English in Belgium

It is quite amazing to see how much English is spoken in Belgium. At least, I can only speak for the Flemish part of Belgium, as I'm not sure how many of these observations apply to the French speaking part of Belgium.

Observations

• The general level of English of the Flemish is high. If you are English and visit Belgium, you shouldn't have much problems buying tickets for the train, or finding it and figuring out the way to your destination just using English as a means of communication.
• At some moments, it even comes to extremes. I'm writing this down with the semi finals of some tennis event in Belgium, broadcasted on television. All of the announcements of the tournament or in English, although probably over 99% of the people in the audience have Dutch as their mother tongue. And no one complains, as they probably all understand what is being said.

Education through the media

You might wonder what helps us learning an alien language. Or how we are pushed around to learn it the hard way. English is a required course in most tracks of education. But atop of that, we get served English through all of the media. Just a few cartoons for kids get dubbed, but all other occurences of English in soaps and television series, movies, documentaries, daily news, are subtitled. As a result, we get an immense amount of training during our off hours.

When I'm watching a movie, I probably follow these subtitles subconciously, but most of the times I'm just listening to the English in the movie, as I got used to it. I know I'm always following the subtitles, but I only realize it when mistakes are made in the translations. Some of these translations are viable, as some word games and local jokes cannot easily be translated into proper Dutch. But on some occurences, mistakes are made that are sometimes pretty obvious.