If anyone's interested, here's an opinion on foreign language skills from a MA linguistics prof. (It's still just an opinion although I arrived at it after exchanging it with lot of professionals from the field.)
There was this one recurring question among my people that asked how come we're so good in foreign languages. This got me interested, but I was never in a position to investigate, although I wanted to. Next best thing, I started gathering info on the subject. First, I was interested what other countries shared this trait, and, more importantly, which countries had a reputation of being bad at foreign languages.
You're guessing right, I was going for economic status and indirectly for school programs and school finance. But that wasn't it. Italy always had significantly more money in education but they are far worse (FAR worse) in foreign languages than we are. Italy was dubbing everything. In fact this is how Japanese cartoons taught Croatian kids to speak Italian. A very interesting cultural exchange. You couldn't see Mazinger Z or Astro Boy anywhere else on TV. Kids went crazy for them and tuned their antennae to pick up Italian TV (back then, coastal Croatia could use aerial antenna to watch programs from Italy since Italy is just across the Adriatic.) We used to think those were Italian cartoons.
It was a lucky thing that I compared Croatia with Italy because it made me think about dubbing and subtitling. Italy is traditionally a dubbing country and Croatia WAS traditionally a subtitling country (a-holes changed this sucking up to the market). But this gave me a frame I could work on. I started checking other countries for this exposure to foreign languages in the age before cable TV when most people watched just a few national channels.
And sure enough, it fits like a glove! Regardless of economic wealth or historical significance, countries that used to expose young people to foreign languages did better in FL skills. Most notably Poland did very poor!! (It was in fact Poland that used to have one single voice for all the roles in foreign films. People now day wrongly ascribe this to less developed countries like Moldavia or Romania, possibly because they just can't believe it's Poland. It was Poland. All dubbed and all using just one person to dub). I was in Warsaw, not long ago. Center of the city. Souvenir shops. Not a single word in English. You would expect it at least in these situations. (I, on the other hand, speak English, Italian, French and could find my way around German)
At one point in time, I was honestly worried and angry because I thought we're gonna lose this comparative advantage because of the septic tank otherwise known as free market. My countrymen invested heavily in the gut wrenching awful discipline of dubbing foreign kids' movies and animated films in order to attract wider audience and sell more tickets. And it's just dreadful, horrible. A shame, nothing less.
Luckily, new media and new technologies came to rescue (!!!!! and this is one of the rarest occasions when I speak positively about new media, so you all need to tune in). Output of gaming world, YouTube, movie industry, the rest of the Internet, cable TV is faaaar bigger than any national studio could ever dub. The kids, once again, are exposed (in never before imaginable quantities) to foreign languages, so no real damage was done. Kids today are even better in English than I was when I was their age.
What happened to other countries (Italy, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and also states of former Yugoslavia considering that dubbing took root)? Yes! they all improved by an amazing percentage. Kids in Italy speak English all of a sudden. And so do German kids etc. And quite well.
Listening to a foreign language coupled with instant translation below at a young age is a very fast and reliable way to learn foreign languages. You would spend hours watching cartoons trying to understand what was being said. So you would listen to voices and read bellow what it meant. Soon enough, you could understand an Italian person (as long as he was speaking about robots
) After some time, you could even put a sentence or two together.
Now imagine all the movies, cinema, YouTube, popular songs, most of Internet...