English speakers who have played abroad

Mars Bar wrote: »

Oh your were talking about Brady? That makes more sense!

There was a two-part episode of the podcast Golazzo in March about Trap (for his 80th birthday). One of the lads was saying that he’s really hard to follow even in Italian so you might not be too far off the mark!

In the videos posted earlier, Beckham’s Spanish is embarrassing after four years at Real. At least Aldridge made an effort, but his Spanish is actually pretty poor in that clip.

Certainly in the case of Beckham and Tevez. I followed Bale’s career closely when he was at Spurs and I’m surprised at him. I thought he was better than that.

TFBubendorfer wrote: »

Aguero is perfectly happy to chat with fans in English and it's definitely not bad, so the interpreters at interviews must be due to him not trusting the English media. Not so sure about Tevez though, I don't think he ever managed to get past the absolute basics.

In general, people in other countries do appreciatem it if someone makes an effort to at least learn some of the local language, and it really doesn't have to be perfect. On the other hand, someone living there for 6 years and cannot be bothered, like Bale, that tends to go down like a lead balloon. It is utterly disrespectful.

I met tevez at a fans forum years ago and he had no problem understanding and answering questions in English with no translator. It was by no means perfect but all things considered was ok.

I reckon bale knows spanish but couldnt b arsed with the Madrid media. Tough bunch at the best of times.

Cookiemunster wrote: »

You were talking about Italians noting leaning a second language and you used a bilingual Italian as an example.

I used Vieri as an example of an Italian who played abroad and refused to learn the language of the country he was playing in. This (according to reports at the time) is correct. Speaking English and Italian doesn’t change that.

Captain Havoc wrote: »

To clear up on the Italians, according to a special Eurobarometer report on languages in the EU, 38% of people in Italy could hold a conversation in a second language, 40% of people in Ireland could do the same which is 1 point better than the UK. The EU average is 54%. The top three second languages in the EU are English 38%, French 12% and German 11%. Within Ireland it's Irish 22%, French 17% and English 6%.

I wouldnt trust those self reporting surveys when it comes to languages, people always overestimate how good they are with many saying they are fluent even though they havent spoken it since school.

ush wrote: »

Scandi's are good at English. The languages are close. But I wouldn't say they're are good at languages. There's been steep fall-off in third language acquisition.

Reckon Italians can bluff their way into ok romance languages. Just cause we don't hear them speak great English, doesn't mean they're bad at languages. Just cause Scandi's are good at English, doesn't mean they're good at languages per se. They just speak, as a second language, the only one most English speakers understand. They're good at the lingua franca of the world, not languages.

I don’t mean that they are good or bad at languages as such, just if there is a culture of learning languages. A lot of older Italians speak dialects as well as Italian, but that’s not the same as learning a foreign language. For Scandinavians and Dutch it’s easier to learn English than it is for Italians because as you rightly said the languages are close. You’re also right when you say they could learn Romance languages easily. Most of them however, don’t bother as they don’t need to. Unless maybe you live in Madrid

Phil Babb had 2 seasons and a decent run of games in Portugal, I wonder did he pick any up.
Paul Lambert has decent German too.

There was an interesting point i heard recently. In rugby Joe Worsley is an ex England player that was/is living in France, he started getting punditry gigs and it was noticed that his English was very clipped. Like he was trying to speak English as a Frenchman. He said he wasnt giving himself enough time to acclimitise back into English, often flying in the night before and going to the game so he came a few days earlier to fall back into old habits.


I'm sure Aguero has an ok level of English and I don't blame him for not speaking English when the media will jump on anything thats left unclear. Torres didnt interview for ages in English despite it being known that he was getting on fine, similar with Pochettino. Its hard to blame them really. Geoff Shreeves' incident with Lacazette wouldn't do much to convince players to give it a go either.

8-10 wrote: »

This is a really really good interview with Hernan Crespo. For somebody who didn't spend long in England (a lot less than Aguero!), his English surprised me

Surprised me too. He also speaks Italian very well. Ricky Villa and Ossie Ardiles (brutal accent apart) learned English well back in day. In the Maradona documentary film you can hear that he seems to speak good Italian.

ush wrote:

Scandi's are good at English. The languages are close. But I wouldn't say they're are good at languages. There's been steep fall-off in third language acquisition.

"F*** Off Norway" (Paul Gascoigne, Polyglot 1996).

Julio Geordio springs to mind .