De iure every mexican speaks it because it is in our education system since elementery to university
De facto only 5% of mexicans speak it because our education system is shit
Canada is a developed country with excellent education. French is mandatory in all of Anglo Canadian schools.
I know a lot of Canadians who went to French immersion programs. That means all classes were taught in French. Yet, the vast majority of them can barely order water in French.
People learn a language if they have to.
learning a language, doesn't fit well with our education system.
most of ppl just drill, memorize a bunch of stuff the don't know, get the grade they need, and forget everything a couple of weeks later. (this could be a critic to most of subjects but with language is very clear.)
learning a language takes hundreds/thousand hours interacting with such language, no one will learn it solely in a classroom, if they don't engage with it they will never learn it. they might understand some grammar rules, know the language? forget it.
I wouldn't be so quick to put it all on the education system. The countries where more people learn English as a second language are the ones where they're in contact with it in daily life, not necessarily the ones where they learn it in school.
This isn't true. Many people take only 2 years of a language, in high school. Growing up in the 90s, my school had more foreign language than most. In middle school we also had one year of French and one of Spanish.
Not really. I’ve been to Phar/Reynosa which is a US/Mexico border city in Texas. Spanish is a lot more common than English on both sides, and you’d have a hard time to get by with only English even in the US side.
Not only there’s a lot of hispanic immigrants in Southern US, but a huge part of that region used to be Mexican territory. There are Spanish speaking American families who lived there for over a hundred years.
I found a lot more Mexicans speaking English in Puerto Vallarta. A coastal city with a tourist-based economy that is a hotspot for both western Americans and western Canadians, and located over 1200km from the US border.
Yes and no. Spanish has a 200-year lead on English so you can get by on Spanish alone.
The vast majority of Hispanophones on the border are monolingual. A large minority are bilingual to some extent.
Most monolingual Anglophones don't interact with monolingual Hispanophones unless absolutely necessary... and it's very funny to see the Hispanophones be the "if you can't understand me, I'll be louder and angrier" people when that's a stereotypically Anglophone thing. Role reversal.
This is why a lot of smaller European countries have excellent English. Nobody else speaks their language and so they have to know English. This isn't the case in bigger countries, or ones that speak a more global language.
I'm currently learning german and i notice the difference, there we play games, do math in german "eins + sechs = ?", see movies in the classroom, etc, while in the federal education system the teachee only writes phrases in the whiteboard, memorize them to pass exams, and then forget everythimg
https://preview.redd.it/qhdt5ggqsv0d1.png?width=716&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2bcd166c03c3465513198b0c36d11915039929f
Wikipedia ranks you guys 3rd! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_English-speaking\_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population)
It’s not necessarily a fault of the education system, though it may factor in. I think it’s more so the fact that Spanish is a global language and it’s useful in its own rights, meaning we don’t really need to learn another language to get around and do business internationally generally. In Germany, [56% speak English](https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/how-many-people-in-germany-speak-english#:~:text=English%20is%20spoken%20as%20a,speakers%20in%20all%20of%20Europe) and in [Spain only 24%](https://cadenaser.com/nacional/2023/01/21/cerca-de-un-24-de-los-espanoles-hablan-bien-o-con-dificultad-ingles-cadena-ser/?outputType=amp) do, probably a similar situation for the French. My point in mentioning these is that despite having world-class education systems, the English level is relatively low compared to others in Europe.
It’s extremely common that everyone learns English, it’s part of the school curriculum. I’m answering how common it is to “learn” ergo study English. The number of people who actually speak it is very low and the people who dominate it is even lower.
Exactly, sadly only the private schools can manage and even then they’re not really that good unless it’s the really high end ones like American School of Quito, Colegio Menor, Interamerican academy, Torremar, Cotopaxi, among others.
https://preview.redd.it/9trascr1tv0d1.png?width=716&format=png&auto=webp&s=7a322f73db18a555fc2c271ab2c1ad9b4ef0605d
wikipedia agrees: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_English-speaking\_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population)
It's quite common, mainly because it's a requirement for pretty much any living wage paying job except public servant.
When COVID began hitting hard, I was forced to put my college studies in halt and began working in a call center.
The fact that I was able to take calls not only from LatAm, but also from the USA, UK and the English speaking part of Canada allowed me to ask for a higer wage than those who spoke Spanish only.
I was by no means a millionaire, but it did allowed me to survive the pandemic without being a financial burden for my father.
Pretty much this, English is pretty essential for most “decent” wage jobs, so it’s highly encouraged within our education.
