I am with you here. Similar feelings. But we may be underestimating the differences between age cohorts. Here’s some data from Eurobarometer (people who can speak English):
Also, former Czechoslovakia may be a victim of its superior tradition of dubbing the movies. Elsewhere you often get movies in the original language with subtitles, or even without subtitles. But I guess YouTube is great equalizer here.
And maybe I could write a blog in English about how people in Slovakia see our common cultural space, and they could read it. In theory! But in practice, these things simply do not happen. If I read blogs in English, they are usually written by Americans. And when I want to blog about things in Slovakia, I blog in Slovak language. I use the English to communicate with fellow rationalists, or to write programming tutorials. I have virtually zero knowledge about France. And the French have zero knowledge about Slovakia.
That! Exactly what the phrase “We have made Europe; now we must make Europeans” refers to.
Hmm, recently I heard my 11 years old daughter chat with someone online in English. I certainly couldn’t do that at her age. So yeah, maybe the situation is mostly fixing itself, it just needs a decade or two more.
I was using a heuristics “young people learn English today just like my parents’ generation learned Russian… but most of them couldn’t actually speak Russian”, but I guess there is a difference that my parents’ generation mostly had ~0 opportunity and incentive to practice Russian after school, while the kids these day have the internet at hand. The practice makes a lot of difference!
I am with you here. Similar feelings. But we may be underestimating the differences between age cohorts. Here’s some data from Eurobarometer (people who can speak English):
Also, former Czechoslovakia may be a victim of its superior tradition of dubbing the movies. Elsewhere you often get movies in the original language with subtitles, or even without subtitles. But I guess YouTube is great equalizer here.
That! Exactly what the phrase “We have made Europe; now we must make Europeans” refers to.
Hmm, recently I heard my 11 years old daughter chat with someone online in English. I certainly couldn’t do that at her age. So yeah, maybe the situation is mostly fixing itself, it just needs a decade or two more.
I was using a heuristics “young people learn English today just like my parents’ generation learned Russian… but most of them couldn’t actually speak Russian”, but I guess there is a difference that my parents’ generation mostly had ~0 opportunity and incentive to practice Russian after school, while the kids these day have the internet at hand. The practice makes a lot of difference!