I rate comprehensible input highly. If Americans and Brits aren’t taught with modern and effective methods, calling them lazy could be challenged.
There’s a political dimension if you connect language learning and multiculturalism and the damage of Brexit.
It is perhaps best not to debate politics in this forum. Language learning discussions generate enough heat as it is, without throwing petrol onto the embers.
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Between that and the clickbait title from a poster with an obvious commercial agenda, and this thread should probably just be closed.
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I don’t display advertisements and receive £0 from my posts.
I’m genuinely interested in peoples’ thoughts. It’s language related and all good fun!!
And I see most of the respondents are native English speakers. I’m hardly going to benefit from my “commercial agenda”?
Language learning can be a lonely experience at times, it’s nice to interact with so many people with similar interests
Anyway, I’ll continue to enjoy everyone’s good natured responses 
I’m not addressing your blog post specifically, but while reading other blogs and listening to podcasts I have witnessed both Spanish and French people say on multiple occasions that people in their countries are bad at learning other languages too.
Part of it is due to the educational system, and part is because they can get almost all of their needs met speaking just their native languages. Some who go on to successfully learn other languages attribute it to participating in the Erasmus program in university.
They point out that people in Portugal, the Netherlands and some other small European countries where foreign movies and TV show are normally subtitled and not dubbed, people often end up learning more English and other languages because they hear them spoken in that context so much. When they sit in English class at school it is reinforcing what they hear on TV on a daily basis. While I was living in France 45 years ago I had a Flemish acquaintance from Belgium tell me the same thing.
When my son lived in Finland 10+ years ago he witnessed this as well. People were constantly asking him, “Why would a foreigner ever want to learn Finnish? It’s not practical, hardly anyone speaks this language, and it’s difficult to learn as an adult.” At least that was their perception of the situation. Some of them felt forced to be bilingual or multilingual in order to just function in the world, and I have the impression that people there take teachers and education more seriously than in the US.
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This. In Germany those who speak relative good English are usually those who actively use the language. In my school the students who were good in English were those who played video games (most of them in English) and/or listened to English music. I work with kids and teenagers and those who say they find English hard to learn often listen to music with german lyrics only.
In Germany, every movie or series you can watch in TV or in the cinema is dubbed. So there is really no need to learn English unless you want to make a career either in science or industry, and even that is only partially true. Many older academics in Eastern Germany learned Russian as their first second language and only had three years of English at school. And if you are going to work for a company that is limited to Germany or in a branch that doesn’t require you to work with foreign partners, you probably don’t need it either.
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I’ve heard the same discussions. Particularly in the Scandinavian nations, where original English TV is played constantly.
It will be interesting to see the affect YouTube, social media etc will have on the rates of language learning in those countries and particularly in the UK
My experience visiting Germany 20 years ago was that people I met in Munich spoke English, and the engineers in the telecoms company I visited also spoke good English, the director was quite fluent, albeit loud. Obviously hotal staff spoke English. I’ve worked with several English companies with offices in Germany. In one case it was a German company, the German engineers came over, and spoke good English. In the other case sales and marketing staff came over and spoke good English, but that was a job requirement. The director was very loud. After 30 minutes of his loud deep booming voice in the office, I had a headache. So my purely anecdotal experience is that well educated Germans speak good English, more than good enough to have a conversation, but they will make mistakes, and have an obvious accent. Well educated Brits are unlikely to speak German, some will have some French or Spanish. You have to admit the food is better. 
That said, German bread, beer and sausages are tops.
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I also have the impression that there is a clear commercial agenda.
This whole forum has a clear commercial agenda. 
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I’ve never been in an English speaking country, so it is hard for me to compare. As you state yourself in some of the occasions English was a requirement. As English is the international language of trade and academia, and the lingua franca used in the western world, and there is quite an influence of the language in media[*], Germans probably have better conditions for learning English compared to English natives for learning a foreign language.
In regards to the title of the thread the answer would than be: No, they are not lazy. They encounter completely different conditions. Similar to how scandinavian people aren’t more diligent language learners then Germans.
I would like to note that in this thread the comparision is mainly made based on how well non-natives perform in the English language. It would be interesting to see how the experience would be for a French visiting Germany or a Spanish. I fairly doubt they encounter a lot of people who speak their language, although very commonly spoken around the world.
[*] The majority of metal bands write their texts in English, even though it is not their mother tongue. I don’t know why for sure, though. In addition, even german game studios tend to release their games with English spoken text if they can only afford one synchronization.
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Nothing to disagree with there. Indians often speak three or more languages including English. Africans also often speak several languages including their local one, a national language if different, and either English or French. There are signs that some African countries may switch from French to English as their main European language. No doubt the influence is America and not that small rain sodden island off the northern French coast.
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