Comparatively to the rest of the internet, it seems like there are a lot more Germans here. I’ve always assumed it was just because I was on a German instance and was in a sort of echo chamber (join feddit.org btw 🥳), but I just checked Fediverse Observer and it’s the 2nd largest country by users. Additionally, the German instances seem to be the biggest non-English ones.
Why is this?
To be clear, native Germans are far better at English than most Americans are at this point.
Depends on the age group imo.
I think the people who experienced internet from ca. 2005-2015 will have the best English on average. Because in this time English was simply necessary to get a grip on a lot of media, games, websites… Now a lot of things are translated, sometimes by force (youtube, reddit…) and with bad auto-translation. Also German content creators became much more widespread since 2015, so now people might never need to look past their language horizon.
Of course the dates and statements aren’t absolutes, just general observations.
For context, I was on the internet before the Web was invented.
lol, spoken like somebody who has never actually tried to speak English in Germany. As a shameful monoglot, I have had occasion to test the limits of English understanding in a variety of countries, and Germany has pretty low rates of English speakers in my personal experience. The Netherlands on the other hand…
This is true. But the general rule of thumb is that the farther you are away from a big city, the worse the understanding of English will get.
Try speaking English in a rural Dutch town and you will get hilariously broken English. There’s a famous book about it - Make that the cat wise. Full of literal translations that make 0 sense.
honestly from a linguistic perspective this is so painfully inaccurate. you’re talking about native speakers here. what you might mean to say is that Germans use English closer to how the Brits use it. that is a defensible statement. but you’re doing something different.
just because native speakers change how they use their own language, they aren’t doing it “worse”. they are adapting their tongue to their needs. one’s mother language is deeply tied to identity, and cultural identities grow and shift through time. to say that their identity is “worse” is certainly a statement you could make, but you see the violence inherent in it, right?
who knows, there’s plenty of criticisms to make of Americans. i probably have more than the average. but i’m not really comfortable with putting down entire groups of people based on how they use their mother tongue. and i’m certainly not going to try to pass off criticism of a culture as a statement of measurement like “you are bad at X”
For another example, there is an exact inverse in America. “Texas German” is much closer to how German was spoken around the time of German unification. Same with Quebec to French.
I mean, many Germans might read and write English well, but their pronounciaton …
Ship captain on the radio: “Mayday, mayday. We are sinking!”
German coast guard: “What are you sinkin about?”
Jokes aside, honestly, I have not hear much bad English here in Germany. Then again, I guess I don’t hear many people speak.
I concur, in my early mmorpg days (EQ) I thought many people playing (US EQ) were non US citizens because their English was very bad. It turned out I was wrong and the skill level was just (oftentimes) far worse than I expected.
Of course not in general, but not rarely either.