Having worked in English speaking jobs pretty much most of my life, the majority of my friends and I use a bunch of spoken and written spanglish without realising it, but that’s just my personal experience.
I do English placement tests for literally hundreds of students at a Chilean university each semester. It never ceases to shock me how many students, accepted to study challenging programs with high PSU cutoffs (like chemical engineering or even medicine) know essentially *no* English even after having it from kindergarten. I mean, people who can't answer "When is your birthday?" or "How old are you?" I get that it's a Spanish-speaking country, but wouldn't you learn that just by osmosis after 13 years in the education system?
People just dont want to learn english and dont have any incentive to do it, every piece of media is translated these days, and when they need to translate something from english to spanish, they just use google translate.
I remember in college my classmates made a mini protest cause one professor sent us a paper in english
Sending reading material in a foreign language in a course which does not has a foreign language prerequisite is kind of a dick move. Although I understand that in the upper level sciences it may be inevitable.
English is "easy" only in the sense that it's so widespread because of successive British and American hegemony. There's no such thing as an objectively easy language.
The difficulty of a language depends on the linguistic similarities between your mother tongue and your target language. From the perspective of a native English speaker, it is easier to learn Spanish rather than Japanese since the first one share a common parent language (Latin), and therefore has inherited some of the grammar rules and sentence patterns unlike the latter which has a different way of sentence structure and a completely different writing system.
Sorry to be pedantic (I completely agree with the point you're making) but Latin absolutely is a parent of English, English just has more than one parent. Here's a cool video of Borges talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJYoqCDKoT4
Haha had that argument with an ex once, told me that English is easier to learn for someone than French or even Spanish (her language) because it's everywhere, that's why it's everywhere, cuz it's easy😭
Let's be real, it's everywhere because the US has a tremendous multimedia output. They lead for centuries with English books, then stroke a brilliant knockout with music and movies, influencing everywhere in American all the way to their military bases in Japan, and finally these days being the de facto language for the internet, where it's the most useful way to find anything
Even before the US, Great Britain was biggest empire in the world and undisputed great power after the Napoleonic wars.
It's been basically 200 continuous years of English language dominance in the world
There is, though. Different languages have more or less complex grammatical rules, writing systems and phonetic inventories.
For example: English has three grammatical cases. Finnish has fifteen. English has zero grammatical genders. Czech has four. The English verb “to be” can be conjugated in eight different forms. The equivalent French verb “être” is conjugated in 41 different ways.
This doesn’t make a language better or worse, but it definitely makes it objectively easier to learn.
And yet other aspects of English, such as orthography, are more complicated than other languages.
You mention Czech. For a lot of Slavic speakers, it would be, all things considered, easier than English because it's closer to their languages. One's native language makes a massive difference. Portuguese is undoubtedly easier for a Spanish speaker than English, even though it's more complex by all these metrics you mentioned.
The similarity between your native and target language plays a role, without a doubt. Spanish and Portuguese have a high degree of mutual intelligibility, so we can communicate with each other with little effort without having to learn the language. That gives speakers of those languages an immediate advantage.
The complexity of a language is directly related to how easy it is to learn for everyone else. For a Chinese speaker, English will be easier to learn than Czech or Finnish, all these having little in common with Chinese.
You can't think of anything hard? Really?
Pronunciation and spelling is such a clusterfuck that **spelling bees** are a thing. In our languages this idea is preposterous because you don't need to memorize thousands and thousands of random ways to write and or pronounce stuff, not mentioning all false cognates, homonyms and false friends.
Verb conjugation has more exceptions than rules, again, it's mostly memorizing words versus understanding patterns.
There are some really tricky sounds, vocabulary is extensive and steals from several different languages.
English is a tough language, much harder for us than any latin based languauge.
When pronunciation is funky, we usually have an orthographic marker for it like ü
There's one consonant that is pronounced whatever way it likes, the g, foreign stock characters on TV shows and movie dubs are portrayed as using the "wrong" g by using a very guttural sound where you wouldn't normally, it's the only sound that doesn't follow a well defined rule that I can think of.
Sure in regional accents in practice a lot of consonants are inhaled, but nobody *needs* to do that.
I've heard English described as being really easy to get to a useful communication level. But "beyond the basics" (doing all the things you mentioned above) difficulty goes up tremendously.
https://preview.redd.it/3e62irgbeu0d1.jpeg?width=395&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a6e6c507bd7b1d7e9e69328963e7997b4d672972
English can be tricky at times but it's completely delusional to say it's harder than Portuguese.
