How Do Scandinavians, The Dutch, And Germans Learn English So Well?!

Perhaps they study English in school from a young age.

Americans have more important things to do.

They are highly intelligent people whose languages are also Germanic.

They get UK TV signals are learn from the programs they watch.

“How Do ... Germans ... Learn English So Well?!”

We obsess on and mimic David Hasselhoff.

In some countries TV shows/movies from the UK/US were always in English with subtitles. That is how I learned English as a kid, I watched a lot of British/American shows like that.

Germans don't deserve to be grouped with Scandanavians. Even those who understand English tend to speak it poorly.

They do it so they can throw their worldliness in your face and accuse you of being a stupid provincial American!

This is such bullshit. The Ivy League maybe but the rest are terrible at speaking English. OP made this up out of whole cloth. What a strange thread.

When I visited Germany, I met many people who were not able to say a word in English. I don´t know why Germany has the same reputation as the Scandinavian countries regarding this.

Not sure about Germany but I guess it´s the same reason as in the Latin countries (the real ones: Spain, France, Italy...) The movies are dubbed, and English is taught very late at school...with the exception of Portugal that I'm sure can beat Germany on this one :P

I'm not Portuguese (Spaniard).

As an observation, they approach learning languages with more enthusiasm and confidence.

In Germany every English speaking show or a movie is dubbed in German. Don't know about Scandinavian countries and Netherlands.

The Dutch and Scandinavians live in countries with languages that relatively few people speak, so English language movies and tv shows aren't dubbed. Between that and English language instruction in school, they grow-up learning to speak relatively unaccented English. The Dutch avoid German even though it is a similar language (historical reasons) but often also know French.

In Sweden, most English shows are subtitled with Swedish. English is taught beginning in grade school so by the time kids graduate they are close to fluent.

They watch a lot of American TV (which helps their English) and travel extensively (often relying on their English where German isn't spoken).

Travelling a lot helps. Unlike provincial Americans who think travel = Las Vegas or Porto Vayawrta.

Spanish and Italians are just as provincial as Americans.

Interestingly enough, compare Spaniards to the Portuguese (who have been relatively backwards for centuries). They mandated English in schools since the 1980s and almost all under 35 speak amazing English. It's why Portugal is such a popular destination for those Americans who do travel.

The Dutch are amazing. They can even pick up the regional (eg, Southern, etc) dialect. I’ve known a number of Dutch. None of which were Ivy League etc.

Spanish speaking people find English hard, for some reason.

[quote] Interestingly enough, compare Spaniards to the Portuguese (who have been relatively backwards for centuries). They mandated English in schools since the 1980s and almost all under 35 speak amazing English.

Portugal has a historical, commercial and political relationship with England.

Dutch is very like English (watch "Professor T"). But the Dutch accent in English is not at all like a native (American, British, Aussie, etc.); everything sounds like they're rolling their tongue.

The languages sound like English and share Germanic influence. Danish or Dutch always sounds like English to me, only gibberish. They share most of our vowels, and the variation in them that is absent in e.g., Spanish or Italian.

I have a friend in Stockholm. He told me that they watch tv and movies in English.

[quote] Portugal has a historical, commercial and political relationship with England.

Yes, unlike the Spaniards, who actually married into the English monarchy.

Idiot.

Here's what Dutch sounds like to me:

kljsgoiashg9weijafakjgnklajg

Here's what Swedish and Norwegian sound like to me:

klajsfiouoiuarjeamrnae

Here's what German sounds like to me:

9uwjtlkwajesklt;gkegh

I'm American, by the way. Foreign languages are too difficult to learn, so why bother?

Besides, it doesn't affect my day-to-day life in any way, since English is spoken everywhere in the U.S., AND around the world.

Learning a foreign language is just... unnecessary.

I think how well you speak a foreign language depends some what on how well the person that taught you the language spoke. I know someone from Latvia who speaks English with a French accent because the person who taught him was French.

I have a friend who’s a folksinger.

I'm one of those rare Americans who is multilingual and very well-traveled. In my experience most Scandinavians and Dutch really do speak excellent English. Younger Germans as well. Yes, television, movies, and music have a lot to do with it, as does starting early in schools. But overall, I think it's a matter of those countries being better-educated in general. They also have economic and social stability that makes it easier for their citizens to travel. Here in the US, people simply do not see a need to ever speak a foreign language. We don't travel much, and everywhere we go so many people speak our language that we can get away with it. If you're from Norway, you're not going to find many people abroad who speak your language (except Mayor Pete).

