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The European Union’s remarkable growth performance relative to the United States (www.bruegel.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/europe@feddit.de
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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

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[–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

I mostly know the situation in Germany, the Nordic countries, the Netherlands and some eastern European countries. When i recently visited Denmark i was positively shocked that people in their 40s and 50s overwhelmingly were fluent in English too. In the eastern European countries it is a strong generational divide. Young people tend to be very good english speakers while there are very few among the older generations. I guess that is the result of learning russian as second language in school and english only as third language and probably many people didn't learn english in school at all. Judging from my parents there isn't much of the russian left that they learned in school either.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years 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.

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