English as a second language: Test results on the most fluent countries

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/04/english?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/whospeaksenglish

by JCB_K • 15 years ago

71 77 15 years ago

economist.com

JCB_K3• 15 years ago

There's a few more factors besides the ones in the article.

-Most of the languages high on the list are similar to English

-The countries don't dub movies. This has such a big impact. I learned most of my English from movies.

rsaarelm• 15 years ago

Finland is the odd one out in the language similarity thing. Scandinavian languages and Dutch are pretty close to English, but Finnish isn't even Indo-European.

xiaoma2• 15 years ago

Strictly speaking, in terms of grammar, Finnish is an Altaic language, like Korean and Japanese. However, in terms of vocabulary, culture and just about everything else, Finnish is closer to English. It has not just a great number of loan words (as Japanese does), but also cognates.

Possibly more importantly, Finland shares a common history and religious background with Europe. There are many, many idioms and ways of looking at things that stem from historical and religious influences. Grimm's fairy tales, for example, spread through Europe widely, but not through Asia or the middle East. On result is that while Chinese often has sayings with a similar meaning as English ones, their literal meanings are very different. In European languages, on the other hand, the sayings are often literal translations.

peritpatrio• 15 years ago

On another note regarding Finnish language:

The word-forms of the Finnish noun kauppa 'shop' (N=2,253), generated automatically by Fred Karlsson

http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~fkarlsso/genkau2.html

cemregr2• 15 years ago

As a foreigner who went to high school in Finland for a year, I'd say their English skills weren't that good. They probably do well in standardized tests because their education is geared towards tests and perfect grammar, not actual communication skills.

My friends in high school would attempt to construct perfect sentences in their head before speaking a word, which made them poor conversationalists.

pwim• 15 years ago

Japan doesn't normally dub movies, but it doesn't score well. On the other hand, it does have a strong domestic film industry, so perhaps that is part of the reason.

JCB_K3• 15 years ago

and Japanese isn't similar to English.

DrPhish• 15 years ago

From my experience, while feature films in theaters are often subtitled (and when dubbed, are shown either subbed or dubbed on alternate screenings), most everything broadcast on Japanese TV has been dubbed into Japanese. Granted, anything that has been dubbed is almost always broadcast with both audio streams present. However, the default is always Japanese audio, so there would have to be a conscious effort to watch a show in English. I believe between the high cost of movies in Japan and the almost universal OTA TV penetration that most foreign content in Japan is consumed dubbed, as opposed to subtitled. Please correct me if I am wrong.

drpgq• 15 years ago

Yes, I noticed as a Canadian living in Germany, that the Germans seemed to dub almost anything, even some pretty small indie films.

RuadhanMc4• 15 years ago

Being an English speaker who has moved to Sweden and has completed the SFI course -- Swedish For Immigrants -- I can tell you it was a lot easier for the English, French, German, etc, speakers to learn Swedish than it was for the Arabic, Chinese, etc, speakers. It is a bit of a no-brainer I guess.

The best thing about the Scandinavians is that they not only speak fantastic English, but they also adopt the accent of the English speaking country that they've spent the most time in or watched the most TV from.

Compare that to the French, Italian, etc, who can learn English very well but who never seem able (or willing) to shake the accent.

berntb2• 15 years ago

This is probably a question of phonemes; Swedish has most of other language's strange sounds. :-)

(A phoneme Swedish lacks is the "th" of "think", that was a problem to learn.)

pbhjpbhj2• 15 years ago

>they also adopt the accent of the English speaking country that they've spent the most time in or watched the most TV from

If it's Britain, which accent ...

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3ldyx_comedy-tour-of-briti...

I think his North Yorkshire and Blackburn are a bit off, others are a bit caricatured but generally he has them pretty well.

"Alright my booties?"

maukdaddy• 15 years ago

Sorry to pollute the thread, but I can't find your email address. Can you email me at the address in my profile?

riffraff4• 15 years ago

Also: the languages of the top 5 countries have a ridiculously small speaking population, which means there are more chances to come across untranslated sources of any kind, not only movies.

I'd say it's a generic trait of niche populations, that they gain better knowledge of languages in which information sources are available.