English speakers learning a foreign language are pretentious, like Buttigieg. The only purpose is to show off, not to communicate.

And R27 shows why so few Americans learn a foreign language...

As a matter of fact English is almost 60% derived from French and Latin vocabulary, especially more standard English. The French who go to university speak English very well, just like English speakers who bother to learn French. However, its more difficult to lose an accent between the two languages. Also the French become fluent with a smaller English vocabulary than the Norther Europeans, who learn the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. Meanwhile, the French rely on all the latin and old French words in English. French is a more nounal language as well, so the French speaking in English come off more "intellectual" or process based, because English is a more direct language often based on action verbs and many of these verbs are anglo-saxon, idiomatic, and short phrasal verbs.

Also I agree that Northern European countries may spend a lot more on early language instruction.

There are other groups who learn English very well, quite fast, and speak it with good vowels. For example, educated mother-tongue Arabic speakers.

One way for native English speakers to bridge the gap without having to learn any foreign language is just to learn English as a foreign language. It's a lot easier.

Also, English is the easiest language to learn. Really simplistic. I've learned it just by watching tv.

R18

That's what Portuguese themselves say is why the younger generations speak English fluently.

Older Portuguese do not speak it on the same level, thus so much for their British ties.

R23, your statement sounds very ignorant. Other languages sound like shsjsndndndjkj to you, because you don’t speak them.

I enjoy learning about foreign cultures which includes learning foreign languages. Reading literature in its original language is very enjoyable. Listening to opera and understanding what they’re saying is enjoyable as is broadening your horizon.

Germans learn 8 years of English at school, but most forget all they've learned when they not use it. The Dutch don't dub their movies afaik. That may be a reason why they are quite good at it. Don't know about Scandinavians.

You can learn to speak English from watching TV.

1. English is fundamentally, at its core, a Scandinavian language, with redundant French synonyms incorporated directly into it. To Scandinavians, English sounds only slightly more "foreign" than another Scandinavian language.

2. Scandinavian school kids spend almost as much time studying English (as a specific academic topic) as American kids do. By high school, most of their schooling is IN English (or at least, their math/science/etc textbooks are).

2a. Building upon #2... by the time they're in high school, just about the only classes that are IN Swedish/Norwegian/Danish is their own national history class... which does double-duty as their high-school-level class in formal S/N/D. Kind of like how in the US, "British Literature" also serves as "British History".

3. To Scandinavian, English is the de-facto language of adult literature. There's kind of a snob factor involved. Imagine an adult who watches kids' cartoons & reads only YA literature... same difference.

4. Pretty much anything that can be written in Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish can be round-trip losslessly translated word for word into gramatically-correct English, in a way that might not look like American/British English, but is as UNAMBIGUOUSLY understandable to other Scandinavians as it would have been in the original language.

As a practical matter, informal spoken Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian are ALREADY turning into de-facto regional dialects of English... and have been, for decades. For a adult Swede to write something in Swedish without using an English word when a good equivalent Swedish word exists is *hard* & takes active effort, precisely because English is so pervasive and integrated into daily life. Even MORESO if they're writing about a technical or scientific topic.

Scandinavian languages actually HAVE well-developed & complete vocabularies to write about topics in things like engineering, chemistry, and physics... but most of it has fallen into complete disuse over the past 50 years, because anyone with the education to write about something like quantum chromodynamics is just going to write it in English. And in fact, if they're under ~60, might not even *know* the words to write about it in Swedish/Norwegian/Danish (they'd probably RECOGNIZE them, but they'd feel like archaic 19th-century British English does to an American).

The SPOKEN languages aren't in any immediate danger of going away... but they'll inevitably mutate into a regional "Scandinavian" dialect of English that's distinct & recognizable, but bears about as much DIRECT resemblance to S/N/D as modern English does to Chaucer's English (or even Beowulf). Copenhagen to Stockholm will be an accent-continuum, like Boston to Baltimore.

I have corresponded with relatives in Norway. They correspond in English with few problems. They learned English is school. This has been going on a while since he's in his 60's.

What always kills me is that my European friends when learning English do everything they can to lose their accent, and some do it every well, sounding quite fluent. However, I have never met a French person who has lost their accent, or even wanted to lose their French accent, even if they've been in this country for years.

The French are so impossible, They're like really mean cats come to life as humans.

