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Count Roland posted:How is this even possible. Is it just a scam? The education is for the appearance of education, actual learning isn't relevant. The materials are mostly terrible, and frequently the English teachers also do not speak English. English classes in Asia are usually conducted exclusively in the native language, I don't recall ever hearing English used in one when I listened from outside. Obviously learning English is going to be harder in Asia than Europe because the languages are so vastly different, but that's only a small factor.
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Nov 3, 2019 22:07
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Count Roland posted:How is this even possible. Is it just a scam? In my school district in America, we were "learning Spanish" from like 3rd or 4th grade on, but we really didn't learn or study all that much until it got to like, 8th grade. And by that point you had the option to switch to French or German instead. It was very "how are you, where's the bathroom, name these colors, here's how to say a number" sort of level stuff until it got serious in middle school. I wouldn't be surprised if the same sort of thing over there for English.
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Nov 3, 2019 22:16
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Grand Fromage posted:How effective is that education? East Asia starts English officially in third grade, many students start earlier, and uh. Good luck finding people who actually learned anything from it. I had students who'd had six years of daily English classes and could barely read the alphabet, let alone put together a sentence. Scandinavians generally speak good english due to being completely submerged in english language media all the time and if one is below 50 its kinda expected of one to speak it somewhat fluently. Like, we have many commercials completely in english and no one bats an eye because we are so awfully americaniz... submerged in english language media.
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Nov 3, 2019 22:21
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Count Roland posted:How is this even possible. Is it just a scam? scandinavian languages are all similar and all extraordinarily useless to anyone not from the nations in question, and also mutually intelligible with neighbouring languages, so nothing but children's shows get more than a halfassed dub. Everything else gets sent in a foreign language with subs. In countries like France and Russia and Spain people bother to translate. Our genius-nation saviours grow up with subtitled shows and english-version everything else, and this leads them to totally own all the idiots born in places where foreign poo poo actually gets translated. The end result is that they all "speak" four or five "languages" including at least one that is halfway useful globablly and they are the wave of the future*. *except people keep learning english, french, russian, mandarin, german, arabic, spanish, etc etc etc and no one on earth who isn't physically in Sweden has yet tried to learn swedish Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Nov 3, 2019 |
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Nov 3, 2019 22:24
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Thanks mostly to Youtube, my eight-year-old has better English pronounciation than most Norwegian cabinet ministers I've heard in my lifetime.
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Nov 3, 2019 22:29
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I don't really think foreign language education, especially the type offered in schools, really works unless you also have regular contact with the language you're learning, which is why English education in countries which consume alot of English-language culture typically works, but Spanish/French/German rarely does much if anything unless someone for some reason also encounters those alot in daily life as well. Zudgemud posted:Im pretty sure for scandinavia the mandatory multi year native language, english and third language education will bump up that number quite a bit, though most admittedly halfass the third language education. The major immigration also leaves a mark I suppose. In my suburban school class of 20 in the late nineties we had three iranians, a pashtun, two finns and five from former yugoslavia, it wouldn't surprise me if a third of my old class spoke 3 non north germanic languages fluently. Norway has about ~12% of its population being immigrants and children born to immigrants, and alot of those are Swedes (we could get into the Scandinavian perception about the number of immigrants, especially non-European ones, in their countries being way out of proportion to their actual numbers). That will not account for ~50% saying they speak 3 or more foreign languages, that is absolutely people counting being able to mostly just understand Swedish and Danish without any real effort because of the similarity. You might even have alot of people who count the language they learned in the mostly ineffective foreign language education in school (though I myself can actually read French somewhat because of it and probably reinforced by having bought Asterix albums in France and read them, though speaking and understanding spoken French is much harder for me). I have met exceedingly few Norwegians in my life who can speak the non-English foreign language they were taught in school, and in the few cases where they can it's because of their family background or they've spent a semester studying in one of those countries or something like that. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Nov 3, 2019 |
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Nov 3, 2019 22:29
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Grape posted:Danish man posts fairly racist graph that looks like something out of a textbook from 1900, film at 11. Groke posted:Thanks mostly to Youtube, my eight-year-old has better English pronounciation than most Norwegian cabinet ministers I've heard in my lifetime. A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Nov 3, 2019 |
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Nov 3, 2019 22:33
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Yeah. In addition to Norwegian I am fluent in English because I've used it an awful lot for a lot of years (and spent a year in total immersion so can also speak it fluently with nary a hint of an accent, once I get warmed up). Took several years of German in school but can at best manage a use-words-and-gestures kind of communication with an actual German speaker (can mostly get the gist of German newsreaders on TV but that's about as far as it goes). Have picked up some rudimentary Spanish because of going on holiday there a lot but it's still on the level of figuring out how to shop for groceries and have toddler-level conversations with the other toddler parents around the pool. Someone asks me how many languages I speak, the answer is "two".