For example, I've consistently noticed programmers speak a better english than architects, and people who use some $RANDOM_NICHE_PLATFORM speak a better english than people who use $REALLY_POPULAR_PLATFORM, due to being forced to use english references.

anghyflawn3• 15 years ago

>the languages of the top 5 countries have a ridiculously small speaking population

Dutch has over twenty million native speakers, Swedish has ten million. That is not ridiculously small. Even Norwegian's four and a half million is, on a global scale, very respectable. To say nothing of the fact that the number of "translated sources" is not a function of the number of speakers, but of the wealth of the country and the spread of written culture (which is very high in all of these cases).

leon_• 15 years ago

I can guess why the Dutch are better english speakers than we here in Germany. In the Netherlands movies and tv-shows are not dubbed - only subtitled. In Germany everything is dubbed.

Since I decided to watch movies and shows in english my (actively spoken) english improved (reading and understanding was never a problem). It's not perfect but it's far better than the english I was speaking after I left school.

Blame the TV :)

antirez• 15 years ago

Yep, same reason strongly applies to Italy too. (also Italian dubbers are among the best in the world, Italian versions of popular US shows won prizes for the best dubbed edition, so from time to time I even happen to see original versions thinking I enjoyed more the Italian one).

I tried to put my son in front of a TV with just English things, but it is hard for a 10 years old to accept to understand just one word from time to time in a moment that should be about relax (cartoons time).

hessenwolf• 15 years ago

No kidding: As a result of the quality of Italian dubbers, Italians do not see anything unusual in Keanu Reeves acting skills. I brought this up in conversation multiple times a few weeks ago in Italy near Bologna. They think he can act.

fkcek• 15 years ago

Another problem of Italy is how English is taught. In 12 years I never had to speak a single word of English or write something longer than 80 words. Most of my peers (21 y/o) can't understand the dialogues in non-dubbed videogames. Your son will learn more English from tv than from school

wazoox• 15 years ago

> Italian dubbers are among the best in the world

It's well known that during the Italian cinema golden age in the 60s and 70s, the general habit was to entirely dub sound in post-production, for some reason. So all movies were dubbed, Italian and foreign alike :)

dspillett• 15 years ago

A bit of an off-topic tangent: is it true that Arnold Schwarzenegger once asked if he could dub his own part in a film for the German release, as he wasn't happy with the dubbing done for a previous picture, but was rejected due to his accent?

The story goes that his accent is from a part of Austria that is seen as rural so to many, particularly in urban parts of Germany, he'd "sound like a farmer" which wouldn't be right for the part - implying that his accent suffers from a stereotype like that associated with strong west country accents in England.

I heard that "fact" some time ago, and I dearly want it to be true!

compay2• 15 years ago

Argentina was #16 overall and #1 in Latin America. As an American living in Argentina I think that sounds about right. Knowledge of English is definitely more widespread here than in other countries in Latin America that I'm familiar with, particularly in Buenos Aires.

GFischer• 15 years ago

Uruguay did not have enough data to be listed, but the years I took the Cambridge and Oxford language tests (FCE, Proficiency, etc.), Uruguayans were in the top spots (the #1 overall got a scholarship to Oxford, and she was Uruguayan).

Of course, the demographics very much the same as Argentina's so it wouldn't be a big difference (we're not an Argentinian province by political accident and meddling by Britain - not that we mind :) ).

forinti• 15 years ago

Uruguay is a great little country. In the Education Index, it's in a very nice neighbourhood:

30) United Kingdom 0.957, 31) Uruguay 0.955, 32) Germany 0.954, 33) Poland 0.952, 34) Japan 0.949...

Uruguayan French teachers are excellent too.

compay2• 15 years ago

I believe it. I know quite a few developers from there and aside from being quite talented at what they do, their English is excellent. But having spent little more than a weekend in the country I didn't want to assume they were a representative sample. :)

Tharkun• 15 years ago

The results are pretty much what you'd expect, really. English proficiency is largely a cultural given. Movie dubbing and such definitely plays a big part of this, as language is largely assimilated by listening to it. If you're taught English by a French person and you never hear anyone else speak English, well, you're going to be a lot worse at English than someone with a comparable education who has more access to spoken English.

It's a shame that the study only shows results per country, and not per language region in countries. For instance in Belgium there are three language regions -- Dutch, French and German -- and I'm willing to bet that the results in each region are much closer to those of Holland/France/Germany than this meaningless average.

The reason why English is rather hard for speakers of Asian languages should be pretty obvious: there is such a big difference in sounds. The sounds used in English are much closer to those used in Spanish than Japanese, even though English and Spanish are already miles apart..

riffraff4• 15 years ago

are you sure about the sound thingy?

