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Why are proud Hungarians mastering English? Simple pragmatism.</h1>
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<p>Hungarians and other Central Europeans are mastering English at a
much greater clip than many of their continental peers, in part due to a
lack of 'lingual baggage' over learning another language.</p></h2>
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<span>
<span>By</span>
<span><a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2015/0502/Why-are-proud-Hungarians-mastering-English-Simple-pragmatism#" target="_blank"><span>Sara Miller Llana</span>, Staff writer<span title="author bio"></span></a></span>
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May 2, 2015 </h3>
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<p><span>
Budapest, Hungary — </span>David Nagy works on the ground floor café of a
multinational bank in Budapest, where English is often the language of
office-place banter. </p><p>He's hoping to prime his own English skills for a future job search. Plus he likes American movies.</p><p>“I
have met many Italians who don’t want to learn English because they
'must' speak Italian,” says the 25-year-old barista, fluttering his
hands in mock outrage at speaking English.</p><div>
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</div><p>His utter lack of pretension about Hungarian, on the other
hand, is one of the driving reasons why Central Europeans have mastered
English at a much greater clip than some of their lagging Western
European peers.</p><div><div><div>
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</div></div></div><p>According to Education First’s most recent <a href="http://www.ef.edu/epi/" target="_blank">English Proficiency Index</a>,
based on adults who take their tests, Hungarians are among the fastest
adapters of English in Europe, along with Poland and Spain. Hungarian
adults rank higher than their peers in France, Spain, Portugal,
Switzerland – and Italy.</p><p>“Central Europeans don’t speak [native]
languages that have a world position. They are not hindered by that
baggage,” says Kate Bell, the EPI analyst at Education First in Paris.</p><p>Hungary
still has a long way to go when it comes to English proficiency. In a
Eurobarometer poll from 2012, only one-fifth of respondents said they
could hold a conversation in it.</p><p>Still, if English fluency is not a
given here like it might be in the Hague or Helsinki, this reporter's
recent trip to meet with government officials, civil society activists,
religious leaders, and the like required the use of a translator just
once. English isn’t nearly as widespread outside of the capital, but
cold-calling to set up interviews was 100 percent successful with
English only. The same is never true when doing comparable work in
France, Italy, or Spain. </p><a name="14d1f8e1423a8867_eztoc20121940_3"></a><h2>Post-Soviet boom</h2><p>Of
all of Central Europe, Poland stands out as the star performer. It
overhauled its education system in the 1990s and 2000s and began to top
international educational charts. Poland is the lone Central European
nation to have mastered English, according to the EF index, alongside
Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands.</p><p>For many such countries in
Central Europe, the shift to English came at the first chance to leave
Russian behind. In 1990, Poland counted 18,000 Russian language
teachers. By the 2002-03 school year, there were only 6,900. In that
time period English language instruction surged, from 1,200 teachers
counted in 1990 to 36,000 a decade later.</p><p>Today there are
undoubtedly more, as former Soviet satellites joined the EU in 2004 and
English became the working language of the international community. And
to that landscape have come a crop of entrepreneurs filling what they
describe as an insatiable demand.</p><p>One company called Angloville,
which started in Poland in 2011, offers one-week English-language
immersion courses. The program pairs volunteers – traveling retirees,
students, backpackers, and the like – who might offer their native
tongue in exchange for free room and board and the chance to get to know
the culture, with locals who need to quickly acquire some English. In
2013, the company ran 16 programs. In 2014, they ran 32. And this year
they have 57 courses planned – including in a new market, Hungary.</p><p>“As
people across Central Europe have recognized the importance of English
proficiency for business and travel we’ve experienced a lot of demand
for our programs,” says Mitch Hume, a program coordinator at Angloville.</p><a name="14d1f8e1423a8867_eztoc20121940_4"></a><h2>'English is what it is'</h2><p>That
demand could grow soon. Hungary has improved its English skills in part
because of education reforms that made foreign language acquisition a
requirement before graduating from college. Now the government is eying
changes to make such skills a requirement even before university. They
can choose English or German, with 60 percent choosing the former.</p><p>Hungarians
speak lovingly and patriotically about their own language, Magyar,
which doesn’t belong to the three main categories of Europe: Slavic,
Germanic, or Romance. But they don’t feel that their language is under
threat just because English looks great on a CV.</p><p>That’s not the
case everywhere in Europe. Some resent the requirement to learn English
when Americans and Brits barely bother to say "bonjour," let alone
negotiate complex deals in a foreign tongue. In France, when the
government announced in 2013 it was going to expand the rights of
universities to instruct in English, there was nearly a riot among the
intelligentsia. France also happens to sit at the bottom of the EF EU
ranking. </p><p>“There is less of a willingness to say English is what
it is, and everyone is going to learn it,” as is the case in Scandinavia
and increasingly Central Europe, says Bell. But language need not be
conflated with culture, she argues. It can simply be viewed as a hard
skill, like learning Excel or algebra.</p>“You don’t have to learn it
because you like the US or you aspire to live in the UK. You can learn
English and not like English-speaking countries at all.<br><br><br>-- <br><div>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: <a href="tel:%28215%29%20898-7475" value="+12158987475" target="_blank">(215) 898-7475</a><br>Fax: <a href="tel:%28215%29%20573-2138" value="+12155732138" target="_blank">(215) 573-2138</a> <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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