Zumindest im Vergleich zu anderen deutschsprachigen Ländern.
Ich dachte immer, dass Schweizer besser mit Sprachen umgehen können als ihre deutschen Nachbarn, da sie kein Problem damit haben, Französisch oder Italienisch richtig gut auszusprechen. Ich bin Schweizer und Deutscher und kann auch Englisch gut aussprechen.
https://i.redd.it/b5744t2qc9ed1.jpeg
Von Tashunka030
25 Kommentare
Remember, we’re about 25% French.
Hard to believe
Don’t trust any source
Because the priority, until very recently, was learning another or two other national languages rather than English. It also depends where you are though, in most cities basically everyone speaks English quite well.
Think about pronunciation. Think about how we pronounce German. It’s ridiculous. It’s almost the same with english.
English usually our 3rd or 4th language…
I suppose we just don’t really care. Learning a second national language is already hard enough.
The methodology from wikipedia shows a likely self selection bias:
The EF EPI 2023 edition was calculated using test data from 2.1 million test takers in 2022. The test takers were self-selected. In order to be included, a country was required to have at least 400 test takers.
This is done by an online proficiency test put together by a chain of private language schools, EF English First. They don’t exactly have rocket scientists working for them.
Because English is not a national language and the focus at school is on the national languages. But it used to be even worse, my parents, for example, never had English lessons at school
It’s hard to believe honestly, but my experience might just be circumstantial. I grew up in Geneva, most of my friends and I sucked at English in our teenage years… but many of us are decent at English now as adults. I live in the States now, so my English is excellent.
I have yet to hear a Dutch guy speak English in an accent which doesn’t completely ruin and undermine everything they’re saying.
Having that said, the Dutch do have an excellent knowledge of the English language!
And I mean post could be right! I’m from Switzerland, living in Belgium (next to the Netherlands). English is at a really high level in these parts! My Swiss family members speak English significantly less fluently when compared to the average Belgian high-school student.
>the EF EPI is based on test data from more than 2,200,000 test takers around the world who took the EF Standard English Test (EF SET) or one of our English placement tests in 2022.
The index doesn’t test English proficiency of a country’s population. It tests English proficiency of the people who take the test by this private company to document their proficiency.
A country scoring high means that many people who are very proficient took the test, presumably to prove or verify their already blatantly obvious proficiency.
Why the average proficiency among people who take this test in Switzerland is lower than in Austria, and higher than France, is probably more related to the reasons these people have for taking the test, than to the average proficiency of the population.
So to answer your question: Your premise that „swiss people are so bad at english compared to other german speaking countries“ has not been proven.
That should settle the question „I don’t speak German/French/Italian, can I get a job in Switzerland with only English?“ once and for all.
I mean in most countries english is the second language they would learn, here usually it’s either german or french, and then sometimes followed by german/french/italian, and finally followed by english. People in Ticino sometime at the same year they start learning english (3rd year of middleschool) they also start learning Latin…
Can’t never exhaust myself enough to say how dumb this is. English should be 2 national language across the country.
Well „so bad“ isn’t as bad as you think. Our index is still considered a „high english proficiency“
Also think about all the 60 year old people from the country side. They didn’t really learn english at school and also have never used it ever since.
In Switzerland up to a couple years ago the general goal was to learn a second language of our country, not English.
Funny that Belgium is so much better than us and also struggles with multilingualism
There is a clear trend to observe here: the closer the natural language is to english the more proficient the people are on average.
Dutch is the closest language to english on the planet, so naturally the dutch have an easier time with english. Then come the other germanic languages.
In Switzerland we have 1/3 french speakers, so it‘s obvious why we are not as good as the germans on average for example.
If you took only the german speaking swiss, it would probably be one of the top places.
1st just until recent years we learnt another national language at school first. 35 years ago we started French at 7th grade (in German speaking area) and English at 8th (we could choose between English and Italian). About 30 years ago they started French at 5th grade, English at 7th.
It’s just since a few years that English starts at 3rd or 4th grade.
2nd nearly all movies and series in TV are Synchronised to German. We were hardly exposed to English.
But that’s changing now, at least in Urban areas the Kids get exposed to English much more.
Depends on the place. If you’d go to zurich, people speak very good english, but if you went to Schwyz instead I think the english is gonna be significantly worse. Also, english is likely the 3rd, 4th or 5th language for quite a big chunk of our population
I remember that a few years ago the results of this test were published my language region in Switzerland. And all regions in Switzerland scored higher than the corresponding neighboring country, eg Romandie higher than France, Ticino higher than Italy, etc. Not sure if this is still the case
Mostly because we don’t really need to? Learning English is a priority for people who need to leave their country and find employment in another one.
Belgium? 👀
At English*
This test has nothing to do with pronunciation. The EF SAT is a placement test when one is interested in language courses offered by EF and is computer based. You can do it here [https://www.efset.org/](https://www.efset.org/)
There is a inherent bias as likely only a few on C1 or C2 level will ever do this test.
This data shows more what level the customers of EF are in each country, than English language proficiency per country in general.
Portugal that high?