Why the Dutch Speak Better English Than the Spanish (And What It Means for You)
The secret isn't better schools or smarter students. It's what's on television.
There is a quiet, natural experiment happening across Europe right now. It has been running for decades. Nobody designed it. Nobody intended it. But its results tell us something profound about how languages are really learned.
On one side of the experiment are countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. On the other side are countries like Spain, France, Italy, and Germany. Both groups teach English in schools. Both groups have access to English media. Both groups live in a globalised, English-connected world.
And yet the difference in English proficiency between these two groups is enormous. Not small. Not marginal. Enormous.
The difference? It has almost nothing to do with schools, textbooks, or teaching methods. It has almost everything to do with something much simpler.
Whether or not they hear real English when they watch television.
The Subtitling Countries vs The Dubbing Countries
Here is the key fact at the heart of this whole story.
When an English language film or television show arrives in the Netherlands, or Denmark, or Sweden, or Norway, or Finland, it is broadcast in its original English with subtitles in the local language. The viewer hears every word of the original English performance. The actors’ real voices, their real pronunciation, their real rhythm and intonation, all of it enters the viewer’s ears exactly as it was recorded.
When that same film or show arrives in Spain, or France, or Italy, or Germany, something very different happens. The English audio is removed entirely and replaced with a dubbed version in the local language. The viewer hears Spanish, or French, or Italian, or German. The original English is gone. The viewer has zero exposure to the actual language the content was created in.
This difference, subtitling versus dubbing, has been a consistent feature of European media for decades. The choice of whether to subtitle or dub was typically made around the time of World War Two and has remained largely unchanged since. No country in the OECD has switched from one approach to the other.
It was originally an economic decision. Subtitling is cheaper than dubbing, and countries with smaller populations and less widely spoken languages tended to adopt the lower-cost option. Nobody was thinking about language learning at the time. It was simply a practical choice about how to make foreign content accessible to local audiences.
But the consequences for English proficiency have been staggering.
The Numbers Tell a Very Clear Story
The EF English Proficiency Index is the world’s largest ranking of countries by English skills, based on testing data from over two million adults across 123 countries. The results, published annually, paint an unmistakable picture.
In the 2025 edition, the Netherlands ranked first in the world. Norway ranked fifth. Denmark seventh. Sweden eighth. Finland twelfth. All subtitling countries. All in the top tier of global English proficiency.
Spain ranked thirty-sixth. France thirty-eighth. Italy fifty-ninth. All dubbing countries. All significantly lower.
These are not small differences. The gap between the Netherlands at the top and Italy nearly sixty places lower represents a vast chasm in real communicative ability. And the pattern holds year after year, edition after edition. The subtitling countries consistently cluster at the top. The dubbing countries consistently sit much further down.
In subtitling countries like Iceland, Denmark, and Finland, between 67 and 75 percent of young people report high levels of English proficiency. In dubbing countries like Italy and France, those figures drop to around 16 and 21 percent.
The correlation between subtitling and English proficiency is one of the most consistent findings in the entire landscape of language education research.
Is It Actually the Subtitling? Or Just a Coincidence?
This is the obvious question, and researchers have taken it seriously.
Maybe the subtitling countries just have better schools. Maybe their populations are more motivated. Maybe their languages are closer to English. Maybe there are cultural or economic factors that explain the difference independently of television habits.
A major study by Frauke Baumeister, Eric Hanushek, and Ludger Woessmann, published as an NBER working paper, directly addressed this question. They compared English proficiency to mathematics proficiency across countries, reasoning that if the differences were driven by general educational quality, they should show up in both subjects. They found that the subtitling effect was specific to English. Countries that subtitle had significantly higher English scores but not significantly higher maths scores. The estimated effect was close to one full standard deviation, a huge impact.
By their estimates, if dubbing countries like Austria, Germany, or Poland had adopted subtitling instead, their English skills would be roughly as high as the English proficiency in the Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands.
A separate peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, titled “TV or not TV? The impact of subtitling on English skills,” reached the same conclusion. They identified a large positive effect for subtitled original version broadcasts on English proficiency scores, and found that the benefit was especially strong for listening comprehension.
The research is clear. This is not just correlation. The subtitling itself is a significant causal factor in the English proficiency gap between these groups of countries.
What Is Actually Happening When People Watch Subtitled Content
Let’s think about what is actually happening, hour by hour, year by year, in a subtitling country.
A child in the Netherlands grows up watching English language television from a young age. Cartoons, children’s shows, family films. The audio is English. The subtitles are Dutch. The child hears English spoken naturally, at native speed, with real pronunciation, real intonation, real rhythm, for thousands of hours over the course of their childhood and adolescence.
They are not studying English during these hours. They are watching television. They are enjoying content. They are following stories. But their brains, those extraordinary pattern recognition machines we have talked about elsewhere on this blog, are doing something remarkable in the background. They are absorbing the sound system of English. They are building a statistical model of how English sounds, how words connect, how sentences flow. They are acquiring the language, in the deepest sense, as a byproduct of entertainment.
By the time this child reaches adulthood, they have accumulated an enormous passive input bank of real, natural, authentic English. Not textbook English. Not classroom English. The English of films and television and real human expression. And it shows in their proficiency scores, in their confidence, and in their ability to communicate in English with a naturalness that learners in dubbing countries often struggle to achieve.
