If you plan to never, ever live in a non-English-speaking place, yeah, learning languages other than English is not terribly useful.
Living in the same country you were born in is the lot of something like 90% of humanity and usually has been, and English-speaking may well embrace more territory than you might guess.
For example, when I visited Belgium and the Netherlands in 2005, I was shocked at how many natives spoke English and how well.
And just today, while finishing a Wikipedia experiment, I was surprised to note that the smaller German Wikipedia was sending something like half as many visits to my (English) DNB FAQ as the larger English Wikipedia. (Although I just checked, and contrary to what I thought, the German entry wasn’t specifying that my page is in English, which is likely inflating click-throughs; I’ve added an ‘Englisch’ warning, so we’ll see how things change after 100 days or so. Good to know this for context in my experiment, too.)
As a Dutch person with a German girlfriend, I’m in both countries quite often. It’s common knowledge in both countries that the Dutch are good at English, and it’s common knowledge in Germany that the Germans are not very good at English. Apart from that, fully English courses, or just English lecture slides, are common in our exact sciences university. In Germany apparently not so much, although I don’t have first hand experience.
Looking up actual numbers, this seems to be somewhat true. The English Language in Europe wikipedia page has a nice bar graph and map, created from data from an EU survey In the Netherlands, 87% indicate that they speak English. In Germany it’s 51% and in Belgium it’s 52%. Across all of Europe, it’s 51%.
Oh, and if you’re ever back in the Netherlands, you’re welcome to drop by :)
Living in the same country you were born in is the lot of something like 90% of humanity and usually has been,
Probably, but I doubt this figure will stay this high much longer, especially for people born in countries living economic hard times such as Ireland. (Also, people who stay in their home country tend to get lower-status jobs than those who emigrate.)
and English-speaking may well embrace more territory than you might guess.
But it might be further away from where you are. Most people emigrating from Ireland and Britain end up in North America or Australia just because they don’t have decent-enough German or French to try mainland Europe.
For example, when I visited Belgium and the Netherlands in 2005, I was shocked at how many natives spoke English and how well.
Northern Europe is unusual in that respect. Staying a few days in Paris without decent French was awful, so I can’t even imagine how it would be to stay there for a longer period without learning French. (And while I never had any kind of language problems in the Netherlands, I still guess that if I looked for a job there it’d be a helluva lot harder to find one than if I could speak Dutch.)
And just today, while finishing a Wikipedia experiment, I was surprised to note that the smaller German Wikipedia was sending something like half as many visits to my (English) DNB FAQ as the larger English Wikipedia.
Well, the kind of people who are likely to be interested in stuff like DNB are likely to already be able to read English, wherever they grew up (if anything, I’m surprised that lots of people read the de.wiki article on GNB rather than the en.wiki one in the first place); but this needn’t generalize to most two-digit-IQ people, and if you live in a country you’ll have to interact with them too.
So to followup the experiment: I checked Google Analytics now and was surprised to see that after I added the English warning, late May—early June 2012 saw a big spike in traffic from the German Wikipedia to the DNB FAQ, many times the daily average. Presumably this must have been from some article in the German media on dual n-back.
Unfortunately, the data ends at 10 June 2012… because that was when I moved to Amazon S3 to save on hosting costs, breaking all my existing redirects (Amazon S3 doesn’t do .htaccess or redirects) - and the German article was pointing to a redirect. D’oh!
Anyway, there’s no obvious sudden drop on 20 May 2012, but the big spike contaminates all the relevant days.
I guess I’ll wait another ~100 days and see what happens now that everything should be working properly...
Living in the same country you were born in is the lot of something like 90% of humanity and usually has been, and English-speaking may well embrace more territory than you might guess.
For example, when I visited Belgium and the Netherlands in 2005, I was shocked at how many natives spoke English and how well.
And just today, while finishing a Wikipedia experiment, I was surprised to note that the smaller German Wikipedia was sending something like half as many visits to my (English) DNB FAQ as the larger English Wikipedia. (Although I just checked, and contrary to what I thought, the German entry wasn’t specifying that my page is in English, which is likely inflating click-throughs; I’ve added an ‘Englisch’ warning, so we’ll see how things change after 100 days or so. Good to know this for context in my experiment, too.)
As a Dutch person with a German girlfriend, I’m in both countries quite often. It’s common knowledge in both countries that the Dutch are good at English, and it’s common knowledge in Germany that the Germans are not very good at English. Apart from that, fully English courses, or just English lecture slides, are common in our exact sciences university. In Germany apparently not so much, although I don’t have first hand experience.
Looking up actual numbers, this seems to be somewhat true. The English Language in Europe wikipedia page has a nice bar graph and map, created from data from an EU survey
In the Netherlands, 87% indicate that they speak English. In Germany it’s 51% and in Belgium it’s 52%. Across all of Europe, it’s 51%.
Oh, and if you’re ever back in the Netherlands, you’re welcome to drop by :)
Probably, but I doubt this figure will stay this high much longer, especially for people born in countries living economic hard times such as Ireland. (Also, people who stay in their home country tend to get lower-status jobs than those who emigrate.)
But it might be further away from where you are. Most people emigrating from Ireland and Britain end up in North America or Australia just because they don’t have decent-enough German or French to try mainland Europe.
Northern Europe is unusual in that respect. Staying a few days in Paris without decent French was awful, so I can’t even imagine how it would be to stay there for a longer period without learning French. (And while I never had any kind of language problems in the Netherlands, I still guess that if I looked for a job there it’d be a helluva lot harder to find one than if I could speak Dutch.)
Well, the kind of people who are likely to be interested in stuff like DNB are likely to already be able to read English, wherever they grew up (if anything, I’m surprised that lots of people read the de.wiki article on GNB rather than the en.wiki one in the first place); but this needn’t generalize to most two-digit-IQ people, and if you live in a country you’ll have to interact with them too.
Statistics. My guess is that the percentage for Belgium would be a lot higher if you excluded the part that speaks French.
So to followup the experiment: I checked Google Analytics now and was surprised to see that after I added the English warning, late May—early June 2012 saw a big spike in traffic from the German Wikipedia to the DNB FAQ, many times the daily average. Presumably this must have been from some article in the German media on dual n-back.
Unfortunately, the data ends at 10 June 2012… because that was when I moved to Amazon S3 to save on hosting costs, breaking all my existing redirects (Amazon S3 doesn’t do .htaccess or redirects) - and the German article was pointing to a redirect. D’oh!
Anyway, there’s no obvious sudden drop on 20 May 2012, but the big spike contaminates all the relevant days.
I guess I’ll wait another ~100 days and see what happens now that everything should be working properly...
Update: traffic has still not recovered: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85192141/Analytics%20www.gwern.net%20User%20Defined%2020120131-20121130.pdf
I infer this means the English warning is indeed deterring a lot of traffic.