Italian and spanish sounds seem pretty much identical to the japanese (e.g. five vowels should be enough for everyone), while english is a utter mess (schwab, long and short vowels, th*,r etc). Possibly you are conflating under "asian" languages a bit too much.

cletus2• 15 years ago

> The reason why English is rather hard for speakers of Asian languages should be pretty obvious: there is such a big difference in sounds.

I disagree. The problem is the grammar. Asian languages are rather "grammar-less" (not that such a thing is technically possible), at least compared to Indo-European languages.

English tenses in particular are hard for even continental Europeans to understand. I learnt German for awhile and Germans just struggle with English tenses. There are only a handful in Germans and many in English.

While English grammar is far more streamlined and less brittle than continental European languages (ie we have almost no case, no gender of nouns except for people, no agreement of adjectives and a word order that front-loads the verb in the sentence) native Asian language speakers still struggle with plurals, tense and the informal way we use tone (compared to the tonal languages).

The phenomes used in each language seem like the least important part.

Lastly, it's worth pointing out that there is as much variety in Asian languages as Indo-European languages. Arguably more since several language families span Asia.

derleth• 15 years ago

> Asian languages are rather "grammar-less" (not that such a thing is technically possible), at least compared to Indo-European languages.

Interesting you should say this, given that Mandarin (for example) has nearly the same grammar as English as far as word order and lack of a case system goes: Mandarin words, unlike words in French and German, aren't changed based on their role in the sentence, and Mandarin words don't have grammatical gender. English happens to be radically unlike most Indo-European languages in precisely the ways that make it fairly similar to Mandarin.

> While English grammar is far more streamlined

All languages have the same amount of grammar, distributed differently. (It's like a waterbed: Push the lump down here and it springs up there.) English does more with word order and context than German, for example.

> The phenomes used in each language seem like the least important part.

Heh. Try saying that when you have to hear and reproduce a vowel sound that sounds like a warped tape, or a consonant that sounds like the speaker is rubbing gravel together in the back of his throat.

> Lastly, it's worth pointing out that there is as much variety in Asian languages as Indo-European languages.

And in Africa. And in the Americas. And so on.

askar_yu• 15 years ago

Very interesting. Evaluating the English skills based on tests is like evaluating programmers based on how well they do on programming contests (i.e ICPC). For example, if this test was given to high school students about to graduate, I would expect China to be in top.

jaysonelliot• 15 years ago

The full report describes their methodology as including (but not limited to) results from people who took an online test at ef.com - this is the test: http://www.ef.com/master/tests/

sivers• 15 years ago

Singapore wasn't in the study because English is Singapore's first language. (Article mistakenly says that the reason is because it's too small.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

Singapore has four official languages: Modern Standard Chinese, Standard Malay, Tamil, and English. The majority home language of most Singaporeans born around the time of independence was one or another southern Chinese language, with Hokkien being the most common (but perhaps not an absolute majority of the population). Also by no means all of the sizeable minority of Indo-Singaporeans were native speakers of Tamil at that time, but Tamil gained the designation as an official language.

The sole language of instruction in primary and secondary schools supported by public funds in Singapore since independence has been English, with most pupils studying one or more of the other national languages. Singapore shows the lie about excuses for poor educational progress in the United States. Many school officials in the United States whine about the diverse language backgrounds in some United States school districts, but nowhere in the United States do you have primary education being done with a population attending school in English but the MAJORITY of the population not speaking English at home, as was the case in Singapore just a generation ago.

I've heard some amusing stories from Singaporeans and from Malaysians of Chinese ethnicity about how to learn just enough Malay to pass school exams and then forget it. English is the language it is crucial to know in that part of the world.

bambax• 15 years ago

Jean-Louis Borloo, who at some point in time was rumored to be the next Prime Minister of France, just launched (today) a new political formation, called "Alliance Républicaine, Sociale et Ecologique".

It doesn't really mean anything, but it spells: ARSE.

It's going to be fun when he shows his business card to British journalists...?

