[romanoderoma]

Yes and no.

First of all, I'm European.

Use of English as a second language, it might surprise you, dropped in the past 10 years, it was spoken by 52% of the population in 2012, now it dropped to 44%.

Not native speakers, English is the fourth language in Europe for number of native speakers, after German, French and Italian (if we don't count Russian, largely first with 120 million native speakers)

Secondly, things can change rapidly.

20 years ago the most studied second language in Italian schools was French.

Thirdly, in Europe countries have spoken to each other for centuries, when I go to Spain I speak Spanish, when I go to France or Belgium I speak French, I can also speak some German.

Of course not perfectly, but we still understand each other better than through English, because of similarities in the languages.

So yes, second language counts, but only when other options are worse (I speak English with Sweds or Dutch - I've been studying Swedish on my own but my progress with the language have been very slow)

In many schools we study more than 1 foreign language.

I studied French in primary and middle school then English and German in high school.

They were regular public schools, far from the best.

It's quite common elsewhere.

My cousins live in Belgium, their kids study French, Flemish and of course Italian in school.

Many Italian researchers, for example, move to Germany and they learn German because it's better to know it when you live there, English is used to bootstrap the social life and at work.

CERN is in Switzerland and even though I believe everyone there speaks English, in Geneva the official language is French, it helps a lot outside of work to learn it, more than English. Move a few Kms and they speak German, go South and they speak Italian and you will still be in small Switzerland.

Where many people are naturally bi or trilingual.

Adding English as a third/fourth it's very easy for them.

Eventually everybody will learn some English, undoubtedly, but it's gonna be foreigners' English, that it's different from proper English and sometimes it's pure nonsense for native speakers and viceversa.