[quote]Besides, it doesn't affect my day-to-day life in any way, since English is spoken everywhere in the U.S., AND around the world.

[quote]Learning a foreign language is just... unnecessary.

Americans don't travel much, and are much less likely to spend any time living in other countries, so this is somewhat true, you can plod along in the tourist spots of select other countries and point on the menu with the photographs.

Subtitles may help familiarize someone with words and phrases from another language, but few people aquire anything near fluency that way.

Because they are not from Slovenia, like Melanie tRump.

Dutch is "similar" to German, but due to past spelling reforms, even sentences that might SOUND similar when spoken end up looking very different. Think: Czech vs Slovak. There's also the fact that comparing Dutch and Berlin-German is kind of like comparing a rural Louisiana Cajun to a Hasidic guy from Brooklyn who grew up in New Jersey... at some points, they diverge so far, it might be EASIER to understand Spanish or French.

There's also the fact that many Dutch people don't actually SPEAK Dutch... they speak Frisian. So when they talk to each other, they'll usually speak... English.

Orientals are the worst at speaking English.

That much is for sure.

R36 pretty much summed up the op's question in a nutshell.

But in doing so, they also exposed a very sad truth: Scandinavians THEMSELVES have deemed their own languages to be useless and irrelevant, and thereby have chosen English as their proxy language.

That is fucking SAD. Your own people have basically thrown away their culture and heritage!

It's absolutely nothing to be proud of, R36.

[quote]Orientals are the worst at speaking English.

My rugs are constantly ignoring my commands.

They're more intelligent than other races.

Ha, just kidding! They start English instruction at very young ages. It's mandatory in their schools.

[quote]Travelling a lot helps. Unlike provincial Americans who think travel = Las Vegas or Porto Vayawrta.

Traveling overseas is expensive for many Americans. Also, it's a trek. In Europe you can hop from country to country like nothing.

Dear R45,

Please read R36. I wouldn't call that "smart."

I call that selling themselves out to the English speaking world.

That's sad and pathetic, but not smart.

Some sounds in English are harder for Spanish/Italian speakers. Like the aspirated p/t/k and the diphthong vowel sounds. French people just hate English so they won't speak it well even if they could.

r43, it's neither good nor bad. It just *is*.

Is it sad that kids from New York & London can't understand Beowulf, barely can make sense of Chaucer, and need Cliff's Notes for Shakespeare?

What about the kids in Normandy, who can't read 12th-Century Norman French, because their "own" dialect was stamped out by Napoleon & his compatriots when they standardized French nationwide?

English is the grand compromise between Germanic languages & Latinate languages. Scandinavians just got lucky, because English is basically a pure superset of Scandinavian languages & feels less "foreign" than "cosmopolitan".

In a sense, they actually WON. The Danes invaded England, and basically erased the indigenous languages spoken there. A thousand years later, that evolved dialect of old Danish simply "came home" as the new global language.

The 300, 000 people of Iceland learn English in order to communicate with the rest of the world. That's why we're good at it.

The Dutch learn English from birth. Everyone there speaks it fluently. Plus the Netherlands is a small country and Dutch isn’t spoken many other places, so they view it as essential to speak English.

Americans may be lazy and stupid when it comes to foreign language acquisition, but you generally have to learn another language to get a decent white collar job in the Nordic countries and NL. More and more university degree programs are taught in English, most of the media young people consume is (at least subtitled) in English. There is also less linguistic chauvinism; French people still think France and the French language is at the center of the universe.

[quote] Scandinavians THEMSELVES have deemed their own languages to be useless and irrelevant, and thereby have chosen English as their proxy language.

[quote] That is fucking SAD. Your own people have basically thrown away their culture and heritage!

This is why I still admire the French, despite the fact that 99% of them are MASSIVE cunts.

They are proud of their language, their culture, and their history. And no one is going to take it away from them.

Vive la France!

R53 "And no one is going to take it away from them."

Submission - Michel Houellebecq

[quote]French people just hate English so they won't speak it well even if they could.

I agree. The French view their language as superior to everything else. So they intentionally half-ass English and use French pronunciations because they see English as inferior.

And here in the US we're told that we have to learn Spanish because English-only will not be around for much longer.

Some schools in Japan are introducing English in pre-school - at least phonetics - because when you're 3 to 5 it's easier to learn to pronounce an "L" or an "R" the English way.

But basically, why should a Japanese bother? They have employment opportunities at home and all the home-grown entertainment they want.

