Finnish and Estonian are basically completely unrelated to English yet the native speakers of those languages are pretty good at English for the most part.
There is the second factor that influences how necessary English becomes to your population: the number of speakers. France, Spanish and Italian have at least 60 millions speakers, which allows them to have a dubbing industry with a significant market.
Hungary should indeed follow the same path, I don’t know what’s happening there either, maybe someone else would know more.
Also, Germany and Austria speak the same native language; German, yet there are more L2 English speakers in Austria than in Germany. It’s the same as comparing France with francophone Belgium.
As a Belgian, I always thought that as we are a country with a low population (French-speaking Belgians are around 4 millions), combined with being bordered by other languages (Dutch and German, English if you count the Channel) and having three national languages just naturally encourages people to be more open about learning at least one other language. Maybe a few of those similarities are also applicable to Austria.
There is the second factor that influences how necessary English becomes to your population: the number of speakers. France, Spanish and Italian have at least 60 millions speakers, which allows them to have a dubbing industry with a significant market.
Hungary should indeed follow the same path, I don’t know what’s happening there either, maybe someone else would know more.
As a Belgian, I always thought that as we are a country with a low population (French-speaking Belgians are around 4 millions), combined with being bordered by other languages (Dutch and German, English if you count the Channel) and having three national languages just naturally encourages people to be more open about learning at least one other language. Maybe a few of those similarities are also applicable to Austria.
I guess that makes sense.