Rah Rah Beijing! Our Fair City's English Level on the Rise, Nearly on Par With Hong Kong

Though you maybe forgiven for thinking that Beijing's level of English sucks after your last interaction with a cab driver, we here in the capital are actually blessed by the city's obsession with good good studying.

That's right, despite the gripes of some uppity expats, the English proficiency of Beijingers has reached nearly that of Hong Kong, according to the fifth annual global English Proficiency Index released by English First (EF), which dubs its study "the world's largest ranking of countries by English skills."

Beijingers are ranked third overall in China for their English skills, trailing Shanghai (#1) and Hong Kong (#2), but that's mainly because those damn Shanghainese have a legacy of kissing way too much laowai ass and Hong Kong was a British colony for a century.

EF, with English training centers worldwide, compiles its data from nearly a million standardized tests from around the globe (you too can participate: taking the free test here to see how you do. There are both 15 minute and 50 minute versions). 

However, both Beijing as a city and China as a country have room to improve.

China's overall index (50.94) puts it at #39 out of 72 countries ranked, behind places like Japan, Russia, and South Korea, dragged down by the relatively low English abilities of provinces like Yunnan, Guizhou, and Xinjiang.

While EF does not provide comprehensive city-by-city data worldwide in an easily accessible format, a little digging shows that Beijing (at 53.49) still lags behind other major Asian cities such as Jakarta (54.12), Tokyo (54.81), Seoul (55.47), and Ho Chi Minh City (56.53).

And even though us foreigners can be unfair and unforgiving at times when it comes to English fluency, we are grateful to all the laobaixing who put in so much effort to better communicate with us. And, to be frank, we enjoy the odd Chinglish error made in the process, especially on T-shirts and street signs.

Meanwhile, most of us have no right as expat residents in Beijing to be ragging on Chinese for their poor English, given the dire state of most of our Chinese skills. When we asked readers about their Mandarin abilities last month in our story about the government's plan to rank expats, the vast majority had never taken the HSK, and of those that did, only a third scored HSK 5 or above.

We sure could be doing more on our end to meet Chinese halfway by improving our Mandarin. 

For more indepth analysis, download EF's full report here, and find the China-specific report here.

More stories by this author here.
Email: kylemullin@truerun.com
Twitter: @MulKyle
WeChat: 13263495040

Images: EF