This may be changing (economically) - I'm not sure - but certainly in the past, it wasn't worth the trouble. (same as the USA - why would you bother? and how would you choose 'the' language that's worth the trouble - Spanish? French? German? Chinese? - and then do what? Unless you know you want to work abroad and you better know which country pretty early to start the arduous task of mastering its language.

r57 explains it. Americans get so much shit for only speaking English, but the reality is that we don't need to learn another language. It has no impact on us personally or professionally. We can speak only English and have no barriers or limitations.

R58- The same holds true for people in the UK and Australia/New Zealand.

A lot of international trade is conducted in “business English,” an abbreviated version of the language that is used when, say, a German company wants to contract with an Indian company. It’s neither party’s first language; it’s a compromise, and it can be used in transactions around the world.

As far as the Japanese learning English, R57, it’s necessary for staying current with international scientific research, among other things.

R60. What you are describing is what linguists call a pidgin. If a pidgin gains some permanence it becomes a creole. There are no native speakers of pidgins, but there can be native speakers of particular creoles.

R46, Australians have one of the highest rates of overseas travel in the world, so don't try to sell us THAT bridge.

The fact is that Americans, especially white ones, have been taught American exceptionalism/superiority from the same age that Scandinavians are taught English, and it's made them smug. (Unjustifiably so given the current state of the place.)

It's hard to teach Australian kids foreign languages because it's hard to make a 12-year-old see the relevance of a country 20,000 miles away, but the difference is that when they do travel, young Australians in particular are generally very open to the other culture and enjoy picking up the words they need from the locals to get around. They don't expect that everyone will speak English and get huffy when they don't.

The person who accused the French of not losing their accents on purpose: here are a couple of facts. One is that some people have a great ear for accents and others just don't. Look at the number of foreign-born people from English-speaking countries that the DL has denigrated for their poor US accents, or their inability to get a region right. Closer to home, Holly Hunter is a spectacular example of someone with no ear AT ALL. She talks the way she's been brought up and is impervious to anything else. She'd probably like to be Meryl Streep, but it's not gonna happen.

The second fact is that the most difficult thing about learning to speak French is that its intonation patterns and emphases are extremely different from English. This is not at all true of German or Scandinavian languages, and (I think) less true of the other Romance languages. One clear example (among thousands) is that traditionally, an English voice will go up at the end of a question. Not so in French. You have to intuit it's a question differently. This makes English spoken with a French intonation sound very foreign, and may be much of what Americans are reacting to.

The person who said English is the easiest language to learn: scholarship is not on your side. English has an enormous vocabulary (much larger than French, for example), partly because Shakespeare made up a whole stack of words and put them into the language, and it is an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon (the Scandi and German connections) and French (from the Norman Conquest of Britain), plus it is very absorbent and has grabbed the influence of waves of immigration over the centuries. It also has far more irregular verbs than most languages, and lots of exceptions to all its rules (eg "i before e except after c" only works part of the time). It's easier than Russian or Chinese, and it's probably easy to learn to speak it badly, but to get it right is difficult, don't worry about that.

The other thing non-language learners need to know is that you can be able to read top literature in a foreign language, yet be unable to understand someone on the street, because you don't learn slang, swearing, colloquialisms and local (eg New Jersey) accents. This might be [at least partly] why you think foreign language learners are stuck up.

Finally, I don't know of anybody in my English-speaking country who could follow The Wire without the subtitles. Yet none of us are sitting around going "Why don't those black Baltimore drug dealers learn to speak the Queen's English? SOOO annoying!" That's what some of you guys are doing to people from overseas.

PS For those who think it's a doddle for the Scandinavians because their language is just like English, have a go.

R46 True, but Germans travel all over the world, not just Europe.

Last time I was in Colombia, the only other foreigners there were all German. Ran into three different groups of them along the way. Excellent Spanish and English.

They just appreciate being citizens of the world more, as do most Western Europeans. A quality lost on Americans.

This thread lays bare a lot of American xenophobia -tinged with more than a hint of racism. There have been many correct, even wise, statements from some of the posters here, but it's depressing how ignorant some people are.

Americans are at a tremendous disadvantage in international trade and treaty negotiations, as more often than not we have to rely on interpreters provided by our hosts. We miss a great deal of the local culture when we do travel -not experiencing local plays, films, or music, and we are often ignorant of the history and achievements of the places we visit. Learning about other people, their languages, customs, and cultures in no way diminishes your pride in your own culture and heritage. As Americans, our culture is the result of blending many others -e pluribus unum and all that... That is the real American exceptionalism.

