I would love to see the USA’s test results on this chart.
This would really be more fun if UK were included in the list because you already know it wouldn’t be on top lol
The French refuse to learn English out of spite, not ability. Infact I wouldn’t put it past a Frenchman to be completely fluent in English but when asked say they don’t understand a word, just because they despise the British so much.
“You don’t frighten us, English pig-dog! Go and boil your bottoms, son of a silly person. I blow my nose on you”
“you empty-headed animal, food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”
Fetchez la vache!
The Netherlands can pick up UK TV broadcasts, they watch English TV from childhood
Greece is high and it’s not a surprise. We teach English in school + kids do lessons after school.
another one for !mapswithoutnz@lemmy.nz smh my head
I hate maps of Europe that don’t include new Zealand. It really galls me.
lol, i only skimmed it and actually didn’t notice it’s limited to Europe.
(my attempted joke was meant to imply something about kiwi accents making them not a part of the anglosphere)
It’s weird that both France and Germany are as low down the list as they are, since English is a Germanic language with an absolute fuckton of words rooted from French.
Well, not too long ago there was a part of Germany where people learned Russian instead of English. The French just hate English I guess.
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Whenever a few Europeans from different countries come together, there’s a joke that inevitably gets told:
Someone who speaks many languages is multilingual. Someone who speaks two languages is bilingual. Someone who speaks one language is English.
That’s what happens when your language becomes popular enough to become the lingua franca. It would be the same for any other language.
It’s hard, but true.
So the U.S didn’t even make it on this list ?
Perhaps more striking, the UK is not on the list.
It’s European English skills, read the title!
Don’t be salty. We English invented the damn thing and, listening to some of us talk, I doubt we’d score near the top either.
You guys have your own English dialect, way more advanced than the rest of the world IMO.
Seriously where is USA on the list anyone got details on where we rank?
Do you see any non-european countries on the list? Why should the US be there?
Fake news. Everyone in France speaks English when English speakers aren’t around. They only speak French out of spite.
French only speak “English”, not English…
Everyone in France speaks English the moment an English speaker tries to speak French.
My French sucks. I would intentionally butcher French just so they’d roll their eyes and start speaking English.
That checks out for Quebec as well.
I look at this and I think you know, not everything needs to be a bar chart… this is different, it’s creative, but then again, it would be better as a bar chart.
It would be better as a map.
Yes, you may be right, given how there seems to be some geographic patterns in the level of fluency. A map would show these better. A bar chart would be better for making visible actual absolute differences in scores. But yeah, a map would be good, I agree.
Map with colour gradient is how I would do it.
And maybe a bar graph along the bottom ordered greatest to smallest.
dataisugly
Where does the UK and Eire come on this?
It was skewed off the bottom of the scale by scouse.
Yeah the obvious joke is “United Kingdom: DNF”
Wow, France being lower than everyone else but Turkey is wild.
It’s also why Belgium is relatively low compared to the Netherlands.
I’m sure that in Flanders the English proficiency is on par with the Netherlands, and certainly better than in Germany, but the French speaking parts pull the average down.
I think part of the reason is that francophone regions overdub all media in French, so when growing up, children never consume media in any other language than French, except maybe some music. You could literally watch French TV for an entire day and not hear a single word in another language than French.
France has a law (Toubon Law) that mandates the use of the French language in official government publications, in all advertisements, in all workplaces, in commercial contracts, in some other commercial communication contexts, in all government-financed schools, and some other contexts.
So it’s quite restricted for french people to come in contact with English language in the daily life.
No, it isn’t. The French are so asshole about languages that are not French, it is amazing.
The French teachers at our kid’s school had serious penis envy because English is the first tier foreign language here, while French is only a second tier one.
We had a French teacher who wanted to fail our son, claiming that “French is the subject that shows if you are actually smart enough for advanced schooling” - my son had the equivalent of A to A+ in all subjects but sport, arts, and French. His English teachers considered him “native speaker level”, so it was not an issue of having problems with foreign languages. But obviously all this had nothing to do with the crappy teaching methods they used that made even French native speaker students fail…
It feels like they tanked the test out of spite. I’m curious about the methodology of the study, but France has far too much tourism to believe this without seeing the underlying data.
?? Japan has a lot of tourism and you’d be hard pressed to find a Japanese person that can speak English proficiently
Do you think that someone should believe a graphic on the internet without verifying the information from a reputable source?
No but the amount of tourism a country gets does not correlate to the English fluency of the average citizen of that country.
shrug
This is why this completely unsupported graphic on the internet seems unreliable to me. If you want to quibble about WHY one shouldn’t believe a completely unsupported graphic on the internet…okay.
I mean have you ever been a tourist in France? I went to Paris last year and I would have been lost without google translate. The french expect even the tourists to just learn their language.
It’s kinda sick that they label everything in French to make it easy to learn the language. I visit France and Nederland as often as I can, and to be fair, even the Dutch don’t label everything in English; the people just speak it super well.
As a German, I can read a lot of Dutch writing. Some words are seriously funny, and the accent is cute, but I usually get the gist. If not, I can always ask in English (in the western parts) or German (in the eastern parts). I can attest that the Dutch are seriously good with English.
I think that most of this is due to TV and cinema, as everything foreign is English with Dutch subtitles, except maybe for the children’s TV.