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Nov 3, 2019 22:38
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:E: one time my flemish bff bragged to me about speaking like 5 languages and then had to call me in the middle of the night out of a bar, like an hour later, to talk to the desk staff at our hotel in loving Lille Most Flemings speak Pop Culture English and questionable school French (unless it happens to be required for their jobs). That's about it. That's the obvious problem with maps like this, how do you objectively determine if someone speaks a language? I've read dozens of books in Spanish, I have a good passive knowledge of it, but I'd still be useless in an actual conversation since I have almost no experience in that situation. I wouldn't say I 'know' it in any meaningful sense. If you ask people to quantify how much languages they speak, many will just use it as an opportunity to show off how cosmopolitan and learned they are.
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Nov 3, 2019 22:42
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Groke posted:Thanks mostly to Youtube, my eight-year-old has better English pronounciation than most Norwegian cabinet ministers I've heard in my lifetime. My six-year-old cousin literally watches french youtubers whose whole thing is translating english ones. And he speaks english well enough, half his family is in the US. Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Nov 3, 2019 |
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Nov 3, 2019 22:42
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:*except people keep learning english, french, russian, mandarin, german, arabic, spanish, etc etc etc and no one on earth who isn't physically in Sweden has yet tried to learn swedish So rude. When I was a teen I halfass tried to learn it for a bit for terrible Swedish pop music until I figured out I was already getting the gist of things and actually committing to being able to speak it would be useless. 
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Nov 3, 2019 22:48
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Count Roland posted:How is this even possible. Is it just a scam? It's not a scam, and it's not even necessarily a sign of a poor education system. It's what happens when you make monolingual children 'learn' a language that they're only ever confronted with in an educational context, and that they're not particularly motivated to seek out elsewhere. I'd say it's the norm for foreign language education in schools the world over, not the exception. You have a choice between lowering your standards or failing 95% of the class, and it's almost always going to be the former. In Belgium, the francophone education system is notorious for the poor quality of its Dutch classes, even in Brussels, precisely for that reason. To avoid this, some ambitious parents simply send their children to Dutch-speaking schools, or even special immersion schools. You end up with this strange situation where most of them are completely garbage at speaking Dutch, and the remainder is perfectly bilingual, whereas in Flanders nearly everyone falls somewhere in between; they speak understandable but middling French.
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Nov 3, 2019 23:04
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A Buttery Pastry's weirder posts are usually gallows humor about the worsening political situation in Denmark. I'm not a fan of that brand of ironic humor, but the dude isn't a bigot and drops kayfabe when it actually matters. As for quality of language education in some places, what I see here causing problems is a mix of incompetence, low exposure to actually spoken foreign language, and awfully convenient incompetence. Before highschool, I had a mix of good and lovely teachers, teaching according to the same mediocre but not awful plan. In highschool, my English professor was rather lovely, but it just so happened that his daughter was giving private English lessons, and would you look at that, people who took her classes had better grades. He and I didn't get exactly get along, to phrase it politely. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar grift operated elsewhere, possibly on a much larger scale. My understanding of English grammar is mostly where it was just before I started highschool (and came in equal measure from classes and from me playing Fallout 1&2, Starcraft, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Leisure Suit Larry, and whatnot whenever mom brought me along when visiting a friend of hers whose adult son left behind a computer with these games on it when he moved out). The only major improvement in my English since then has been expanding my vocabulary. My older nephew picked up a bunch of words from English language cartoons on TV and Youtube, he even learned the words for colors in English before he learned them in Serbian, which worried his parents somewhat. My Russian language professor was an absolute disaster, but we did get to watch a bunch of Russian films, so I picked up bits of it here and there.
