For example in East Asia: Japan is one of those countries with a low level in English proficiency, not only because due to their own language (there are huge linguistic differences) being absent from using the "Latin alphabet" (since they have their own) but they are not inclined to use English in their daily lives, since everything (from signage, books, menus, etc.) are all in their language. Depending on the place you go, it's a hit or miss if you'll find an English menu, but that won't be guaranteed.
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I very highly doubt that Japan is among the countries with lowest proficiency in english in asia. There are much smaller, less international countries.
In europe it would probably be some smaller country in eastern /south east europe. But the gap is getting smaller and smaller all the time
I would say probably a country in Eastern Europe – Moldova, Belarus or Russia
Moldova because of it’s ruralness and distance, Belarus and Russia because of poor education, ruralness paired with a lack of useability other than the internet
In the EU iirc, France, Spain and Italy rank quite low if not the lowest
There is an [English proficiency index by Education first ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index), which can give a slight insight and by that metric the worst European country in terms of English proficiency is France with a result of Moderate proficiency.
The worst asian countries would be Tajikistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia with Very Low Proficiency result. Japan is at Low Proficiency.
This would make sense to me, as the french are patriotic and very reserved when it comes to Americanization or englishisation. They also are a very substantial economy which is, to an extent, self sufficient and the local workers do not need to depend on/move to other countries as much. There’s also a historic conflict that has never went away culturally.
But this should be taken with a grain of salt, because this index is skewed by its very concept imo.
This is going to be controversial, but I’m a European currently living in Asia, and generally the people I have the hardest time understanding are… native speakers.
They keep using their local slangs and are completely oblivious that not everyone is familiar with those expressions.
>everything (from signage, books, menus, etc.) are all in Japanese.
So like in pretty much every country in the world? English is used in touristic places, airports and such, but everywhere else everyone uses their own language, obviously.
English is an international language now, you need to know it if you want to travel abroad but can’t/won’t learn the language of the country you’re going to.
As for your question, France has the lowest proficiency of English in the EU, according to a study from a few years ago. Spain and Italy are close. It’s still over 50%, though.
Globally the lowest are countries in the Middle East and Asia, like Yemen, Libya, the -stans, etc.
I’d say some of the richer countries like France or Italy. Their people don’t feel the need to learn English because they have everything they need without it.
Not sure about which European country, but rural areas all over the Union have some of the lowest proficiency skills in general if they are not part of some touristic infrastructure.
>Which European country has the lowest proficiency level in English and
Eastern European countries or France.
>why is that the case?
Learning a new language takes a lot of time and you don’t get that much from learning English. Most series, games, movies and books are translated. It’s not required for work. You don’t have enough money to travel and tourists are not interested in visiting your country.
The easiest answer to this is any country that dubs instead of subs.
Definitely Belarus. I often speak to my friend in English when we hang out. A lot of people look at us as if we’re weird aliens.
Frenchmen’s proficiency varies with generation. Young Frenchmen have high proficiency while other generations have virtually nothing. Italy on the other hand has a consistent level of English proficiency across the generations, and are in practice far worse than France
definitely Turkey, but again not counted as an European nation – just look at the comments.
Just from my personal subjective experience I’d say Spain.
On average, the Spanish people I met had a significantly lower English level than French or Italians even though they also have a reputation of speaking bad English.
In Europe, Hungary, then some distance behind it Spain.
In Asia, China. In Japan, you can get by in English. In China outside of Shanghai, Beijing and perhaps a few other major cities, almost no one speaks English.
Teach EFL and this was generally what I’ve noticed of different groups based on their country of origin.
Austrians followed by Germans take the very best of skills. Essentially were already fluent but lacked any real knowledge of idioms/slang/or informal speech. Other than that though they were totally fine.
After them the French and Dutch. Seemed to struggle more, in different ways, but still understandable. More focus on grammar and such was needed.
After that then was Italians and Spanish students; both groups were generally struggling a lot more and needed a lot of extra classes on grammar and pronunciation. Still able to follow instructions though which is the biggest step.
After that was Hungarians. I only ever had one class but it was a complete mess, even their English teacher couldn’t speak English. Like literally not a word. (Technically Ukrainians also should be here but I was working with those who came over unexpectedly so I think it would be an unfair comparison.)
No clue what this says of the culture though, only the groups I was being sent to help further their skills. Within the realm of possibility I was getting some biased result or instead students were more affected by the education system teaching them.
France, even if pretty much everyone studies it 5 to 7 yrs in school. But the true requirement is usage.
I wasn’t proficient until I had reasons to use it very regularly and actually master it. For most of the population, there isn’t any need to master a foreign language, let alone English.
Obviously everything here is written and said in French. But also most of the jobs are done exclusively in French, if you’re not in tourism or in specific white collar jobs you’ll never practice English. Even in tourism, depending on the region it is as – or sometimes more – useful to be proficient in German, Italian, Spanish, or even Chinese. Same for relations with neighboring countries. Which is also why English is not always the first foreign language you learn in school. So you’ll find that the foreign language proficiency in France is actually pretty good, but very diversified, whereas many countries only favor one, often English.
And as for foreign relations, they are tighter with Francophile countries, so less need for English even working with foreign people. And there is a political incentive to promote French, as it’s part of what makes the soft power of a nation. Domestically as well the culture is pretty francophile, and helped to do so: every movie and show is dubbed, artistic creation is helped – for instance cinema which participates to make France the 3rd movie industry in the world with about 4500 movies produced each year – and there are quotas of minimum French content – for instance on the radio, young talent stations have to broadcast at least 35% of french-language songs, and heritage stations 60%.
Member of romance language group are bad, members of germanic language group are good, slavic people are not very good but better than romance.
