We're embarrassing at speaking English despite a decade of classes

We're embarrassing at speaking English: the fault isn't the accent

Why doesn't a Spaniard with years of English behind him dare to order a coffee in London? The answer that dominates among the collected testimonies is uncomfortable and very specific: the language is studied from primary school to the end of high school, at a rate of "a couple of hours" per week, and the most cited result is that of someone who barely knows how to ask where the bathroom is. The blame, agree the most nuanced voices, is not pronunciation.

Two causes are repeated above the rest. The first is a class model focused on grammar and the entrance exam: you learn what's on the test, not how to speak. The second is cultural: dubbing, little exposure to the original language, and stage fright in the classroom.

What is taught when English phonetics is taught

The system is not homogeneous and the label of a country with no ear bothers. There are testimonies of colegios concertados (semi-private schools) where phonetics was formally examined and where students, already at university, caused the astonishment of a professor who asked them if they had lived abroad. The other side is attributed to much of public education, which is reproached for a weak level in English and, incidentally, in mathematics, geography or biology.

Where there does seem to be agreement is on the destination of the effort: passing the selectividad (university entrance exam). A repeated diagnosis holds that "the purpose is not for you to learn English, it's for you to pass the English selectividad." You study what's on the test, you memorize a grammar that the average speaker doesn't use, and little or no time is devoted to conversation. Some accounts add an uncomfortable detail about teachers from past decades: graduates in other subjects with minimal notions of the language teaching the subject.

Mockery in high school as a brake on English

One testimony describes the mechanism precisely: in a public high school, whoever tried to pronounce an English phrase well was mocked, so the collective strategy was to keep quiet. The result: zero level. Another account recalls the separation into two groups, the "smart" class and the "dumb" class, officially renamed advanced English and intermediate English: in the first, laughter was directed at whoever conjugated an irregular verb incorrectly.

That social factor explains why so many adults with acceptable vocabulary freeze up when speaking. Pronunciation stops being a technical problem and becomes a matter of public exposure.

Do Brits speak better English than Swedes?

Here the consensus breaks down. A map of English proficiency by country circulates as a reference —it carries no figures or sources associated in the answers— and gets everything: it is reproached for putting Germany in the high group when there are Germans who don't speak any, omitting Greece, and placing the Nordic countries and the Netherlands ahead of the United Kingdom under the criterion of "more comprehensible English."

The thesis defended by that classification is that street English in the United Kingdom is mumbled, while the Nordics practice an international and neutral version. Against it, the opposing argument is the usual one: no country teaches its own language homogeneously, and the comparison is made between the Scandinavian elite and the average Brit. One example suffices: the actor who played the Spanish waiter in Fawlty Towers was German, and the most convincing accent some have heard was that of a Spaniard who deliberately mimicked it.

Dubbing and co-official languages: the context of the lag

The favorite structural explanation is dubbing. It is argued that countries that translated comics, cinema and series maintain a lower oral level than those that broadcast content in the original version. The comparison with Portugal, which consumes undubbed material, is used as proof.

To this is added the distribution of school hours. One message puts it at "40 years wasted on Basque, Galician and Catalan" and assures that those years don't come free in the English fruta; another qualifies that learning other languages helps train new phonemes and escape the "mesetario lockout." The shared conclusion, in any case, is that daily exposure weighs more than any method.

What really matters: understanding, fluency, and only then pronunciation

One of the most repeated hierarchies places understanding what you're told first, then fluency in speaking, and last, pronunciation. "Phonetics is not important," summarizes that current. The most frustrating thing would not be your own accent, but not being understood.

Hence daily immersion is recommended —reading and watching content in English, something the internet now allows without leaving home— and it is insisted that the language can be taught in parallel with the mother tongue from the start. There are also those who consider it an artificial problem: with Spanish as the second most spoken language on the planet, one's own cultural production would work as a cushion and as an excuse.

Will machine translation replace language learning?

The last offshoot of the matter is technological. It is noted that real-time oral translators are still weak and that, when the earpiece that really works arrives, learning languages will resemble learning to sew: a niche thing for simultaneous interpreters in high-level business and diplomacy.

And one last pearl about the native accent, in case anyone thinks that's the goal: those who speak English best in Europe don't do it because it sounds pretty, but because they've been listening to it their whole lives. We're left with the consolation of discussing it in Spanish, which is what we do well.