If you don't believe it (I couldn't), see:

http://www.lecentrisme.com/2011/04/actualites-du-centre-jean...

rads• 15 years ago

"Okay, Lindsay, are you forgetting that I was a professional twice over - an analyst and a therapist. The world's first analrapist."

jarek2• 15 years ago

You better not hear what the acronym for the Children's Internet Protection Act means in a certain European language then...

ubershmekel• 15 years ago

Israel wasn't included. Anyhow here's a copy of the main graph:

    Rank, Country, EF EPI Score, Level
    1 Norway 69.09 Very High Proficiency
    2 Netherlands 67.93 Very High Proficiency 
    3 Denmark 66.58 Very High Proficiency 
    4 Sweden 66.26 Very High Proficiency 
    5 Finland 61.25 Very High Proficiency
    6 Austria 58.58 High Proficiency
    7 Belgium 57.23 High Proficiency 
    8 Germany 56.64 High Proficiency 
    9 Malaysia 55.54 High Proficiency 
    10 Poland 54.62 Moderate Proficiency
    11 Switzerland 54.60 Moderate Proficiency 
    12 Hong Kong 54.44 Moderate Proficiency 
    13 South Korea 54.19 Moderate Proficiency 
    14 Japan 54.17 Moderate Proficiency 
    15 Portugal 53.62 Moderate Proficiency 
    16 Argentina 53.49 Moderate Proficiency 
    17 France 53.16 Moderate Proficiency 
    18 Mexico 51.48 Moderate Proficiency 
    19 Czech Republic 51.31 Moderate Proficiency 
    20 Hungary 50.80 Moderate Proficiency 
    21 Slovakia 50.64 Moderate Proficiency 
    22 Costa Rica 49.15 Low Proficiency
    23 Italy 49.05 Low Proficiency 
    24 Spain 49.01 Low Proficiency 
    25 Taiwan 48.93 Low Proficiency 
    26 Saudi Arabia 48.05 Low Proficiency 
    27 Guatemala 47.80 Low Proficiency 
    28 El Salvador 47.65 Low Proficiency 
    29 China 47.62 Low Proficiency 
    30 India 47.35 Low Proficiency 
    31 Brazil 47.27 Low Proficiency 
    32 Russia 45.79 Low Proficiency 
    33 Dominican Republic 44.91 Very Low Proficiency
    34 Indonesia 44.78 Very Low Proficiency 
    35 Peru 44.71 Very Low Proficiency 
    36 Chile 44.63 Very Low Proficiency 
    37 Ecuador 44.54 Very Low Proficiency 
    38 Venezuela 44.43 Very Low Proficiency 
    39 Vietnam 44.32 Very Low Proficiency 
    40 Panama 43.62 Very Low Proficiency 
    41 Colombia 42.77 Very Low Proficiency 
    42 Thailand 39.41 Very Low Proficiency 
    43 Turkey 37.66 Very Low Proficiency 
    44 Kazakhstan 31.74 Very Low Proficiency

darklajid• 15 years ago

Just sad.

I currently move over to IL and would've loved to see their ranking. Everyone over here is fast to tell me that you can cope without hebrew easily, my anecdotal evidence is far different.

This dataset could've been an unbiased source of information.

bbgm• 15 years ago

I find it very hard to believe that China is ahead of India, even if it's a few percentage points, especially given that there are enough people in India for whom English is essentially a first language or a parallel first language.

kazuya• 15 years ago

Here is my take about Japan:

In Japan people learn English as a part of mandatory public education without targetting any practical use, and many companies mandate good exam score or certificate about English, even if they don't need English skills on the job.

This leaves Japanese in a strange parallel world of learning English, where the goal is scoring good and getting a nice job, not communicating with others.

Hence people without real incentive are forced to take globally standard English tests such as TOEFL or TOEIC, resulting in that low average score.

wilhelm2• 15 years ago

As one would expect, the top of the list is dominated by small, peripheral European nations. As a Norwegian, I'm painfully aware that both my country and my language is too small to matter to anyone else. If I wish to interact with people abroad, I will have to do so on their terms, in their language.

And I do have to interact with people aboard. If you have a national economy or a cultural ecosystem consisting of fifty or hundred million people – like France, Germany or Japan – there's rarely a real _need_ to talk to anyone on the outside. There are enough newspapers, books, movies and records being produced in Japan to satisfy the domestic market – and the imported stuff can be translated and adapted without adding too much to the cost for each consumer.

For a country and language with less than five million people – not so much. We produced a total of 20 movies last year, and the climate on this frozen rock made sure our crops yielded only half of the food we actually need. If we didn't talk to anyone else, we'd be bored and starving.

