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Comment by narag | Hacker News Reader

English is studied in primary school, which wasn't the case 20 years ago...

That's tricky. Years ago primary extended from 1st to 8th grades (6 to 14 y.o. aprox.) so English, that started in 6th was primary. Now 6th to 8th have been moved to ESO.

Anyway I just checked with my son and he started in Infantil, so it's really soon.

The real issue is qualification. To really understand and speak English you need to learn pronuntiation properly. And that's the weakest link in our system. Most teachers have no idea how English is really pronounced and wouldn't be able to understand a native speaker to save their lives. It's impossible to learn English from someone that can't understand or speak it.

I believe it was Aguirre that proposed a plan to invite thousands of native speakers to teach English in Madrid. Of course everybody attacked her as usual whatever she says... I don't like her either, but that was a good idea for once.

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This is true. While I learned English in the written form in my teens and was able to somewhat understand movies in English, I only became proficient in it in spoken form after I joined a guild in an online MMO game and everybody talked through TeamSpeak. Good times :)

The written form of English and the way words are pronounced are so different it must be a nightmare to learn in some ways. I can recall when I was progressing through school even often seeing written words that I had never heard before and having no idea to pronounce them and would ask someone and the answer would be like, oh that's a French word and the 'g' is silent ( for example a word like benign). It's actually pretty bizarre to think about it now but realizing this has given me even more respect for people who learn English as a second language. Honestly I kind of feel like the language could be simplified and made more efficient for future generations and non native speakers to learn.

The hard part is that you have many vowels. In Spanish there are only five. Understanding is often done by elimination. If I can't discard a word because I can't tell if it's bar or bore or beard or bird or bear or beer, unless context helps, I'll simply stall.

That's why I consider native teachers to be the most powerful advantage. At school they insist too much in grammar, that's important, but the foundation is how the language sounds.

I hate movies with original language and subtitles. I've used them with subtitles also in English with great results to learn.

But nothing can replace a teacher that corrects your pronuntiation as you speak and repeats the right sounds as many times as you need.

Also when I'm watching a movie for pleasure, I like to watch and listen, not to read.

After a while reading the subtitles becomes something done in an instant. Then you can listen

A while? I've done it for years and still don't like it. I'm not saying I can't do it, just that it's super annoying for me. I don't enjoy visuals if I need to read. It's totally anti-usabilty.

It's funny because as American kids are learning to read and ask what a word is we are told "sound it out". It usually works. But it definitely doesn't work the other way around, trying to spell a word by how it sounds. I had a Portuguese friend online once that spelled "awesome", "hawsom" and we had a good laugh because he felt embarrassed but we had to assure him it's still spelled wrong but still sounds right if you read it out loud.

As a native English speaker I could understand dropping the "e", but where does the "h" come from?

H at the beginning of a word is silent in Portuguese (as in Spanish and Italian)

I guess it could come from the same place as in "hour", "honor", "honest", etc. :)

This! The reason Germany has a high level of proficiency for a country that doesn’t translate media (movies, tv shows etc don’t act as language learning agent), it has a deep and well trained set of teachers. How? Famously the last German emperor insisted that every kid learn English in school. Over 100 years later and this has lead to well trained teachers, who can teach kids properly.

I guess the take away is that teaching a whole country a new language takes time and is hard to accelerate.

It's more general than for learning a language. For a whole country, teaching quality is a virtuous circle, you can't simply put a lot of money and expect inmediate results, but need to iterate through generations. That's why I think importing a lot of native speakers was a good idea: you can step ahead iterations.

Sweden started after WW2 and it is way ahead of Germany. So I’d say it is possible to accelerate. I think English really started to take hold in the 60s and 70s. Relatively low educated people born in the 1950s can make themselves understood in a pinch

Source? Although that sounds like something Willhelm II. would have done he couldn't make laws on his own and I think education was a state matter anyway.

At least it was according to the constitution but that doesn't mean much. Often laws that modified the 1871 and 1918 constitutions did not change its text but overrode its meaning. Imagine the US constitution but longer you get to hunt down the amendments yourself.

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