Want to speak another language? Learn from Europeans

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• 00:00

  Hi, I'm back in Vancouver and today I want to talk about how much the level of English spoken by non-native speakers

• 00:07

  of English, how much that has improved and what that means for the opportunities to learn other languages.

• 00:14

  What triggered this was watching the celebrations in Budapest where they recently had an election and the supporters

• 00:21

  of the winning party were all, you know, giving interviews to the foreign media.

• 00:28

  And as I have noticed in so many other countries,

• 00:30

  the level of English spoken by these people, predominantly young people, is astounding in how good it is.

• 00:37

  We have a chance to live a life where we are free, we have our rights, we have opportunities.

• 00:45

  This is a win for freedom, for Europe, for democracy, and it's amazing.

• 00:49

  And of course, Hungarian is not a language that 's similar to English in any way,

• 00:54

  other than that it uses the Latin alphabet.

• 00:56

  So why has the level of English improved so much everywhere?

• 00:59

  This takes me back to sort of what I have always said about language learning.

• 01:03

  It's a function of motivation.

• 01:04

  It 's a function of the time you put in divided by the amount of friction,

• 01:09

  difficulty, inhibition, frustration that the language learner experiences.

• 01:13

  The big factors are motivation and friction,

• 01:16

  because if you 're motivated and there 's less friction, you will put in the time.

• 01:20

  So what has happened in the last 20 years,

• 01:22

  I do n't think is that the quality of language instruction in schools has all of a sudden dramatically improved.

• 01:29

  I don't think it has changed at all.

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