Which regional great power dominates our trade and cultural input has varied over time. Norway was in the Hanseatic League's sphere of influence from the 1300s, and German language and culture had the greatest influence for almost a millennium. The harbour area of my home town of Bergen is still named “the German Wharf”. And my great grandmother told the German soldiers approaching her in April 1940 to fuck off in perfect German.

During and after the war, the Anglo-american economic and cultural influence quickly surpassed the German. The Cold War brought us even closer to the US, despite the American culture being rather … incompatible with the Norwegian.

The stories are similar for most of the other small European countries. But how the English language influences the native tongue varies wildly from one country to the next. The differences are especially noticeable between Norway and Denmark.

Some more historical background first:

Norway is a very young nation-state. From 1380 to 1814, Norway was part of Denmark. From 1814 to 1905, Norway was in a personal union under the Swedish king. As of the 19th century, we didn't have our own written language. We spoke Norwegian, but wrote Danish. As Norwegian nationalism grew during the 1800s, a charming gentleman called Ivar Aasen set out to create a Norwegian written language. He traveled around the country, taking note of how people actually spoke. Dialects vary wildly between different parts of the realm (I haven't seen this much internal variation in any other country), but he did distill what he heard down to a set of grammar and vocabulary.

The adoption of Ivar Aasen's nynorsk (literally: New Norwegian), too, varied a lot from region to region. It was generally recieved well on the countryside. In the cities, the Norwegian upper classes had developed an amalgam dialect combining the original local tongue and Danish. They were greatly opposed to this uncivilized new language, and brought much of the urban working classes onto their team. So for the past 150 years, we've been been fighting, sometimes almost literally, about how to write. Today we have two official written languages – bokmål (literally: book language) and nynorsk. There was a stranded effort in the mid-1900s to unify them, but they have influenced each other a lot. Bokmål isn't very much like Danish anymore, and standard nynorsk is quite watered down.

The result of these struggles is that how a Norwegian speaks and writes is a significant part of his identity. The dialect shows which region you come from and which social class you belong to (or aspire to belong to), and each one comes with pride. Not chauvinism or jingoism, but genuine pride. I live in Oslo, but if I come home to Bergen and show signs of being influenced by the Oslo dialect, I will be ridiculed by friends and family. For real. (c:

Now, back to my point. The Danish language today is heavily influenced by English. The frequency of loan words is staggering. A number of English words have found their way into the Norwegian language too, but an order of magnitude less. I believe this is due to our history. The Danes were never colonized by anyone, and haven't spent much time philosophizing about how they speak or write. We have, and it shows.

(Other interesting tangents: Why have the Norwegian dialects diverged so much? Why can Norwegians understand Swedish but Swedes have a hard time understanding Norwegian? Why has Norway stayed out of the European Union? Why is the English influence of the Norwegian language more noticeable in the capital than elsewhere?)

pasbesoin• 15 years ago

Thank you. As someone somewhat curious about Norway (and Scandinavia in general; "it" being part of my heritage), your description provides some detail I'd not heard.

The regional dialects remind me of my time in Germany. There is considerable variation between the coastal areas and the Alps. I recall being freshly arrived in Munich and having a "genuine" (here in the U.S., if we were were joking or a bit mean, we might say "hillbilly") Bavarian as a neighbor. I couldn't understand a word he said (unless he made a conscious effort, and even then...). (He was a really nice guy, BTW, and we go along fine, despite this.)

I spent a lot of time with students in Munich, a city and university system that attracted them from all over. And there were plenty of light-hearted comments about others' accents and where they must be from. I think I was fortunate to be amongst a younger population for whom such things were more curiosity than a divisive issue. Older Germans... plenty of genuinely nice ones, but also sometimes some very entrenched feelings. Like anywhere, I guess.

I had a question for you, if you don't mind. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark seem to have so thoroughly integrated English as a second language. Where do you, and do people in general, seem to find the boundary between their native language and English in their daily interactions?

I've heard, for example, that if one attendee in a meeting is not a native speaker, the meeting switches to English and that really seems to be no problem at all. In Montreal, Canada, amongst the young technologists I visited, conversations would switch between French and English, and back again, in mid-sentence.

I don't have a compelling reason for asking; I'm just curious.

wilhelm2• 15 years ago

> Where do you, and do people in general, seem to find the boundary between their native language and English in their daily interactions?

* If I speak to other Norwegians, I will speak Norwegian. Always. I make a conscious effort to keep the language free of any [recent] loan words.