[quote] Australians have one of the highest rates of overseas travel in the world, so don't try to sell us THAT bridge.

It costs thousands of dollars for Americans to travel overseas. Many Americans simply can't afford it.

FFS save us from non-Americans who lecture Americans about things they know fuck-all about.

r65 as has been explained, Americans do not need to use a language other than English. The rest of the world does. Europe is a land of tiny countries, all right next to each other, and each country has its own language. Of course they need to be multilingual. Also, the pop culture that people consume is mostly in English. Yes it would be nice to learn another language as an American, but where the fuck am I going to need to speak German or French? When I travel to Europe for two weeks out of the year?

[quote]This thread lays bare a lot of American xenophobia -tinged with more than a hint of racism.

Please provide examples. This thread has laid out specific reasons why Americans don't learn foreign languages.

[quote]Americans are at a tremendous disadvantage in international trade and treaty negotiations, as more often than not we have to rely on interpreters provided by our hosts.

That's what interpreters are FOR. We still get the job done, don't we?

The Dutch have trouble with the “th” sound.

R65 again. I am a trained interpreter -I know my job. But an interpreter cannot adequately interpret every utterance in a room, nor always provide the cultural background context of a statement.

Hints of racism and xenophobia? Go back and reread R2, R8, R17, R23, R27, R38, R40, R42, R53, R58...

The American belief that we don't need to learn other languages because everyone else learns English is at its core a hostile attitude. It assumes a one-sided relationship where only Others must adapt -and adapt to suit our needs and wishes. That may work in a pure capitalist economy, but it will never bring peace and cooperation... We will forever be the "ugly Americans."

I have a lot of family in Sweden. It's simple - they know if they want to travel to anywhere outside of Scandinavia, there's not going to be any speakers or written translations for them.

They HAVE to learn another language and it may as well be English since it is the lingua franca of the world.

They start young - 6 or 7. Plus, they get a lot of English language music, film, shows, etc. Universities are almost uniformly taught in English.

But any American or English regional dialects are not very widely understood. By the same token, I can't understand Skane Swedish very well either.

[quote]The American belief that we don't need to learn other languages because everyone else learns English is at its core a hostile attitude. It assumes a one-sided relationship where only Others must adapt -and adapt to suit our needs and wishes. That may work in a pure capitalist economy, but it will never bring peace and cooperation... We will forever be the "ugly Americans."

It's simply not practical or economical. Why does somebody who works in Des Moines as an insurance adjuster, for example, need to learn French or German? It costs money. Money that needs to be spent on other things. The fact that English is the worldwide language is what it is. The British have just as much to do with it as Americans. And contrary to your "ugly Americans" self-flagellating, many people don't mind English at all. I've been told by many Dutch and Germans, in particular, that they prefer it to their native languages. When the Chinese eventually take over the world we'll all have to learn Chinese if we want to do international business. For many years, French was the international language. Things change.

A Dane once told me that the Germans watch American and British tv shows dubbed and so miss a chance to improve their English, whereas in Danmark the shows were subtitled. This Dane, incidentally, spoke English with an unimpeachable American accent though he'd never been to the US and was still in high school.

r71 is humor impaired and doesn't know bitchy humor when he sees it.

Using that clip from film "The Damned" again as example; find English spoken with German accent (especially the aristocratic one used by Helmut Griem in clip) extremely sexy.

Way officer Aschenbach says "what do you mean..?" Or "Do you want the chancellor to be displeased with our fine generals?"

Helmut Griem also uses trilled R which just adds to the mix.

The Dutch learn languages in school from a young age. When I was in Amsterdam I saw super young kids on break from school effortlessly switching between several languages.

One thing always to keep in mind is how small many European nations are, and or how close certain areas border other countries.

If Rhode Island had a totally different language than say Massachusetts many would be fluent in both if nothing out of necessity.

Staring post WWII and picking up steam by say 1970's or 1980's English fast became the common worldwide language, especially for business. Thus anyone who wanted to get on needed command if not fluency of English language. It also makes it far easier to move between several languages say in a group if one dominates, and that likely today would be English.

Ages ago of course it was Latin, then came French (there is a historical reason why passports world over are issued both in native language and often French).

American culture that was exported to Europe heavily beginning around 1970's or so made learning English almost a must, especially for younger people who often couldn't get enough of anything American.

