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The European Union’s remarkable growth performance relative to the United States (www.bruegel.org)

submitted 9 months ago by Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de to c/europe@feddit.de

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The article chooses to take a metric that you usually do not see much: GDP per employee and per hours worked, at purchasing power standards

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[–] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Same experience as yours when I visited Norway a few years back, 50 year old people were at ease with English. I guess the Norwegian media only get you so far ha ha.

To contrast, in France, French-speaking Belgium, Italy, Spain, (I dont' know about French-speaking Switzerland), even young people would have issues speaking English. You can clearly see the divide here:

https://www.ef.com/assetscdn/WIBIwq6RdJvcD9bc8RMd/cefcom-epi-site/reports/2023/ef-epi-2023-english.pdf

Portugal is the exception, I don't know why.

[–] HarvesterOfEyes@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

Portuguese here. This is anecdotal evidence but, as far as I can tell, a lot of our proficiency comes, essentially, to constant exposure to the English language since the early to mid-90s. We don't dub English-speaking media (apart from movies and tv shows more aimed at kids, but even then, Cartoon Network didn't even have subs when I was a kid and I still watched it religiously), the video games we played when we were kids also didn't have a Portuguese language option so we were basically forced to learn English.

And now that the Internet has become widespread throughout the country, the younger generation consume a lot of English-speaking content, so they have little trouble with speaking and writing in it.

This results in a good % of the population having decent to good English, not just the kids but a lot of people in their 30s (and some in their 40s) too.