* If I speak to Swedes or Danes, I will speak Norwegian. If I see they're having trouble following, I will speak slower and tone down my dialect. I will not switch to Swedish or to English. I understand them – they better do the effort of understanding me. (That's the 500 years as a colony kicking in. :)

* If I speak to a non-Scandinavian foreigner who doesn't understand or speak Norwegian, I instantly switch to English.

* If I speak to ten Scandinavians and one non-Scandinavian, I will instantly switch to English.

* If I speak to someone who has been in Norway long enough to understand the language but not long enough to be comfortable speaking it, I will speak Norwegian. I don't mind if he speaks English, but I'll stick to Norwegian if he actually understands it.

* If I speak to someone who doesn't really speak much Norwegian but tries hard to, I'll answer in Norwegian first – but usually switch to English when I see they're struggling.

All of the above apply within my own country. Abroad, I will try to speak the local language if I can. If not, I will ask, in the local language, if they speak English and then switch. If I'm spoken to in English, I will respond in English.

bioh42_2• 15 years ago

Guessing as someone who has very little clue about Scandinavia:

Why have the Norwegian dialects diverged so much

A rugged and wast geography tends to isolate people, this leads to greater drift between local dialects? Sweden is big too, but I think Norway is much more mountainous?

Why can Norwegians understand Swedish but Swedes have a hard time understanding Norwegian?

Norwegians are used to listening for a wide range of dialects, Swedes not so much?

Why has Norway stayed out of the European Union?

What's the point of joining for a small yet well of country? If you're big like France and Germany you can guide the EU your way, if you're small but less developed like Spain, Portugal, all the new members, you hope for increased wealth. But if you're Norway, why join?

Why is the English influence of the Norwegian language more noticeable in the capital than elsewhere?

The capital has a bigger economy, more trade, more people's work requires English, more tourists, even the non-UK and non-US tourists are more likely to communicate in English, more entertainment overall, and this means more foreign entrainment - music, movies - in English.

gyardley• 15 years ago

Reminds me of Quebecois French vs. Parisian French, for much the same reasons. In Paris, I can call an e-mail an e-mail. In Montreal? I've been told I have to use 'courriel'. The Quebecois are a little less secure about their cultural identity than the Parisians, so their resistance to loan words makes sense, despite a higher level of English proficiency.

Incidentally, I don't think that study does justice to Norwegians' facility with English. I never worry about being understood in any European capital, but in Norway everyone seemed near-fluent, even in the rural areas. We spent a couple of weeks driving around above the Arctic Circle, and I never had to whip out the phrase book once.

tallanvor• 15 years ago

As an American living in Oslo, I can say that understanding spoken Norwegian is incredibly difficult. Even Norwegians admit that the divergence of some of the dialects creates problems for them as well. Bokmål's syntax and grammar is not actually that difficult to learn, but because the spoken language is really quite different - even in Oslo - it's very difficult to mentally map the spoken words to the written words. I'm also not sure that I would agree with you concerning the difference in English influence between, for example, Danish and Norwegian. Norway, much like France, does have a group dedicated to coming up with "Norwegian" words for new terms, but those words are often ignored, such as people saying dot instead of punkt when reciting a URL. There was also an article recently about the increasing tendency for Norwegians to say sorry instead of unnskyld or beklager.

Danes and Swedes do not have nearly as wide a variety of accents, and I think that is why they have a much harder time understanding Norwegian than you have understanding them. Norwegians have to grow up learning two native languages, figuring out all the different dialects, and start learning English around the age of 7 or 8 (these days, at least). The affect this has on your ability to grasp languages does not surprise me at all.

Of course, I still find it rather annoying that some of my Norwegian friends expect me to be able to learn Norwegian quickly despite knowing that I work in an English language environment (I share an office with 4 other people, none of whom are Norwegian) and not having a Norwegian spouse or samboer. And, of course, that most of them spent around 10 years in school learning English, not to mention being exposed to it through TV, movies and music.

One last question, though... What's the point of Norway not being in the EU if they keep agreeing to everything the EU enacts? Such as, say, the DLD?

tsuyoshi• 15 years ago

My guess is because of petroleum exports. Presumably Norway would not be able to have a tariff on exports to other EU countries if they joined the EU.

kylemathews• 15 years ago

I was disappointed the Philippines didn't make it on the list. I spent two years there and they are ridiculously obsessed with learning English. Add to that the 50 years they spent as an English colony and they, as a nation, are exceptionally good at English. Even slum dwellers I'd find were often fairly proficient.

samatman• 15 years ago

The Philippines were in point of fact an American colony; I presume you meant English-speaking, as the English did their colonizing under the flag of Great Britain in any case and it is customary to refer to their colonies as British.