All of one's French friends who are college educated or above speak fluent English, they have since teenagers, young adults. This holds true in most of the larger cities like Paris, Lyon, etc... Out in the country or rural areas things might be different. However just because a French person doesn't wish to speak English does not always mean they don't comprehend what you are saying or whatever. It is a fucking game they play with all Americans and even British. Proof of this is when they get fed up with an American or whoever slaughtering French language they quickly switch to English. Just like Aleksandr Petrovsky.'s daughter dealt with Carrie in SATC. It's a bit of "look I see you cannot speak French so I'm doing you a favor....."

THIS.

I live in CT. If MA, NY RI and NJ each had their own languages, I would be fluent in five languages.

R78 nailed it.

In some fields, like computer programming, English is almost a non-negotiable prerequisite. You can find books about niche programming topics in Japanese, Korean, and Russian, but if you want Spanish, French, Italian, or Portuguese, the best you're likely to find are books about more beginner-level topics.

The fact is, nobody is going to publish a book about C++17 memory management & multithreaded programming in a language like Polish, Dutch, Serbian, or Luxemborgish. It would sell less than a thousand copies, and the publisher would go broke. Even in Japan, Korea, or Russia, it would be a huge publishing risk. Hell, an ENGLISH book on a topic like that might sell only 8,000-12,000 copies globally... at least 1/4 of which would be thanks to India.

Incidentally, even when translated books (say, from O'Reilly) are available, Germans in particular usually prefer the English edition. Why? Because half the time, the translator doesn't fully understand the topic, and leaves German readers scratching their heads wondering wtf the author actually *wrote*. A lot of Germans wish publishers like O'Reilly would take a cue from Japanese "ruby text" & print the original English in tiny blue type above or below the translated German text, so they could skim the German for simplicity, but have the original English text adjacent for reference if some poorly-translated sentence confuses them.

I have two American friends who are fluent in German and ironically they rarely get to speak it when they're in Germany. Germans insist on speaking with them in English because they love doing that with a native English speaker.

That's really interesting, R81.

I was watching Angels and Demons, and thought about the people working on the CERN project in Switzerland.

It was a multinational cooperative effort, and naturally the working language was English.

Scientists were from all over the world, and there's no way they could communicate if they didn't have at least one language in common.

Of course, that's English.

Now you know why Americans don't bother learning another language.

R82

Same thing in France. Whenever am there always want to speak in French to hone my skills, but my native French friends, their family and others (once they find out am American) want to speak in English. The young especially want to brush up on American accented English, learning how to make "TH" sound (as in "The", and of course understanding American idioms. Try explaining to "throw someone under a bus"....

Proximity doesn't necessarily mean necessity. Strasbourg (France) and Kehl (Germany) are literally a few thousand feet apart, but for most of their history, just ignored each other and LITERALLY turned their backs on the river dividing them.

I grew up in Miami, and looking back, it was kind of weird and surreal... like two cities occupying the same chunk of land in parallel. If you were Anglo, you did your casual shopping "down south" (south of sw 40th street, more or less). If you were Cuban, you did your casual shopping "up north". Obviously, we all crossed the invisible language line all the time... but you KNEW that if you went to Hialeah instead of Dadeland & needed to talk to someone, you were going to waste an hour while they hunted down the store's one (frazzled) English-speaking employee to help you.

I've been told that before the EU opened borders & English became Europe's de-facto second language, most cities in Europe were like 1980s Miami... multiple languages, but psychologically invisible to each other. You learned which areas were wrong-language, and just subtly pretended they didn't exist without even realizing how often you did it.

Here is English final exam for students who wants to graduate from HS in Finland. The students are 18 or 19.

my first language is spanish, I came yo the US when I was 12 years old since 1994 and I still have an accent. english pronunciation is just hard. then in high school i began taking italian classes and italians always see that I have an accent, but not a foreing one but kind of like a regional one, so they ask me, what part of italy are you from??? if they are from the north they think that Im from the south and if they are from the south they think that im from one of the italian islands in the mediterrenean.

Rofl at R86.

Thank you for posting the Finnish English exam. I love the instructions given at the beginning of the exam:

[quote] Koe koostuu neljästä osasta: kuullun ymmärtäminen, luetun ymmärtäminen, sanasto ja rakenteet sekä kirjallinen tuottaminen.

quote] Voit tehdä tehtävät haluamassasi järjestyksessä. Noudata tehtäväkohtaisia vastaamisohjeita. Voit muuttaa antamiasi vastauksia koska tahansa kokeen aikana. Varaa aikaa kuullun ymmärtämisen tehtävien tekemiseen yhteensä noin 1 tunti.