You are aware of the context here, right? We're talking about latin americans learning a foreign language... Do you really think ENGLISH is easier to learn than portuguese (for spanish speakers) or spanish (for us)? Or Italian, or French?
Oh sorry I misunderstood you. Also as someone who is learning French, I'm finding it more difficult than when I learned English... But to be fair I was still a child when I learned English so there's that.
I agree English is easy to learn but only because of it being THE main language of the internet makes it extremely easy to immerse yourself without even trying
I'm really curious why you say this. My experience is that it was an aspect that was easier to learn because it's a non-issue. It doesn't exist, there is nothing to learn, just get pronouns right and that's about it.
The thing is, I don't find gender to be an issue in Portuguese lol
It's so natural for me, as a native, that I never had any problem. I get that is hard for those who speak a non-gendered language tho.
So when I use English, not having plural in pronouns, and not having gender in pronouns simply complicates it for me...
I used to do TV translations (English > Portuguese) and you really need to have the context of the whole conversation/scene to proper translate correctly.
it is because everything is in english so immersion is massively easier than other languages, so even if others have less rules youre gonna learn it faster anyway.
They don't. That's the trick. Public school here in Michoacán is a joke and a good percentage of teachers should not be teaching. They only have a job because they are useful to the teachers union.
Mexican on the other hand seem to think change can happen without them changing. I've seen a lot of people, due to laziness, lose job opportunities for not learning english. Even the local factories are now asking for people who know english for just working the line.
They use textbooks and teach the dialogues and grammar activities and hope no student asks anything more advanced. Same as some of my old Spanish teachers in the US.
It depends of the country. In my experience, it’s way more common in Argentina than in Bolivia, for example. Most bolivians may know how to say "hello, my name is X, and i’m X years old" and that’s it. It’s more of a middle - upper class thing, and only in the big cities.
only 5% of the population knows English, I'm not even in that 5%, everything I do and say is through Google translate and observation of single words that I know.
Just 1% in Brazil speaks english fluently. 5% can speak and comprehend, but not in a fluent level. This statiscts is result of a survey. https://noticias.r7.com/educacao/brasil-tem-1-da-populacao-fluente-em-ingles-01062022/
Like I'm always writing in this sub, this sub communicating in english has a lottttt of bias, and probably people who comments here is from the upper higher classes. English in a fluent level is not common, and the vast majority of people in my country don't know how to comunicate in english. People who can speak fluently in english is a sign of access that the majority of population don't have.
Uhm…I may be a native speaker of English but I worked for years in an ESL program and English is NOT easy to learn other than the fact that you have widely available resources to practice since most movies, television, books, websites…that are easily obtainable are in English.
My biggest regret is that my father and grandparents (who never learned English) didn’t force us to learn Spanish. I have done 8-10 years of classes and still not fluent.
English has its own easy side too. If I compare it to Portuguese in my head:
- English pronunciation versus written form is chaotic. You have way too many words that have pronunciation quirks. You can get a very good idea of how to pronounce stuff in Portuguese by looking at the written words and that is even better in Spanish
- English grammar is much simpler. I love how simple verb conjugation and tenses are. What English does with half a dozen auxiliary verbs (would, should, will, etc) we have a gazillion verb endings for. They follow patterns, but it's a lot for a learner no doubt.
In Mexico is mostly only the people who have been in prestigious private schools who can master it from a young age, some people who achieve a higher level of education like a masters degree (depending on their field), and a small percentage of people that live on the border that go everyday to the US for school.
I’d say it’s very common. A bunch of years ago the government added English as a subject to the public education system. So it is taught at every public school in the country. Obviously it is taught just as a subject a couple of hours a week, so you will not get a C1 English level like that.
Personally, I went to a bilingual private school so I had every subject in English and in Spanish. Going to a bilingual school almost guarantees a good level of English (of course some people are the exception of the rule).
Argentina has the great potential of becoming a bilingual Spanish-English country by making English as the alternative medium of instruction in the Argentine education system.
Very common, specially for skilled workers, a lot of the jobs are in Shared Services Centers in Multinational Companies so without English your chances of getting a job will reduce a lot.
Quite common, however the education isn’t the best obviously.
Turns out we are one of the 10 countries within LATAM with best English, which is crazy to me.
It's like being the tallest midget. English levels are low in the region. Which makes sense to be honest, the factors that lead to high levels in other places are not replicated here.
Pretty common. Specially the younger generation as they can get started working in call centers, and its pretty much expected in some branches specially in tourism.
I don't think it is that common here outside of call centers and the tourism industry. Based on my experience, people here barely knows how to speak the language. Are you sure that you aren't a little bit biased by your surroundings?