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Nov 3, 2019 23:19
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I always felt that here in Germany, second language education is great while third language education sucks. Despite both being taught by the same teachers. Part of that is that because the most common second language is English which is obviously useful and thus easy to motivate. Part of that is because many old foggies still try to push Latin as the preferred third language, they only recently gave up on advertising as the best second language. But a large part is still that there is a lot of teaching time in syllabus for the second language while the third is borderline optional.
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Nov 3, 2019 23:27
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my dad posted:My Russian language professor was an absolute disaster, but we did get to watch a bunch of Russian films, so I picked up bits of it here and there. Sounds like my French language teacher. Though he was at least eccentric and amusing. He still stuck to what I'd call very old fashioned teaching methods, such as him just dictating a bunch of words and us writing them down, and after having talked to a friend of mine's mom who also had classes with him back in the early 80s I'm pretty sure the guy was still using the same overhead slides he was using back then. But yeah, he was very eccentric and weird, and he occasionally fell in his chair when he wasn't actively reading anything for the class or recounting some anecdote. But we watched alot of movies and listened to music, so overall it was pretty great. Except if you were pulled for an exam, pretty much all of those failed.
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Nov 3, 2019 23:31
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:scandinavian languages are all similar and all extraordinarily useless to anyone not from the nations in question, and also mutually intelligible with neighbouring languages, so nothing but children's shows get more than a halfassed dub. Everything else gets sent in a foreign language with subs. In countries like France and Russia and Spain people bother to translate. Our genius-nation saviours grow up with subtitled shows and english-version everything else, and this leads them to totally own all the idiots born in places where foreign poo poo actually gets translated. Plus English is fairly closely related to all those languages aside from Finnish.
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Nov 4, 2019 00:12
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Yeah. It's gotten to the point where some younger Danes will properly code-switch between English and Danish in every day speak - not just inserting English terms, but switching entirely to English for sentences that touch specific Americanized subjects. The younger generations are on their way to being truly bilingual in English and Danish. This dynamic kinda exists in Gatineau, Quebec, and it's cool as hell. It's like a hybridized communication. Another interesting dynamic is that since everyone is bilingual, it's common for people to just speak the language that's more natural to them, but listen to whatever. So you can have a conversation where someone is speaking english and the other is speaking french, but it's not rude or anything because they completely understand eachother. And then again people will still switch back and forth all willy nilly in the process, it's fun.  Language is cool. Learn more languages if you can.
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Nov 4, 2019 00:16
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Sometimes it's a scam, sometimes it's poor education policy. Japanese students finish high school with 6-8 years of English education (sometimes more). But that education consists primarily of teaching to tests which present the language as a puzzle to be solved rather than a living language. They are given tasks like properly arranging a set of words into a grammatical sentence, finding information in a passage that matches the choices given, or direct translation of set phrases. You get individuals who have perfect marks in English class but have zero functional grasp of the language. Also, their only exposure to real life speakers of the language are generally untrained 22 year old weebs that take a job "teaching English" so they can spend a year or three living in Japan. I found people in Taiwan, which has a similar education structure as Japan, had much better functional English on average. They didn't treat it like a puzzle and the people who go there to teach are generally more interested in actually teaching rather than just scoring a visa.
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Nov 4, 2019 05:40
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:My six-year-old cousin literally watches french youtubers whose whole thing is translating english ones. my dad posted:A Buttery Pastry's weirder posts are usually gallows humor about the worsening political situation in Denmark. I'm not a fan of that brand of ironic humor, but the dude isn't a bigot and drops kayfabe when it actually matters. *Though a recent study in the news did show us to be the second least friendly country for expats out of 64. Which definitely isn't surprising.
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Nov 4, 2019 06:49
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The only people who don’t find that scandinavians tend to be extraordinarily condescending are the dutch and flemish in my experience This is because the Flemish are too dumb to understand condescension and it is obviously impossible to condescend to the superior culture. 
