbour in the south, tschild, says - Holland. I’ve yet to meet someone from Holland who doesn’t feel comfortable with English, German and French (in varying degrees, of course). Swedish, Danish and Norwegian people also learn 2nd and 3rd languages, starting with (mandatory) English at 9 (some private schools offer it earlier) and 3rd language at 12 (most popular is Spanish, but German and French is in there too).
Generally, I would say that the smaller the country and language is, the bigger need there is to learn a forreign language. There’s no point in translating some textbooks from English to Swedish för university use, amounting to maybe 500 or a thousand copies. Translating from English to Spanish or French makes a lot more sense.
Also, the Scandinavian countries and Holland use subtitles for forreign films and tv. Most other countries dub (this has to do with literacy rates in the early 20th century), so we hear the big languages from early childhood.
I have a few Belgian friends, and all of them are very comfortable with Dutch, German, French and English. I did ask them one of them about it, and she said that this was normal.
Granted, my statement was badly worded, but it doesn’t matter where I’m from. I was talking about people from North Africa, Asia, and Europe. Something we have very little of in the states are local or regional langauges.
I actually know of very few (which means very little, since I’ve never looked). In the South, we have geechee/gullah, but I don’t even know if that qualifies as something along the same lines as Basque, Cantonese, or Kabyle.
I was so pleasantly surprised when I came to Sweden and I could hear Homer Simpson’s real voice again, and not this French imposter I *have *to listen to every night.
Every Swiss person I’ve met speaks English, French, German, Swiss-German, and Italian. Many speak Spanish too.
Scandinavians learn English and German, but if you know German, and you know English, you can probably muddle through any of the norski tongues already.
My own experience (see location field above) confirms most of this, at least as far as English competence goes. I have met some Dutch people whose English wasn’t very good, but except for a few people in rural areas I’ve encountered nobody whose English wasn’t at the least much better than my Dutch!
The fact that it’s a quite smallish country that is nonetheless very economically active internationally, with a language that pretty much nobody else speaks, is a big driving force towards second-language competence. And getting lots of English-language media (England itself is just a long spit away across the North Sea, after all) also helps.
My colleagues at the university, though, complain that today’s young people get a much less solid grounding in French and German, particularly German, than they used to. I don’t know how true that is, but most of the well-educated Dutch people over 45 that I’ve met seem to be absolutely quadrilingual, with perfect to extremely good fluency in Dutch, English, French, and German alike.
Maybe once it was, but no longer. IMHO, the movement to “save Gullah” is way too late; it hangs on as a museum curiosity. You might make an argument for Yiddish, though. (Not just in one location, but as an ethnic tongue spoken in the home.)
Anecdotal only, but Japan and Hong Kong seem to have pretty poor English programs. At least in Japan the issue is that they really seem to just teach vocabulary. So you’ll see them learning a list of words like “trebuchet”, "polymorphism’, and “caviar” but not be able to form a sentence, conjugate a verb, nor pronounce things where a native speaker can tell what they are saying.
Having seen it firsthand, I can say this is rather an understatement. I once sat through an “English class” in Japan where, I kid you not, there was not one word of English spoken. Everyone had English books and the teacher was explaining the meaning in Japanese (somewhat incorrectly, being a product of the same system). English is studied in Japan in the same way we study Latin in English-speaking countries… as a subject to be memorized, not a skill to be practiced.
) is really embarassing to us Germans (embarassing because we don’t reciprocate much, preferring French as a second foreign language).