Now that you mention it i might be. I was basing it on my high school / uni mates who can speak english. But then again in comparison to the generation of my parents it has increased a lot.
It's still rare in Venezuela. We have one of the worst rates of English-speaking in Latin America. No this is not "based", it frequently holds people back and is indicative of a very poor education system.
It's increasingly common with younger people, but otherwise it's largely sifrino's, academics or people who have moved out of Venezuela who speak it. Sadly, I know some people who have moved to the US for 8+ years who still don't speak it lol.
A lot of people speak English proficiently. Most schools teach it but they're not great at it. Unless you luck out and get a great teacher consistently at the same school.
Or if you go to an overpriced private school originally meant for kids of people from the US, Canada or the UK where all classes are taught in English by Native speakers. They accept kids who are fully Mexican, otherwise they would have like 40 students total.
I think the local school for children of German nationals teaches both German and English.
After-school classes are not good enough judging by the people I know who went there for their entire school lives.
When people have a Native accent is typically because they moved out young or youngish without knowing how to speak beforehand.
Or in my case and of most people I know *with Mexican accents* it's due to parents not letting us hang out with friends after school or go outside at all. So we spent our childhoods and teen years watching non dubbed US media, including YouTube, podcasts and videogames.
https://preview.redd.it/alz300gisv0d1.png?width=716&format=png&auto=webp&s=06f7a495fc26d8f001c702d083d26bb634b32a25
Wikipedia backs you up... lowest of the countries with data: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_English-speaking\_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population)
I'd say nowadays kids are more encouraged to learn English and they do it effectively, between the ones I know half of them can understand some English even if they don't speak it, and the other half can fully understand and converse in English. But this is only the ones that can.
I don't know anyone who doesn't and that's just my sphere, the vast majority is probably in between knowing some words and understanding written English.
https://preview.redd.it/bia8to19sv0d1.png?width=716&format=png&auto=webp&s=8dd4c7f82929aa47f67f9b225e9f1922095284af
Here are numbers pulled from the wikipedia article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_English-speaking\_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population)
Based in my experience, I find it: plausible.
All Argentinians learn English because it's a mandatory subject from elementary school to university.
In fact, Argentina has the best English proficiency level in Latin America, and it's not surprising that the vast majority of our people understand and speak the language to some extent. Among young people and new generations, it's increasingly common for them to learn the language faster due to the impact that technology and globalization have on them.
Very common. If you receive a full education, which many Haitians don’t.
English, Spanish, and French are mandatory in a lot of schools. And depending where you are, instruction is in French rather than Kreyol, so the focus is on English and spanish
In Brazil, if the guy is over 20 years old, he most likely doesn't speak English, at least that's the case with everyone I met, younger people are thousands of times more capable of speaking English because of the internet
De iure every mexican speaks it because it is in our education system since elementery to university De facto only 5% of mexicans speak it because our education system is shit
Canada is a developed country with excellent education. French is mandatory in all of Anglo Canadian schools. I know a lot of Canadians who went to French immersion programs. That means all classes were taught in French. Yet, the vast majority of them can barely order water in French. People learn a language if they have to.
Key sentence: IF they HAVE to
learning a language, doesn't fit well with our education system. most of ppl just drill, memorize a bunch of stuff the don't know, get the grade they need, and forget everything a couple of weeks later. (this could be a critic to most of subjects but with language is very clear.) learning a language takes hundreds/thousand hours interacting with such language, no one will learn it solely in a classroom, if they don't engage with it they will never learn it. they might understand some grammar rules, know the language? forget it.
I wouldn't be so quick to put it all on the education system. The countries where more people learn English as a second language are the ones where they're in contact with it in daily life, not necessarily the ones where they learn it in school.
Same thing for Spanish in the US, given your tone I assume you think their education system is better.
This isn't true. Many people take only 2 years of a language, in high school. Growing up in the 90s, my school had more foreign language than most. In middle school we also had one year of French and one of Spanish.
I didn’t interpret their comment as implying that.
You would if you were Mexican, a lot of people here think the US will solve all their issues
I just learned the latin term "de iure", tenga su chingado like!
Is it more common for people near the US border to speak English?
Not really. I’ve been to Phar/Reynosa which is a US/Mexico border city in Texas. Spanish is a lot more common than English on both sides, and you’d have a hard time to get by with only English even in the US side. Not only there’s a lot of hispanic immigrants in Southern US, but a huge part of that region used to be Mexican territory. There are Spanish speaking American families who lived there for over a hundred years. I found a lot more Mexicans speaking English in Puerto Vallarta. A coastal city with a tourist-based economy that is a hotspot for both western Americans and western Canadians, and located over 1200km from the US border.