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Nov 4, 2019 08:46
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Grape posted:Plus English is fairly closely related to all those languages aside from Finnish. Finland isn't a part of scandinavia 
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Nov 4, 2019 10:28
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Thanks. And yeah, I'm trying to cut down on it, but old habits die hard - and the discussion of condescending Scandinavians really spoke to me. Partially because it's true, even of myself in my weaker moments, partially because the whole thing has a really annoying internal component too. I'm sure other countries do this too, but the whole "Another study shows that WE, the greatest people on Earth, continue to be the greatest" * thing feels almost ever-present, and clashes real hard with the reality of politics here. Like, it's some pretty loving limited universal tolerance we've got going when every party but one is like "Yeah, but are concentration camps really that bad?" in reaction to 5% Muslims. Every country does it, but Scandinavians are more immersed in the English speaking world than others, and doubly so on SA, so they stand out as by far the most annoying of the lot. Also more so than other nationalities they tend to give off the impression they actually believe the bullshit they say about themselves. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Nov 4, 2019 |
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Nov 4, 2019 17:35
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Andrast posted:Finland isn't a part of scandinavia Finland's the sack
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Nov 4, 2019 23:49
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Andrast posted:Finland isn't a part of scandinavia 
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Nov 4, 2019 23:53
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Finnish cats aren't white.
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Nov 5, 2019 00:27
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Bloodnose posted:Finnish cats aren't white. Don't know about Finnish cats, but it is kind of funny how it's actually kind of reasonable to divide the entire European population into Finns and non-Finns. Pretty much everyone else resemble one another when it comes to a number of genetic markers (with geographically closer population typically and logically being more similar to each other, but there's still some small similiarity even when you look at opposite ends). Finns though are just kind of completely different from anyone close by and most of those far away as well (and Estonians are closer genetically to the other Baltic peoples, the same goes for Hungarians and the populations close to them, essentially indicating that those two have mixed with their neighbors while the Finns have just kind of remained genetically isolated).
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Nov 5, 2019 00:35
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Randarkman posted:the Finns have just kind of remained genetically isolated). finnish_bustop_queue.jpg
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Nov 5, 2019 00:39
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Bloodnose posted:Finnish cats aren't white. you made me look at pictures of Finnish cats, and there was this one:  it appears that Finnish cats are actually zeppelins! (it's actually a Norwegian breed anyway, apparently.)
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Nov 5, 2019 00:56
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I really like staring at this series of maps.     
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Nov 6, 2019 03:13
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From the Lombard invasions to the Risorgimento is the most dynamic and interesting period of Italian history, yes.
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Nov 6, 2019 03:37
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Andrast posted:Finland isn't a part of scandinavia It's the other way around: Scandinavia isn't part of Finland:  Hesburgers (the sea is red because there might be one or more there at any given time but currently there are none).
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Nov 6, 2019 11:42
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 Hesburg Jaw
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Nov 6, 2019 11:47
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Hesburger sounds like a boring German thing. They should have spiced up the name, given it that exotic Finnish flavor.
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Nov 6, 2019 11:48
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Phlegmish posted:Hesburger sounds like a boring German thing. They should have spiced up the name, given it that exotic Finnish flavor. Well it used to be called Kievarin grilli. e: According to the story the owner Heikki Salmela a.k.a. Hessu didn't think Hesburger would be a good name because it didn't sound Ämerikän enough so he hired a consultant firm and they presented him with a 100 000 mark bill and the name Hesburger 
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Nov 6, 2019 11:51
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Phlegmish posted:Hesburger sounds like a boring German thing. They should have spiced up the name, given it that exotic Finnish flavor.
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Nov 6, 2019 12:33
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Hesburger is okay, the sauce largely saves it.
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Nov 6, 2019 14:57
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Jerry Cotton posted:It's the other way around: Scandinavia isn't part of Finland: Luxembourg is labeled as having Hesburgers, but that is not borne out by a Google search nor by their Wikipedia page. I wonder if the person making that map just coincidentally got Kaliningrad Oblast correct, and if it was made back when Crimea was part of Ukraine.
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Nov 6, 2019 15:47
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Saladman posted:Luxembourg is labeled as having Hesburgers, but that is not borne out by a Google search nor by their Wikipedia page. Luxemburg doesnt even exist 
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Nov 6, 2019 15:55
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 For me this raises some important questions, like why should state governments exist at all and why do 49 of them have have a bicameral legislature?
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Nov 7, 2019 21:43
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Vivian Darkbloom posted:why should state governments exist at all and why do 49 of them have have a bicameral legislature? 
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Nov 7, 2019 21:52
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