Now compare that to a child in Spain or Italy. Same films. Same shows. But dubbed into Spanish or Italian. The original English has been stripped out entirely. Every hour of television that could have been an hour of English input has been replaced with the local language. The opportunity for passive, enjoyable, effortless English acquisition has been completely removed.
The child in Spain receives their English exclusively in the classroom. In lessons. Through grammar exercises and textbook dialogues. A few hours a week, at most. And the difference between a few hours a week of formal instruction and thousands of hours of natural, passive exposure is not small. It is the difference between the Netherlands at number one and Italy at number fifty-nine.
Why This is the Input Hypothesis in Action
If you have been reading this blog, you will recognise exactly what is happening here. This is not a new phenomenon. It is the input hypothesis, playing out at a national scale, across millions of people, over decades.
The populations in subtitling countries are receiving massive amounts of comprehensible English input. They are hearing real English, in context, attached to visual meaning through the action on screen, with subtitles in their native language providing a comprehension scaffold. The conditions for acquisition are almost ideal: low pressure, high engagement, meaningful context, and enormous volume.
The populations in dubbing countries are receiving almost none of that input. Their English acquisition depends almost entirely on formal instruction, which as we have discussed extensively throughout this blog is a far less effective pathway to fluency than natural, input-rich exposure.
The subtitling countries are, in effect, running the exact experiment that the input-based approach to language learning predicts should produce superior results. And it does. Consistently. Measurably. Across millions of people.
What This Means for You
You are probably not living in a subtitling country. Or if you are, you may not be watching enough English content to benefit from the effect. Either way, the lesson of the subtitling-dubbing divide is directly applicable to your personal English learning journey.
The lesson is this: exposure to real, natural English, in large volumes, over extended periods, produces extraordinary results. Not because of any clever teaching method. Not because of any particular curriculum. Simply because the human brain, given enough meaningful input, acquires language. Automatically. Reliably. Profoundly.
The Dutch are not genetically better at English than the Spanish. They are not smarter. They are not more motivated. They simply hear more real English. Thousands of hours more, accumulated casually and enjoyably over a lifetime of watching television and films in their original language.
You can create the same effect deliberately.
Creating Your Own Subtitling Country
You don’t need to move to the Netherlands. You don’t need to change national broadcasting policy. You just need to do what the Dutch have been doing accidentally for decades: fill your life with real English audio.
Watch English language television and films in English. Not dubbed. In the original English, with subtitles in your own language if you need them, or with English subtitles if your level is high enough to follow along. Every hour you spend doing this is an hour your brain spends absorbing real, natural, authentic English pronunciation, rhythm, and phrasing.
Listen to English podcasts. Watch English YouTube. Play English audiobooks. Put English radio on in the background. Do everything we have talked about throughout this blog about building your listening hours and creating an immersive environment, because the research on subtitling countries is simply a large scale confirmation of what the input hypothesis has always predicted.
The more real English you hear, the better your English becomes. It really is that simple. The Dutch proved it without even trying.
A Note on Subtitles Specifically
Since we are talking about subtitles, it is worth saying a few things about how to use them effectively.
If you are at a beginner or low-intermediate level, watching English content with subtitles in your own language is a perfectly good starting point. You are still hearing all the English. Your brain is still processing the sounds, the rhythm, the intonation. The native language subtitles are simply helping you follow the meaning, exactly as they do for millions of viewers in the Netherlands and Scandinavia.
As your level improves, switching to English subtitles is a powerful upgrade. Now you are reading and listening simultaneously, which as we explored in our post on combining those two skills produces deeper encoding and faster acquisition than either one alone.
Eventually, when your listening comprehension is strong enough, dropping the subtitles entirely is the final step. Now you are processing English purely through your ears, which is exactly the skill you need for real conversation.
This progression, native language subtitles to English subtitles to no subtitles, is a natural and effective arc that mirrors the journey from beginner to advanced listener. Move through it at your own pace, and don’t rush. Every stage is producing real acquisition.
The Bigger Picture
The subtitling-dubbing research is, for me, one of the most powerful pieces of evidence available for the input-based approach to language learning. Because it is not a laboratory experiment. It is not a small study. It is the real-world outcome of different levels of English exposure, played out across entire nations, over decades, measured by the largest English proficiency testing system in the world.
And the conclusion is the same one we keep arriving at from every direction on this blog: real English input, in sufficient quantity, produces real English proficiency. The brain does the work. You just need to supply the raw materials.
The Netherlands supplied those raw materials accidentally, through a broadcasting decision made decades ago for purely economic reasons. You can supply them deliberately, through the choices you make every day about what fills your ears and your eyes.
Choose English. Choose the original. Choose real voices, real accents, real language. And let your brain do what every Dutch brain has been doing for decades.
Create Your Own Subtitling Country
You don’t need to move to the Netherlands. You need to do what the Dutch have been doing since childhood: hear real English every day through content you actually enjoy.
For building your English through reading and listening with content you love, LingQ is the tool I recommend above all others: lingq.com
For doing exactly what the Dutch do, watching real TV shows and films in English with subtitles, but with interactive features that make every word clickable and learnable, Lingopie is the tool built for this.
If you want compelling, story-driven English listening at just the right level, Olly Richards’ Conversations course is well worth exploring.
If you’re looking for a conversation partner to practise your English with, iTalki is where I’d start. And if you’d like to work with me specifically, book a trial lesson here.
Geography isn’t destiny. Input is destiny. And input is available everywhere.
✍🏼 Richard
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