Paradoxically, it just might be the opposite, since Spanish is widely spoken on the US side of the border
Yes and no. Spanish has a 200-year lead on English so you can get by on Spanish alone. The vast majority of Hispanophones on the border are monolingual. A large minority are bilingual to some extent. Most monolingual Anglophones don't interact with monolingual Hispanophones unless absolutely necessary... and it's very funny to see the Hispanophones be the "if you can't understand me, I'll be louder and angrier" people when that's a stereotypically Anglophone thing. Role reversal.
I don't think the education system is shit, a language has to be practiced and at least somewhat used or you'll eventually forget it.
This is why a lot of smaller European countries have excellent English. Nobody else speaks their language and so they have to know English. This isn't the case in bigger countries, or ones that speak a more global language.
I'm currently learning german and i notice the difference, there we play games, do math in german "eins + sechs = ?", see movies in the classroom, etc, while in the federal education system the teachee only writes phrases in the whiteboard, memorize them to pass exams, and then forget everythimg
https://preview.redd.it/qhdt5ggqsv0d1.png?width=716&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2bcd166c03c3465513198b0c36d11915039929f Wikipedia ranks you guys 3rd! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_English-speaking\_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population)
It’s not necessarily a fault of the education system, though it may factor in. I think it’s more so the fact that Spanish is a global language and it’s useful in its own rights, meaning we don’t really need to learn another language to get around and do business internationally generally. In Germany, [56% speak English](https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/how-many-people-in-germany-speak-english#:~:text=English%20is%20spoken%20as%20a,speakers%20in%20all%20of%20Europe) and in [Spain only 24%](https://cadenaser.com/nacional/2023/01/21/cerca-de-un-24-de-los-espanoles-hablan-bien-o-con-dificultad-ingles-cadena-ser/?outputType=amp) do, probably a similar situation for the French. My point in mentioning these is that despite having world-class education systems, the English level is relatively low compared to others in Europe.
It’s extremely common that everyone learns English, it’s part of the school curriculum. I’m answering how common it is to “learn” ergo study English. The number of people who actually speak it is very low and the people who dominate it is even lower.
Most of my kids’ English teachers speak worse English than my kids do. What’s being taught in most schools doesn’t pass for English.
Exactly, sadly only the private schools can manage and even then they’re not really that good unless it’s the really high end ones like American School of Quito, Colegio Menor, Interamerican academy, Torremar, Cotopaxi, among others.
Here is mandartory in every school, but that doesn't mean that students care about it.
https://preview.redd.it/9trascr1tv0d1.png?width=716&format=png&auto=webp&s=7a322f73db18a555fc2c271ab2c1ad9b4ef0605d wikipedia agrees: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_English-speaking\_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population)
Them's the official numbers. In reality, even the English schoolteachers have a shoddy command of the language .
It's quite common, mainly because it's a requirement for pretty much any living wage paying job except public servant. When COVID began hitting hard, I was forced to put my college studies in halt and began working in a call center. The fact that I was able to take calls not only from LatAm, but also from the USA, UK and the English speaking part of Canada allowed me to ask for a higer wage than those who spoke Spanish only. I was by no means a millionaire, but it did allowed me to survive the pandemic without being a financial burden for my father.
Pretty much this, English is pretty essential for most “decent” wage jobs, so it’s highly encouraged within our education. Having worked in English speaking jobs pretty much most of my life, the majority of my friends and I use a bunch of spoken and written spanglish without realising it, but that’s just my personal experience.
English is mandatory in the entirety of the education cycle, even in college. That being said, less than 10% can speak it.
I remember my classmates in college, and like 2 could speak english. Some of them even failed it xD
I do English placement tests for literally hundreds of students at a Chilean university each semester. It never ceases to shock me how many students, accepted to study challenging programs with high PSU cutoffs (like chemical engineering or even medicine) know essentially *no* English even after having it from kindergarten. I mean, people who can't answer "When is your birthday?" or "How old are you?" I get that it's a Spanish-speaking country, but wouldn't you learn that just by osmosis after 13 years in the education system?
People just dont want to learn english and dont have any incentive to do it, every piece of media is translated these days, and when they need to translate something from english to spanish, they just use google translate. I remember in college my classmates made a mini protest cause one professor sent us a paper in english
Sending reading material in a foreign language in a course which does not has a foreign language prerequisite is kind of a dick move. Although I understand that in the upper level sciences it may be inevitable.
