Why Italians and Spanish usually speak only their native languages and rarely speak English?
May 13th, 2011 | 
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Jean asked:
I’ve met bunch of different people from all over the Europe and I noticed that Spanish and Italian people are ones who speak English much worse than the rest of Europe. I don’t want to offend anyone and of course I also met many people from Spain and Italy who spoke English fluently were very intelligent and kind, but actually those who could speak English told me that they had learned it because of travelling or at work or something.
Why is it so?
Aren’t there English language lessons at school/university in Italy and Spain?
Seriously, I love both Italians and Spanish, but they often only speak Italian or Spanish… Not the nations of polyglots, really…
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I’ve met bunch of different people from all over the Europe and I noticed that Spanish and Italian people are ones who speak English much worse than the rest of Europe. I don’t want to offend anyone and of course I also met many people from Spain and Italy who spoke English fluently were very intelligent and kind, but actually those who could speak English told me that they had learned it because of travelling or at work or something.
Why is it so?
Aren’t there English language lessons at school/university in Italy and Spain?
Seriously, I love both Italians and Spanish, but they often only speak Italian or Spanish… Not the nations of polyglots, really…
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Let’s turn this around… why are most English people unable to hold a conversation in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Welsh, French, German etc etc etc.
They expect everyone else to learn English so that they themselves won’t have to learn another language.
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Well, let me ask you this. So many people in the US take Spanish in school for several years and in the end they can not carry on a conversation with a Mexican native. I’m sure it is the same in Italy and spain, as well as other countries.
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Because Italy and Spain have a low percentage of English speakers not many Italians and Spaniards speak English only the younger generation of Italians and Spaniards speak English the older generation of Italians and Spaniards don’t speak English but in countries like Holland and Germany have a high percentage of English speakers people of all ages speak very good English because the Dutch and the Germans learn English at a young age back to Italy and Spain in Italy it’s only area tourist areas like Rome it’s easy to find people who speak English in non tourist areas of Italy it would be very hard to find people who speak English in Spain it’s normally big cities like Madrid and Barcelona those cities it’s very easy to find people who speak English but in non tourist areas of Spain it would be very hard to find people who speak English.
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I’m Spanish. And here, in Spain, kids start to learn English at the age of 3 yr. Almost all of the students here, keep up learning English (they usually go to the US or UK to learn it -just like I recently did-). The problem is the 50′s 60′s 70′s generations. When they were childs, they didn’t use to learn english at school. In the 80′s, 90′s and now, kids are used to speak English. Now, you come here at a High School, or a College, and anyone can speak English (proper English) to you. I don’t know the situation in Italy; must be almost the same.
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Consider also that, whereas in Italy and Spain everything they show on TV is dubbed, in most of the countries in Europe where people speak good/fluent English people watch American movies and series in English with subtitles in their own language (I’m thinking about the Northern countries and the Netherlands for example). This helps a lot!
Moreover, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German are all Germanic languages and so is English.
I’m Italian myself and I love foreign languages
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I am italian and I can speak almost a good english,..in Italy we start to have english lessons since the nursery school.
There’s a lot of italian people who can talk in a good english and not just few ecceptions.
Maybe it could be just an option they would like that you speak their language when you there, if I come in the Usa or Uk I never think that people could understand me if I speak italian…and don’t tell me that english is the “international” language…it might be, but still those countries got their own language and have the RIGHT to speak it, it’s a matter of choise and they don’t want have a “second” language, in other words they don’t want to be fluent in a language they don’t feel as “their” language…last but not least english is hard to be spoken in those countries where they are used to have phonetical words…it always suprise me how english speaking people hardly pick a foreign language instead, maybe because with an hint of arrogance they expect that everybody knows their language…east europeans picks up a good italian in a couple of months, why british or americans can’t? Why often they can’t spell their own language?
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Although Cedors is right, it’s also true Italy was used to be one of the western European nations with the lowest percentage of English speakers: 20 years ago it was 17%, compared to a peak of 66% in Denmark. Only Greece, at the time, had a lowest percentage.
The main point is learning English became mandatory since primary school just around half of the 90s; prior, it was done only starting from the sixth year (a choice between English and French, actually).
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Don’t forget that Spanish is not the first language for many Spaniards, but that it is known by every person in Spain. This means that almost 38% of all Spaniards are bilingual, because they speak Catalan/Basque/Gaelician + Spanish.
Traditionally, French was the foreign language spoken by most people in Spain. Reason? Neighbors. Now english is taught in Schools, but I’ve noticed that Spaniards learn gramatic, not the way to use the language.
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Why wouldnt they speak their native language better than a foreign one?
All universities around the world offer English classes for all levels, and other lessons.
Why dont you speak Italian and Spanish?
You have to see it both ways