It has always seemed slightly bizarre to me that, after food and football, the thing of which Italians are most proud is their ability to dub films and TV shows. At least twice a year I’ll hear someone say: ‘we Italians have the best dubbers in the world’.

It’s a sentence that has always irritated me because the Italian fixation on dubbing delivers dreadful TV. On terrestrial channels all imported films or series are dubbed, resulting in dialogues that are (you can hear the difference from a genuine Italian show a mile off) flat and tinny. Blanket dubbing means that foreign language-learning is astonishingly low. I’ve been teaching English (creative writing, literature and language) in Parma for 25 years, and it’s clear that most Italian school-leavers can’t hold even an elementary conversation in English despite roughly 12 years of study. The principal culprits, I’ve always thought, are those dubbers.

It’s partly cultural. From the outset, television in Italy was conceived of as a tool of Italianisation. The national broadcaster, RAI, has always been a bosom of cultural nutrition, offering programmes like the 1960’s It’s Never too Late (part-funded by the education ministry), which attempted ostentatiously to raise the level of spoken and written Italian. Meanwhile, the cream of the Italian acting fraternity were assigned to specific actors from Hollywood, so that certain dubbers – such as Gualtiero de Angelis (1899-1980), who Italianised Cary Grant, James Stewart and Errol Flynn – become stars in their own right.

My annoyance wasn’t only because dubbers seemed to impede the learning of English. It was also because fetishising the voices of famous actors spoke to the thing I find most challenging about living here: people love the sounds of their own voices. I got the feeling that the general adulation of a dubber’s timbre, of their stylised delivery and immaculate timing, was a reflection of many people’s aspiration here to deliver their lines like a pro. As I’ve written in the past on Engelsberg Ideas, there’s an orality to Italy which extends to school results: one’s ability to perform linguistically – all that elocution, eloquence, loquaciousness – is as important as written replies to exam questions.

Then I realised I had a blind spot. We were back living in Somerset when our kids were born, so we started watching Pingu, that charming, scatty cartoon about a penguin’s adventures in snowland. Listening to the gibberish used by the non-verbal penguin, my (Italian) wife said immediately that the vocalist was a compatriot. We listened more closely to Pingu’s whimsical sounds and it’s true, they did sound a bit like Italian heard through a washing machine.

A few seconds of googling revealed that Pingu’s grammelot (clown sounds) was the work of the Italian voice-actor, Carlo Bonomi’s. All that nonsense buffoonery – squeaks, scrapes, raspberries, percussive drillings –  emerged from Bonomi’s rubbery mouth. When he was replaced after the first four series, the role was almost inevitably given to another Italian – Marcello Magni. Their vocal virtuosity, I learned, was directly descended from the commedia dell’arte: rather than gibberish this was brilliant, high-brow mouth gymnastics.

So I began to wonder if I hadn’t been unfair to the ‘best in the world’ dubbers. If you listen to the very best, like Maria Pia Di Meo (who dubbed Audrey Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep and Julie Andrews) or Ferruccio Amendola (De Niro, Hoffman, Pacino and Stallone), you understand that there is a brilliance to acting only vocally. I even began to feel sympathy for them: according to a friend who has spent her life working as a voice actress, streaming has dealt a near death-blow to the industry. As with so many gig careers, the work now just goes to who can do it cheapest, regardless of quality.

It’s all made me ponder how we actually acquire foreign languages. As a (bilingual) family we’ve had four different Scandanavian adolescents staying with us in recent months, and – with the exception of pinholes of missing vocabulary and minimal mispronunciations – they speak English like the rest of us. That ability isn’t only the result of the proximity of Old Norse to Old English, but of a culture that insists that other languages should be heard on screen.

It’s also a question of educational philosophies. Because Italy has a 19^th-century conception of education, learning by rote and regurgitating, many teachers are still lobbing verbs and vocab from the lectern. Despite the heroic efforts of innovative teachers to make learning less staid, most Italian pupils – who all have phones under their desks – drift far away.

The failure of that method is as visible as the success of the other. I do a lot of work with teenagers excluded from mainstream schools here in Parma, in a cultural association we founded called ‘Common Home’. What intrigues me is that often these teens – who have been repeatedly failed (‘bocciati’) in schools – have a spoken English far beyond that of their peers in prestigious licei. When I ask them how it is that they speak such great English, they’re almost embarrassed: beyond hanging out with immigrant kids from Africa who speak Biblical and street English, their principal route to learning has been very simple: gulping down hundreds of hours of Netflix series in the original language.

That persuades me of how important the conversation around dubbing remains. Despite latterly learning to appreciate the artistry, I still think it renders a culture blinkered. Dubbing deifies Italian voices, but ignores the most important organs for actually learning another language: the ears.