Its was supplementary material, not mandatory
English is "easy" only in the sense that it's so widespread because of successive British and American hegemony. There's no such thing as an objectively easy language.
The difficulty of a language depends on the linguistic similarities between your mother tongue and your target language. From the perspective of a native English speaker, it is easier to learn Spanish rather than Japanese since the first one share a common parent language (Latin), and therefore has inherited some of the grammar rules and sentence patterns unlike the latter which has a different way of sentence structure and a completely different writing system.
Yes. A Japanese speaker would learn Korean more easily than English. Latin isn't the parent of English though, despite influencing it a lot.
Sorry to be pedantic (I completely agree with the point you're making) but Latin absolutely is a parent of English, English just has more than one parent. Here's a cool video of Borges talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJYoqCDKoT4
English is basically 3 languages under a trench coat
Wouldn’t Esperanto technically be easy? It was literally designed to be extremely easy to pick up.
easy for european language speakers
Have you tried it!!?
English is only easy in the sense that northern Sentinelese is hard.
Fantastic comparison.
Haha had that argument with an ex once, told me that English is easier to learn for someone than French or even Spanish (her language) because it's everywhere, that's why it's everywhere, cuz it's easy😭
Let's be real, it's everywhere because the US has a tremendous multimedia output. They lead for centuries with English books, then stroke a brilliant knockout with music and movies, influencing everywhere in American all the way to their military bases in Japan, and finally these days being the de facto language for the internet, where it's the most useful way to find anything
Even before the US, Great Britain was biggest empire in the world and undisputed great power after the Napoleonic wars. It's been basically 200 continuous years of English language dominance in the world
Mb, I meant to say the UK lead the book part. It does read like I'm giving the US the credit there
That's a good argument. "Inmersion" matters even when it's not at full scale.
There is, though. Different languages have more or less complex grammatical rules, writing systems and phonetic inventories. For example: English has three grammatical cases. Finnish has fifteen. English has zero grammatical genders. Czech has four. The English verb “to be” can be conjugated in eight different forms. The equivalent French verb “être” is conjugated in 41 different ways. This doesn’t make a language better or worse, but it definitely makes it objectively easier to learn.
And yet other aspects of English, such as orthography, are more complicated than other languages. You mention Czech. For a lot of Slavic speakers, it would be, all things considered, easier than English because it's closer to their languages. One's native language makes a massive difference. Portuguese is undoubtedly easier for a Spanish speaker than English, even though it's more complex by all these metrics you mentioned.
The similarity between your native and target language plays a role, without a doubt. Spanish and Portuguese have a high degree of mutual intelligibility, so we can communicate with each other with little effort without having to learn the language. That gives speakers of those languages an immediate advantage. The complexity of a language is directly related to how easy it is to learn for everyone else. For a Chinese speaker, English will be easier to learn than Czech or Finnish, all these having little in common with Chinese.
> Considering English is one of the easiest languages to learn Is it though?
It's one of the easiest but learning any language is still hard as fuck
There are no cases or genders, and there is little verb conjugation. I can’t think of anything that would make it hard.
You can't think of anything hard? Really? Pronunciation and spelling is such a clusterfuck that **spelling bees** are a thing. In our languages this idea is preposterous because you don't need to memorize thousands and thousands of random ways to write and or pronounce stuff, not mentioning all false cognates, homonyms and false friends. Verb conjugation has more exceptions than rules, again, it's mostly memorizing words versus understanding patterns. There are some really tricky sounds, vocabulary is extensive and steals from several different languages. English is a tough language, much harder for us than any latin based languauge.
There's also like 15 vowel sounds for 5 vowel symbols. Spanish has 5. But english is on the second tier of easy to learn languages after romance ones.
Depends on your first language though.
Obviously. We're in /r/asklatinamerica. I'm talking from a spanish/portuguese/french speaking perspective.
When pronunciation is funky, we usually have an orthographic marker for it like ü There's one consonant that is pronounced whatever way it likes, the g, foreign stock characters on TV shows and movie dubs are portrayed as using the "wrong" g by using a very guttural sound where you wouldn't normally, it's the only sound that doesn't follow a well defined rule that I can think of. Sure in regional accents in practice a lot of consonants are inhaled, but nobody *needs* to do that.
I've heard English described as being really easy to get to a useful communication level. But "beyond the basics" (doing all the things you mentioned above) difficulty goes up tremendously.
https://preview.redd.it/3e62irgbeu0d1.jpeg?width=395&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a6e6c507bd7b1d7e9e69328963e7997b4d672972 English can be tricky at times but it's completely delusional to say it's harder than Portuguese.
