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So people are monolingual?
Mostly only people from countries where English is the main language and even there, more and more are becoming bi- or even multilingual
Except India and every African country (with English as main language).
For a lot of african countries english and french are more administrative languages. More and more people learn them as they're used in schools, but in everyday life other languages dominate. Calling them english speaking countries may be correct as english is the "official" language, but that's not the whole picture.
Yeah, that's my point.
I didn't mean ALL countries with English as their main language but yeah, good point!
To cut Anglophones some slack, quite a lot of people are bilingual by knowing their native language + english because it's pretty much the de facto international language, especially in Europe. For Anglophones it just happens that their native language is english, so they don't bother with learning a new one since realistically they don't need to, whereas for others knowing english is often mandatory for jobs.
Besides that it's much easier to learn english than any other language because media and culture in english is unavoidable unless you live without internet and TV.
Regarding media, I can get almost anything I want in a dubbed or translated version, even some youtubers provide dubbed versions of their videos.
Yeah, but what I meant is that for English you don't need to look for it. You'll see English on every social media. At least in Serbia, most, if not all popular foreign songs are in english, and most younger people listen to music with english lyrics, on TV you'll find mostly american series, movies and shows, technology uses english by default, and everyone learns english in school here since year 1 of primary school.
My point is that Anlophones who want to learn, say, French, have to actively seek it out and motivate themselves for the sole purpose of being able to engage in French culture, while here (but I imagine it's very similar in the rest of europe) people are bombarded with english everywhere they look, whether they want to or not.
And this reach really makes it insanely easy to learn english. I've been listening to so much Swedish metal that I've learned a handful of words, and if I had immediate access to Swedish like I do to English, I'd probably be talaring svenska by now, but I do not, so I don't. So to make a fair comparisson, I'd say it would be better to see how many people speak 3+ languages, and compare that to the number of bilingual Anglophones.
About that, why do Germans dub so much? Here we only dub children's shows. Netflix has tried to dub a few normal movies and they got mocked by pretty much everyone.
I guess the immigrants appreciated it though. It's probably a good way to learn our language.
I suppose there are two related reasons:
- older people (but also quite a lot of young people) don't speak english that well, they would have problems understanding and dubbing has been done for so long that they expect it
- there are enough german speakers that it's worth dubbing instead of just subtitling