this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
50 points (100.0% liked)

Europe

106 readers
1 users here now

News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺

(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures

Rules

(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)

  1. Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
  2. No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
  3. No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.

Also check out !yurop@lemm.ee

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
poVoq@slrpnk.net
50
The European Union’s remarkable growth performance relative to the United States (www.bruegel.org)
submitted 10 months ago by Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de to c/europe@feddit.de
23 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The article chooses to take a metric that you usually do not see much: GDP per employee and per hours worked, at purchasing power standards

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Same experience as yours when I visited Norway a few years back, 50 year old people were at ease with English. I guess the Norwegian media only get you so far ha ha.

To contrast, in France, French-speaking Belgium, Italy, Spain, (I dont' know about French-speaking Switzerland), even young people would have issues speaking English. You can clearly see the divide here:

https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/WIBIwq6RdJvcD9bc8RMd/cefcom-epi-site/reports/2023/ef-epi-2023-english.pdf

Portugal is the exception, I don't know why.

[–] HarvesterOfEyes@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

Portuguese here. This is anecdotal evidence but, as far as I can tell, a lot of our proficiency comes, essentially, to constant exposure to the English language since the early to mid-90s. We don't dub English-speaking media (apart from movies and tv shows more aimed at kids, but even then, Cartoon Network didn't even have subs when I was a kid and I still watched it religiously), the video games we played when we were kids also didn't have a Portuguese language option so we were basically forced to learn English.

And now that the Internet has become widespread throughout the country, the younger generation consume a lot of English-speaking content, so they have little trouble with speaking and writing in it.

This results in a good % of the population having decent to good English, not just the kids but a lot of people in their 30s (and some in their 40s) too.