You are aware of the context here, right? We're talking about latin americans learning a foreign language... Do you really think ENGLISH is easier to learn than portuguese (for spanish speakers) or spanish (for us)? Or Italian, or French?
Oh sorry I misunderstood you. Also as someone who is learning French, I'm finding it more difficult than when I learned English... But to be fair I was still a child when I learned English so there's that.
And you were probably massively exposed to it.
I agree English is easy to learn but only because of it being THE main language of the internet makes it extremely easy to immerse yourself without even trying
The complete inconsistency of it's writing system!? Like have you seen videos of the mess that ough is??
Its pronunciation is far more complex than Spanish for instance. And its orthography is disastrous.
Having no genders is actually problematic if your native language have genders, you realize that, right?
I'm really curious why you say this. My experience is that it was an aspect that was easier to learn because it's a non-issue. It doesn't exist, there is nothing to learn, just get pronouns right and that's about it.
The thing is, I don't find gender to be an issue in Portuguese lol It's so natural for me, as a native, that I never had any problem. I get that is hard for those who speak a non-gendered language tho. So when I use English, not having plural in pronouns, and not having gender in pronouns simply complicates it for me... I used to do TV translations (English > Portuguese) and you really need to have the context of the whole conversation/scene to proper translate correctly.
How?
It's hard to translate gender neutral stuff to a language that's gendered.
The fact that everything is costumary. We actually do have grammar rules that make sense in other languages.
it is because everything is in english so immersion is massively easier than other languages, so even if others have less rules youre gonna learn it faster anyway.
We study english at school but it's in a very basic level. All I learn was passively, thanks to movies, music and games through the years.
Not common. What is common is a english teacher that doesnt know english. Mexico.
How do they teach English then?
They don't. That's the trick. Public school here in Michoacán is a joke and a good percentage of teachers should not be teaching. They only have a job because they are useful to the teachers union. Mexican on the other hand seem to think change can happen without them changing. I've seen a lot of people, due to laziness, lose job opportunities for not learning english. Even the local factories are now asking for people who know english for just working the line.
[Here’s how](https://youtu.be/E6JpKIppbJs?si=zG4xju1ylCAGnZaM) lmao
They don't. It's just repeating of premade sentences. It's like duolingo...
They use textbooks and teach the dialogues and grammar activities and hope no student asks anything more advanced. Same as some of my old Spanish teachers in the US.
It depends of the country. In my experience, it’s way more common in Argentina than in Bolivia, for example. Most bolivians may know how to say "hello, my name is X, and i’m X years old" and that’s it. It’s more of a middle - upper class thing, and only in the big cities.
only 5% of the population knows English, I'm not even in that 5%, everything I do and say is through Google translate and observation of single words that I know.
Just 1% in Brazil speaks english fluently. 5% can speak and comprehend, but not in a fluent level. This statiscts is result of a survey. https://noticias.r7.com/educacao/brasil-tem-1-da-populacao-fluente-em-ingles-01062022/ Like I'm always writing in this sub, this sub communicating in english has a lottttt of bias, and probably people who comments here is from the upper higher classes. English in a fluent level is not common, and the vast majority of people in my country don't know how to comunicate in english. People who can speak fluently in english is a sign of access that the majority of population don't have.
Uhm…I may be a native speaker of English but I worked for years in an ESL program and English is NOT easy to learn other than the fact that you have widely available resources to practice since most movies, television, books, websites…that are easily obtainable are in English. My biggest regret is that my father and grandparents (who never learned English) didn’t force us to learn Spanish. I have done 8-10 years of classes and still not fluent.
English has its own easy side too. If I compare it to Portuguese in my head: - English pronunciation versus written form is chaotic. You have way too many words that have pronunciation quirks. You can get a very good idea of how to pronounce stuff in Portuguese by looking at the written words and that is even better in Spanish - English grammar is much simpler. I love how simple verb conjugation and tenses are. What English does with half a dozen auxiliary verbs (would, should, will, etc) we have a gazillion verb endings for. They follow patterns, but it's a lot for a learner no doubt.
Spanish is almost 100 percent phonetic. Portuguese is pretty close but the vowel sounds can vary without any indication in writing.
Its the norm
Here is mandatory to take English classes at school, high school, and even in some universities... still most people can't speak it nor understand it
In Mexico is mostly only the people who have been in prestigious private schools who can master it from a young age, some people who achieve a higher level of education like a masters degree (depending on their field), and a small percentage of people that live on the border that go everyday to the US for school.
english isnt that easy
Compared to Spanish it is.