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

"This was not a statistically controlled study: the subjects took a free test online and of their own accord."

This is by far the most important point made in the article in The Economist, but so far it is little reflected in the comments here on HN. The reported results have some broad plausibility to me, as a native speaker of General American English who has lived overseas (including living in an international dormitory with residents from all over the world, who variously used English-as-a-second-language, French-as-a-first-or-second language, Spanish-as-a-first-language, or Chinese-as-a-second-language as interlanguages). But the reported results may or may not reflect the reality of the situation in the real world, as the editor of The Economist takes care to note.

It's time to dust of the electrons on my FAQ post on voluntary response polls.

VOLUNTARY RESPONSE POLLS

As I commented previously when we had a poll on the ages of HNers, the data can't be relied on to make such an inference (what the average age of HN participants is). That's because the data are not from a random sample of the relevant population. One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.

-----Original Message----- From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu Subject: Re: qualtiative study

Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

For more on the distinction between statistics and mathematics, see

http://statland.org/MAAFIXED.PDF

and

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz

I think Professor Velleman promotes "Voluntary response data are worthless" as a slogan for the same reason an earlier generation of statisticians taught their students the slogan "correlation does not imply causation." That's because common human cognitive errors run strongly in one direction on each issue, so the slogan has take the cognitive error head-on. Of course, a distinct pattern in voluntary responses tells us SOMETHING (maybe about what kind of people come forward to respond), just as a correlation tells us SOMETHING (maybe about a lurking variable correlated with both things we observe), but it doesn't tell us enough to warrant a firm conclusion about facts of the world. The Literary Digest poll intended to predict the election results in the United States in 1932

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5168/

http://www.math.uah.edu/stat/data/LiteraryDigest.pdf

is a spectacular historical example of a voluntary response poll with a HUGE sample size and high response rate that didn't give a correct picture of reality at all.

When I have brought up this issue before, some other HNers have replied that there are some statistical tools for correcting for response-bias effects, IF one can obtain a simple random sample of the population of interest and evaluate what kinds of people respond. But we can't do that in the case being discussed here in this thread on HN.

Another reply I frequently see when I bring up this issue is that the public relies on voluntary response data all the time to make conclusions about reality. To that I refer careful readers to what Professor Velleman is quoted as saying above (the general public often believes statements that are baloney) and to what Google's director of research, Peter Norvig, says about research conducted with better data,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

that even good data (and Norvig would not generally characterize voluntary response data as good data) can lead to wrong conclusions if there isn't careful thinking behind a study design. Again, human beings have strong predilections to believe certain kinds of wrong data and wrong conclusions. We are not neutral evaluators of data and conclusions, but have predispositions (cognitive illusions) that lead to making mistakes without careful training and thought.

Another frequently seen reply is that sometimes a "convenience sample" (this is a common term among statisticians for a sample that can't be counted on to be a random sample) of a population offers just that, convenience, and should not be rejected on that basis alone. But the most thoughtful version of that frequent reply I recently saw did correctly point out that if we know from the get-go that the sample was not done statistically correctly, then even if we are confident (enough) that Norwegians who responded to an online poll are reasonably fluent in English, we wouldn't want to extrapolate from that to conclude that any particular social or educational factor present in Norway provides an advantage in learning the English language, or that Panamanians on average are some of the least fluent speakers of English in the world.

On my part, I wildly guess that most western Europeans who have completed secondary education in the last three decades are moderately fluent in English, if only because they have occasion to use English as an interlanguage when speaking to other Europeans (something I have seen happen many, many times) and because they have much exposure to English-language media content (books, movies, radio broadcasts, TV shows). People who live in Latin America and who have occasion to travel to neighboring countries (including Brazil) have considerably more occasions to use Spanish as an interlanguage, even with native speakers of Portuguese, and thus somewhat reduced tendency to keep their English in practice.

The way to know which social or educational or economic factor is most important in the spread of world English as the global interlanguage would be to do an even more careful study than the interesting preliminary study reported here. Meanwhile, we will be trading anecdotes based on personal experience, which I will read with interest to supplement my personal experience.

Krshna• 15 years ago

Empirical Forum... English = Technology = World Domination..

English as a second language: Test results on the most fluent countries

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