Ability to have a conversation in English (EU27)
|Country|Percentage|Rank|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Austria|59|12*|
|Belgium|61|11|
|Bulgaria|30|26|
|Cyprus|80|7|
|Czechia|43|18|
|Germany|66|9|
|Denmark|90|5|
|Estonia|59|12*|
|Greece|52|15|
|Spain|39|22|
|Finland|82|6|
|France|42|19*|
|Croatia|45|16*|
|Hungary|31|24*|
|Ireland|97|1|
|Italy|34|23|
|Lithuania|45|16*|
|Luxembourg|71|8|
|Latvia|55|14|
|Malta|91|3*|
|Netherlands|95|2|
|Poland|31|24*|
|Portugal|42|19*|
|Romania|27|27|
|Sweden|91|3*|
|Slovenia|62|10|
|Slovakia|40|21|
* Shared rank
Source: [Special Eurobarometer 540](https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2979), October 2023
So based on this Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland have the lowest share of the population who think that they can hold a conversation in English, at least in the EU 27 member states. A disadvantage of this question is that it is self-rated, so people may underestimate or overestimate their actual ability in English, perhaps influenced by what they think is normal in their country.
It mostly comes down the scale of the language and particularly the scale of media landscape. French and Spanish are huge in that context. Spanish is also a significant world language. Portugal has access to Brazilian media that scales things up.
Even Italian is pretty much a bubble in itself just due to the size of Italy’s population giving it critical mass.
Germany is a bit unusual as you get a lot of English speaking ability despite its size.
A small language like Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian etc isn’t big enough to be able to live in a bubble of only that language.
In Europe without looking it up and just guesstimating from my travels… France and Italy must be up top! Spain probably as well but less so than the other two. Although in terms of younger French I’m not sure if it’s actual language skills or just their famous aversion to the english language.
I also know that both French and Italians use their horrible dubbing for movies and shows wich doesn’t help them at all with english. But so does Germany and they still are miles better than France/Italy.
Poles, at least a few years back had another way of translating movies… they lowered the actual audio of the movie and had the same unentusiastic guy translating every characters dialogue. 😅
>but they are not inclined to use English in their daily lives, since everything (from signage, books, menus, etc.) are all in their language
All European countries except UK and Ireland is run in a different language than English (Afaik).
Some of the things that makes people good at another language are:
* Similarity (E.g. Germanic languages are close to English)
* Introduction to the Language at a young age. (Movies, TV, Music, Books)
* Language classes in School
45′ years ago before satellite TV, some areas in Denmark could receive German, or Swedish TV (Back then there was only one boring Danish channel)
The result was that preschoolers learned German, or Swedish, and was able to understand those more or like like a native child, but they had difficulties speaking it.
Back then we learned German in 7’th grade, the ones from the south have watched German TV everyday the last 10 years, and us from the north was not able to understand German spoken at speed with slang etc.
Movies has never been dubbed in Denmark, there have only been subtitles. In the 50’s it might have been due to cost, but later people did not what it.
So all Danes grooving up the last 80 years, has been exposed to English in this way.
Any country that dubs foreign media.
Germany and Spain I am specifically looking at you.
From my traveling I noticed that counties with dubbed TV have a lower proficiency in English. For example Hungary and Romania are pretty similar but in Poland everything is dubbed while in Romania everything is subtitled and you notice the difference in society
Clearly you missed the point. Koera, China don’t use English in daily life as well.
The difference is that japan has a tradition to bring in English words by their own writing. Aka using Japanese letters to simulate the English sound.
Which make them really bad at English.
Also many services people you meet are just part time workers who are not educated enough to have certain proficiency in English.
If they knows English, they can surely move ahead to a higher paid services job(international hotel brand) or even do the office job.
And lastly even they know a little bit English, they just don’t want to help you. Because you are an alien.
My anecdotal sample of one after having lived and worked in 7 countries ( 6 in EU) and having 100s of international colleagues, Italians have been consistently the worst English speakers no matter how well educated they were.
I’d say Italy, but France never fails to disappoint.
Greeks speak good English from my experience with their own language being absent from the “Latin alphabet”
Francs os really bad on english. People think we are rude because we refuse to speak to people but we usually just don’t speak english. I blame the education system for that, it is really bad.
This doesn’t asnwer your question I disagree with your OP that Japan has a low level of English proficiency due to how different the language is from English. 50% of Vietnamese people and 45% of Thai people speak English and their languages are just as different from English as Japanese or any other Asian language.
I think the reason for the low level of English proficiency in Japan is due to the lack of necessity stemming from how wealthy and large Japan is.
Japan peaked as the second largest economy in the world at one point and has a built in consumer market of ~190 million people and were at one point, wealthier on a per capita basis than America was. A Japanese firm like Toyota or Honda or Nintendo had a built in market of 190 million people they can sell their goods and services to before having to think of having to expand to international markets so the need to learn a second language wasn’t there.
You can see this phenomenon in Brazil as well. Brazil was never as wealthy as Japan but it has a built in consumer market of over 200 million people. Only an estimated 5% of Brazilians speak English and 4% speak Spanish and it’s not too surprising that most of the largest Latin American companies are Brazilian.
Wealth+population are the primary reasons I think some countries emphasize a second language more than others. If you’re wealthy with a small population like the Netherlands, it’s pretty much a necessity. Same if you’re large and poor like India. If you’re wealthy and large like Italy and France the need diminishes a bit.
Vatican despite its pull of tourismn from all over the world gives a damn about the english language.
But they got Jesus, his father and the holy ghost on their side, so who cares or dares to challenge them?
Based on my travels: Worst: Russia, Spain, Austria, Italy. Best: Netherlands, Sweden