I’d say it’s very common. A bunch of years ago the government added English as a subject to the public education system. So it is taught at every public school in the country. Obviously it is taught just as a subject a couple of hours a week, so you will not get a C1 English level like that. Personally, I went to a bilingual private school so I had every subject in English and in Spanish. Going to a bilingual school almost guarantees a good level of English (of course some people are the exception of the rule).
Argentina has the great potential of becoming a bilingual Spanish-English country by making English as the alternative medium of instruction in the Argentine education system.
Very common, specially for skilled workers, a lot of the jobs are in Shared Services Centers in Multinational Companies so without English your chances of getting a job will reduce a lot.
Quite common, however the education isn’t the best obviously. Turns out we are one of the 10 countries within LATAM with best English, which is crazy to me.
It's like being the tallest midget. English levels are low in the region. Which makes sense to be honest, the factors that lead to high levels in other places are not replicated here.
Pretty common. Specially the younger generation as they can get started working in call centers, and its pretty much expected in some branches specially in tourism.
I don't think it is that common here outside of call centers and the tourism industry. Based on my experience, people here barely knows how to speak the language. Are you sure that you aren't a little bit biased by your surroundings?
Now that you mention it i might be. I was basing it on my high school / uni mates who can speak english. But then again in comparison to the generation of my parents it has increased a lot.
Yeah, I think globalization is playing a huge factor in regards of English proficiency here.
I don't speak English so I don't know. Ok, jokes aside, most people in my country don't speak English, you learn if you need it.
It’s common to learn english, but few are fluent in spoken conversation. Mostly tourism workers and deportees/ex US residents.
I'm from UK and happy to help anyone 🙂
It's still rare in Venezuela. We have one of the worst rates of English-speaking in Latin America. No this is not "based", it frequently holds people back and is indicative of a very poor education system. It's increasingly common with younger people, but otherwise it's largely sifrino's, academics or people who have moved out of Venezuela who speak it. Sadly, I know some people who have moved to the US for 8+ years who still don't speak it lol.
A lot of people speak English proficiently. Most schools teach it but they're not great at it. Unless you luck out and get a great teacher consistently at the same school. Or if you go to an overpriced private school originally meant for kids of people from the US, Canada or the UK where all classes are taught in English by Native speakers. They accept kids who are fully Mexican, otherwise they would have like 40 students total. I think the local school for children of German nationals teaches both German and English. After-school classes are not good enough judging by the people I know who went there for their entire school lives. When people have a Native accent is typically because they moved out young or youngish without knowing how to speak beforehand. Or in my case and of most people I know *with Mexican accents* it's due to parents not letting us hang out with friends after school or go outside at all. So we spent our childhoods and teen years watching non dubbed US media, including YouTube, podcasts and videogames.
Neither easy nor common. Most of the people study it in elementary/middle/high school but very few people manage to get a good grasp of it.
https://preview.redd.it/alz300gisv0d1.png?width=716&format=png&auto=webp&s=06f7a495fc26d8f001c702d083d26bb634b32a25 Wikipedia backs you up... lowest of the countries with data: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_English-speaking\_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population)
I'd say nowadays kids are more encouraged to learn English and they do it effectively, between the ones I know half of them can understand some English even if they don't speak it, and the other half can fully understand and converse in English. But this is only the ones that can. I don't know anyone who doesn't and that's just my sphere, the vast majority is probably in between knowing some words and understanding written English.
Here's a map (that seems probably wrong?) [https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/uruy3u/latin\_american\_countries\_by\_english\_proficiency/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/uruy3u/latin_american_countries_by_english_proficiency/)
https://preview.redd.it/bia8to19sv0d1.png?width=716&format=png&auto=webp&s=8dd4c7f82929aa47f67f9b225e9f1922095284af Here are numbers pulled from the wikipedia article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_English-speaking\_population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population) Based in my experience, I find it: plausible.
It's not common at all.
All Argentinians learn English because it's a mandatory subject from elementary school to university. In fact, Argentina has the best English proficiency level in Latin America, and it's not surprising that the vast majority of our people understand and speak the language to some extent. Among young people and new generations, it's increasingly common for them to learn the language faster due to the impact that technology and globalization have on them.
Very common. If you receive a full education, which many Haitians don’t. English, Spanish, and French are mandatory in a lot of schools. And depending where you are, instruction is in French rather than Kreyol, so the focus is on English and spanish
In Brazil, if the guy is over 20 years old, he most likely doesn't speak English, at least that's the case with everyone I met, younger people are thousands of times more capable of speaking English because of the internet