8/31/2023 0 Comments Yeah you are in spanish> It is actually crazy when you think about this. And, among Europeans, the most difficult accent to understand is the British one :) At least in Europe nobody really cares how good your English is past a certain level (ofc, if people can hardly understand you, then yeah you're in trouble). > So, in order to compete with engineers, scientists, etc from english-first countries you not only have to be as good as they are, but all of that while paying this "english-learning tax"ĭepends as well. So, all in all, more or less kids in western countries spend the same time in school. It's not that you get N hours free per week if you don't need to learn English, isn't it? English-speakers probably fill those "English as a second language hours" at school with something else. > If you're from non-english speaking country, then you'll be spending like 14 years at school learning english. There are a number of infinitely more relevant variables that could explain scientific throughput by country. rest of Europe in numbers of papers" could support the claim that a head start doesn't exist. This is something I'm pretty sure a native speaker doesn't have to mind with when starting at a new job. I myself can't count the number of hours of pronunciation practice I amassed throughout the years for being too afraid of sounding dumb in my daily scrums. So either due to structural differences between languages (especially those that don't share the same Germanic roots as English), or due to economical and social issues, some non-English speakers have to spend hours of deliberate practice to be on the same ground as people from a few other countries, in academia or in a multi-cultural IT team. In reality, good and affordable schools in our own native language is considered a privilege to many. This can be due to significantly different grammatical structures, word roots, phonemes, and whatnot, or-most importantly-due to the fact that most of us can't afford quality language courses at affordable prices. I'm based in Brazil and I can tell you with reasonable confidence: the average person in Latin America struggles A LOT to get past Harry Potter books and achieve full work proficiency. I understand that learning English may have not been that hard for you, and given that you come from a Scandinavian country, most likely you speak near-perfect English (I've been to Norway once, it's amazing how even the old lady in the yarn store speaks English so fluently!) Also, no one is contesting the benefits of learning something new.īut keep in mind that different cultures face significantly different difficulties when it comes to pick up a foreign language.
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