[quote] Älä jätä mitään merkintöjä sellaisen tehtävän vastaukselle varattuun tilaan, jota et halua jättää arvosteltavaksi.

I was only joking at R23, but it looks like I wasn't very far off from the truth.

I literally just bang away at letters on my keyboard, and you have Scandinavian words.

I wouldn't even begin to know how to pronounce them. It's like absolute gibberish.

Lol, damn all these white bitches on dis thread, lol

Why in the FUCK are Finnish words so long?

It makes them 10 times harder to pronounce!

A friend co-majored in Korean (and business) at university but it ended up he found a job in Japan.

I studied Latin, Spanish and French in high school and college - and my work took me to China, mainly.

So if you're an English speaker wishing to be bilingual without an actual plan, it's a crap-shoot. For the rest of the world, it's an easy decision. English opens doors not just to science/technology but to people quite widely in the world. My experience was the Chinese don't want you to try to speak "bad" Chinese - they laugh and point and aren't helpful at all. Do it right or don't do it. The French can be a bit like that as well (though I've found most people are more patient - and even appreciative)

But still, WTF bother if you're American? I see the mind-expanding possibilities, but personally, I think philosophy or history is better for that, if you're thinking about the personal value to your entire life.

Finnish isn't a "Scandinavian" language. It's somehow related to Hungarian.

I'm just guessing, but Finnish words might be long if it's a polysynthetic language like German & Mandarin. In a polysynthetic language, you make new words by agglutination... basically, an English prepositional phrase minus spaces, so it all turns into one word.

German example: diarrhea is 'durchfall' -- literally, "through case/instance".

Mandarin: computer is 'electricbrain' -- literally, the character for electricity followed by the character for brain.

That's also why German "has a word" for almost EVERYTHING... new words get created in German all the time, because anyone can read the new word & figure out what it means.

Another German example: "environmental pollution" is "umweltverschmuzung" -- break it up into um-welt-ver-schmuz-ung... um=over, welt=world (ie, world-surface), "ver-" = state-of schmuz=dirt[y], -ung = "-ness". Or... world-surface-state-of-dirty-ness.

Foreign languages are such a bother. Just talk to people who speak your native tongue. Much simpler.

The answer is simple. The northern countries subtitles all foreign tv programs, so that every time they turn on the tv, they get a language lesson. Additionally, to gain university entrance to a lot of programs, they have to be proficient in one or more foreign languages. This is because there aren't enough books translated into a smaller country's language, eg, Norwegian or Portuguese. (Portugal is an exception; everyone under 40 speaks English and likely Spanish as well.)

In the southern countries, they dub tv programs into their own language. When I discussed the advisablity of subtitles to an Italian, he said, "But you would put a whole industry out of work!"

Anglophones may not need a foreign language, but I can tell you from experience that your r'ship with locals changes immensely for the better when you communicate with them in their own language, eg, Italian and French. It might not hold true with Scandis or Germans, as they are so comfortable in Englsh.

[quote]German example: diarrhea is 'durchfall' -- literally, "through case/instance".

actually it rather means -through falling-, the falling as meaning slipping/sliding

[quote]Another German example: "environmental pollution" is "umweltverschmuzung" -- break it up into um-welt-ver-schmuz-ung... um=over, welt=world (ie, world-surface), "ver-" = state-of schmuz=dirt[y], -ung = "-ness". Or... world-surface-state-of-dirty-n - ess.

It's actually

Umwelt (noun) - environment, surroundings

Verschmutzung (noun) - dirtying, pollution or contamination (dirt means Schmutz in German)

The German language makes one word out of both individual nouns - Umweltverschmutzung

lololol

[quote] again. I am a trained interpreter -I know my job. But an interpreter cannot adequately interpret every utterance in a room, nor always provide the cultural background context of a statement.

Hints of racism and xenophobia? Go back and reread [R2], [R8], [R17], [R23], [R27], [R38], [R40], [R42], [R53], [R58]...

The American belief that we don't need to learn other languages because everyone else learns English is at its core a hostile attitude. It assumes a one-sided relationship where only Others must adapt -and adapt to suit our needs and wishes. That may work in a pure capitalist economy, but it will never bring peace and cooperation... We will forever be the "ugly Americans."

