Just look at the results to assess the level of foreign languages in a country.
The rate of bilingualism, for example.
We see that 60% of Swedes have a perfect command of a second language in addition to their mother tongue.
A feat which, by comparison, increases the French toll.
An article from the British weekly magazine
The Spectator
on January 29 made fun of our poor level of English.
Every month, he reports, there are 14,000 searches on Google Translate in France to find out how to say
“hello”
in the language of Shakespeare.
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The weakness of the objective results is, however, alleviated by an original study by Babbel.
The world's first language learning platform has indeed launched into the analysis of statistics relating to... user motivation.
Verdict: the determination of the French to master foreign languages is remarkable.
Italy in the lead
How is it possible to evaluate a criterion as subjective as that of motivation?
Babbel sought to identify
“super-learners”
: that is, those who follow a ratio of 60% lessons and 40% revisions.
And geographic location seems to have a role to play.
The study shows that some countries are more conducive to language learning than others.
Italy thus comes at the top of the ranking, closely followed by France.
Canada, Germany, Austria, Poland and the United Kingdom follow respectively.
France gets first place when it comes to
“determination”
.
According to Babbel, it has
“the particularity of being the country where we set the most objectives”
.
The success of podcasts
Italians are thus the most active learners, with an average of seven learning activities per day on the platform, but also the most regular during the first 20 days.
Finally, they listen to more learning audio content and podcasts than any other nationality.
The rankings come as a surprise, because Italians are known for their monolingualism.
But isn’t this weakness precisely the source of their motivation?
As Todd Ehresmann, linguist and head of educational content at Babbel, explains in a press release,
"not wanting to be one of the Europeans who speak bad English is a much stronger motivation than wanting to master the vocabulary for the next vacation to be able to order at restaurant "
.
And to recall in fact that
“Italy is at the bottom of the scale when it comes to mastery of English”
.