The reason the Swiss aren’t good at English, I think, is that when I was young, in the German speaking part of Switzerland, you learned French in 6th grade and in 8th grade, if you had qualified for a better school, you could pick between Italian and English. Later, when I was in my mid-twenties, there was a big move towards „early English“ which many felt was problematic for national cohesion reasons: if everybody learns English instead of a second national language, that just means more imported culture and values. As a non-Swiss I didn’t mind so much but I liked the ideal of a multilingual country where people speak three of the four languages. Now I know that not all languages are treated with the same respect and don’t understand why the old national languages need special support and I guess it‘s just complicated. Which is fine. The world is complicated and if we have ten popular languages picking English as the second language is fine – at least it’s not one group lording it over the other.