November 10, 2019 – Spoken English in Croatia is among the highest quality in the non-native-speaking world, and improving faster than almost anywhere, according to the 2019 EF EPI index.
Safety.
Lifestyle.
Natural beauty.
Excellent spoken English.
These are four key elements which Croatia possesses in abundance when looking to market itself on the global stage, and four key elements which will serve the country very well as the digital nomad era takes hold. Who wouldn’t want to spend time in a safe, beautiful European country, with a relaxed lifestyle where English is widely spoken?
And it is official – English in Croatia IS excellent.
The latest 2019 EF EPI (English Proficiency Index) is out, and while the headline for many portals is that Croatia is 14th in the world outside non-native counties, looks a little deeper and see some even more encouraging trends.
In the week that we celebrate 30 years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it is VERY encouraging to see that English in Croatia is spoken better than anywhere else in Central and Eastern Europe, apart from Poland.
And not only that, but year on year, since the 2018 EF EPI index, English in Croatia has improved faster than anywhere else in the world in the EF index, apart from Portugal.
The EF SET is an online, adaptive English test of reading and listening skills. It is a standardized, objectively scored test designed to classify test takers’ language abilities into one of the six levels established by the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). The EF SET is available to any Internet user for free. For more information about the research and development of the EF SET, visit www.efset.org/research/.
EF EPI 2019 scores have been found to correlate strongly with TOEFL iBT 2017 scores (r=0.80) and IELTS Academic Test 2017 scores (r=0.74). These correlations show that, while these tests have different designs and test taker profiles, they reveal similar trends in national English proficiency.
Methodology
This ninth edition of the EF EPI is based on test data from more than 2,300,000 test takers around the world who took the EF Standard English Test (EF SET) or one of our English placement tests in 2018.
You can see the report in full here, and while English in Croatia is generally excellent, it is not quite perfect. Here are 25 common mistakes people make speaking English in Croatia, of which ‘sitting on a coffee’ is one of my favourite.
And of course, Croatian is far from easy for us foreigners – here are 25 of our common errors when attempting the impossible – speaking perfect Croatian.