I don't get your point. Are you saying that even though interpreters can't "adequately interpret every utterance", that you, if you study a couple years of a foreign language in high school and/or university, can do better than a professional interpreter at understanding a foreign language? If so, interpreters must really suck at their jobs.

The "American belief" is based on being practical and using one's resources intelligently. If we lived in Denmark, with six million people and almost no Danish speakers outside the country, it would make a whole lot of sense to learn to invest the exorbitant time and effort it takes to be truly fluent in a foreign language.

If you live in a geographically isolated country with 330 million people and a highly advanced economy and entertainment structure - not only that, but most pertinent info, whether for work or fun, is translated into English, why in the fuck would you bother using all that time/energy and brain resources becoming fluent in, say, Chinese or Russian or German or, hell, any of them?

You could be learning to play the piano - to program in C++ or Java - to be an expert on philosophy or international current events or history - etc etc.... Or you could spend 1000s of hours learning Portuguese. Gee, I wonder which choice would more enhance your life, over all?

Well hell -- are we supposed to do backslash quote to stop the quoting? Or double enter or something? I cannot master this quoting shit. And you want ME to use my meager intellectual capabilities to learn Swahili?

My response was suppose to start at "I don't get your point..."

[quote] in front of what you want to quote

Oops...put the word quote in brackets [ ] before whatever it is you want to quote

I tried! And succeeded on a little bit of the post ("again, I am a trained interpreter...)

But I didn't end it properly so the rest of the post was put in as though I wrote it. How do you stop quoting - before you start your reply?

(and thanks in advance - I know this is probably explained in some Q&A somewhere but, well, if I weren't lazy, I wouldn't be explaining why it's too much work to learn a language lol)

Their own languages are similar to English, OP.

Check out R63 and say that again, R104.

[quote] and of course understanding American idioms. Try explaining to "throw someone under a bus"....

I've noticed that Germans are especially interested in American idioms, slang and colloquialisms. Whenever I've used one, they ask me to repeat it, ask for a precise definition and then make a mental note of it.

Hey, look everyone! I can speak Swedish and Finnish!

kjflajbakndbdfjdasjg gdsjgljajasdklfjaldfjas jkdgjlajglkjglkakb ajvlkjagjalgjal ajglkajblajbljajjslkgjlekj!!

" The Dutch have trouble with the “th” sound. "

The also have troubling with picking up the check!

[quote] " The Dutch have trouble with the “th” sound. "

Lol, every time I ever heard Yolanda speak on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, she always said "D" instead of "Th."

I remember this one episode, where she started to lecture one of the Mexican day laborers who was doing some work in her yard.

She told him that he needs to learn English because it will help him move forward in the U.S. Then she went into some bullshit story about how when she arrived in the United States, she couldn't speak English, and that she studied hard to learn the language.

I call bullshit on that one.

R86 the first exam question about meringues (referring to the dessert Eton mess... I assume!?) reminded me of twenty years ago on a short student exchange to Japan as a high school student. I sat in on an English class with my classmate where the entire lesson was about the behaviour of manatees in the mangroves of Florida. It was surreal and had nothing to do with anything you are likely to ever speak about in English. Much like meringues and Eton.

Could R107 BE more American?

Bimp

“Australians have one of the highest rates of overseas travel in the world, so don't try to sell us THAT bridge. It costs thousands of dollars for Americans to travel overseas. Many Americans simply can't afford it.

FFS save us from non-Americans who lecture Americans about things they know fuck-all about”. R 66

Obviously r 66 you have NO idea what it costs an Australian to fly to a place like Europe. Let me make it very clear, on average about twice as much as an American and In many cases more. It takes in the fastest flights nearly 24 hours or more to fly toEurope and 18 hours to fly to LA. Don’t tells us how expensive it is .WTF!!

What I will give you is time off work per year. On average an Australian has 4 weeks per year of Annual Leave and then on top of that after more than 10- 13 years you accumulate in many businesses 10 or more weeks you can take. So I will give you that. But as for expense clearly you get the better deal.

What I will ma

Bullshit about the French, and others. This kid is French. Watch him at @ 2:10. His unaccented English is great. Then he goes into French.

Having lived in the Netherlands for ten years I can say it in one word: school. even a ditch digger in the netherlands has had approximately six years of thorough english training in school. he may avoid using it and yet he sees it on media in the news so even he will develop it and use it even if sparingly

anyone who has an academic background likely has at least ten or twelve years of english study under their belts

R114 thinks that one little frog proves the rest of the swamp speaks unaccented English.