this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
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Wow, France being lower than everyone else but Turkey is wild.
No, it isn't. The French are so asshole about languages that are not French, it is amazing.
The French teachers at our kid's school had serious penis envy because English is the first tier foreign language here, while French is only a second tier one.
We had a French teacher who wanted to fail our son, claiming that "French is the subject that shows if you are actually smart enough for advanced schooling" - my son had the equivalent of A to A+ in all subjects but sport, arts, and French. His English teachers considered him "native speaker level", so it was not an issue of having problems with foreign languages. But obviously all this had nothing to do with the crappy teaching methods they used that made even French native speaker students fail...
French teachers can be a cock sometimes, it’s 100% true. In the end of it, French grammar is far more specific than other languages, so there’s a bit of a need to be persistent and persnickety; native speaking French classes during school are noteworthy for being hard for that reason. They don’t really take the Japanese/Mandarin approach and drill you to death, instead they’ll just kinda mock you for things they think you should know. It’s super important to find a French teacher that will be detail oriented, but not a cock about it.
It's also why Belgium is relatively low compared to the Netherlands.
I'm sure that in Flanders the English proficiency is on par with the Netherlands, and certainly better than in Germany, but the French speaking parts pull the average down.
I think part of the reason is that francophone regions overdub all media in French, so when growing up, children never consume media in any other language than French, except maybe some music. You could literally watch French TV for an entire day and not hear a single word in another language than French.
France has a law (Toubon Law) that mandates the use of the French language in official government publications, in all advertisements, in all workplaces, in commercial contracts, in some other commercial communication contexts, in all government-financed schools, and some other contexts.
So it's quite restricted for french people to come in contact with English language in the daily life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law
It feels like they tanked the test out of spite. I'm curious about the methodology of the study, but France has far too much tourism to believe this without seeing the underlying data.
I mean have you ever been a tourist in France? I went to Paris last year and I would have been lost without google translate. The french expect even the tourists to just learn their language.
It’s kinda sick that they label everything in French to make it easy to learn the language. I visit France and Nederland as often as I can, and to be fair, even the Dutch don’t label everything in English; the people just speak it super well.
As a German, I can read a lot of Dutch writing. Some words are seriously funny, and the accent is cute, but I usually get the gist. If not, I can always ask in English (in the western parts) or German (in the eastern parts). I can attest that the Dutch are seriously good with English.
I think that most of this is due to TV and cinema, as everything foreign is English with Dutch subtitles, except maybe for the children's TV.
Native English speaker here, but spoke French with my father’s family about 1/2 the time: I can read and pronounce Dutch well enough that my Dutch friends understand what I’m saying (we’ve laughed about it a few times when I was unaware of a few of the weird dipthongs they have). I can’t understand nearly anything I’m saying or reading.
?? Japan has a lot of tourism and you’d be hard pressed to find a Japanese person that can speak English proficiently
Do you think that someone should believe a graphic on the internet without verifying the information from a reputable source?
No but the amount of tourism a country gets does not correlate to the English fluency of the average citizen of that country.
shrug
This is why this completely unsupported graphic on the internet seems unreliable to me. If you want to quibble about WHY one shouldn't believe a completely unsupported graphic on the internet...okay.