At least compared to other german speaking countries.
I always thought swisd people are better with languages as their german neighbours, as they dont have a problem to pronounce French or Italian very well. Im swiss and german and have a good pronounciation in english as well.
by Tashunka030
25 comments
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.
English usually our 3rd or 4th language…
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.
>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.
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
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
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?
Don’t know what you’re talking about. My English accent is perfekt! Und I know a lot of Anglais sans problem! /s
Lived in Switzerland until my parents decided to do the split when I moved to Germany at around the third year of Primary School where I learned English for 5 years before returning back to Switzerland to finishing the 6th Primary School Year where to my surprise I learned I’d be the most fluent English Speaking Pupil since everyone else was learning French during those years I spent in Germany whereas I was completely lacking in that department ( since I choose a Technical course over either French or Home Economics )
That though has been over 20 years ago soo… Not sure if the situation still holds up today 🤔
I dont know, guess speaking 4 languages is enough….🤷🏻♂️
Whereas most countries are at 2 (even if….)
In my school, we started learning English as early as first grade, French in second, Italian in 4th, and all the while learning proper German. I didn’t know any of the foreign languages well enough to actually speak them and I guess a lot is due to being overwhelmed. Learning languages early is a good thing, but you can’t throw 3 languages at a child and expect it to learn them all perfectly and then add German into the mix. I know a lot of Swiss who don’t know how to properly spell in German, it is relatively easy by the mistakes Swiss people make in German to detect them. Most focus on French and Italian as foreign languages because they are national languages, English is in 3rd place. So I guess it’s just a lot for most children to learn properly.
I have been here for more than a year and worked in two different places and 85-90% of the people I interacted with spoke perfect English
I bet it’s because of the western and southern parts of Switzerland.
Je pense que s’il y avait un classement des pays selon le plurilinguisme de ses habitants, nous serions mieux classés.
because there aren’t subtitles. TV has been translated to german.
I smell BS. I lived in some of those countries ahead of Switzerland, absolutely no way they speak better English. For example, Hungary??? You’d be lucky if a cashier there knows how to count to 10 in English or what milk is (these sound oddly specific, but I once spent 10 min trying to explain to the person I’m looking for milk, I even had to do the little udder milking maneuver before they went ahhhh Tej!)