Follow up post ZOMG O.o

I got a comment on my last post, or rather on the TV makes kids stupid part of it, and as a first on this blog, I think I am posting a follow up.
I totally agree on the part where Norwegians are good at English due to TV. I attribute my good English skills to watching a lot of TV as a child. But there are some contributing factors here: The first one being our age, and the second one being the age that we start to learn English.
I can see that I was very unclear about that in my last post, but these findings are mostly directed at children of 3 years and younger, so they are very young, and are still learning our mothertounge. When we start to better our English through TV we already know some English, which brings me to my second point. In Norway we start learning English in 1st grade. Or at least a lot of us do. I learned longhand instead, and therefore did not start to learn English before I was in 4th grade.
So: When we start to learn English from TV we are old enough to do so, and we already know English. You cannot simply pick up a language from watching TV, unless it was a language teaching programme. If we could how many teenagers would not be fluent in JapaneseXP
I wholly agree that our very high exposure to English through the media contributes hugely to our adeptness at English here in Norway, and the fact that they have deemed English a second language in Norway (as opposed to a foreign language) somewhat attests to this fact.
But then you have other people who don't learn as much as say you or I have. I know a man, exactly my age, who has watched as much English TV as I have, and who started learning English in 1st grade, four years before me, who cannot speak it at all. He almost flunked out of English in high school. So then we have to ask ourselves: This kid, who has had all the same things as us, and who doesn't have our skill, and you do not have to look far or hard to find others like him, what did his parents do differently?
I was speaking and writing poetry in English (very bad poetry thou) when I was 11. I did not grow up in his house so I don't know his amount of TV watching, or what he watched, but I know that he has had a similar upbringing as me and all that.
The fact that Norwegians are generally better than Germans or Finns does not mean that most of us are very good. We all grew up watching the same after school specials, and the same soaps, and the same sitcoms. We had the same TV available, but still a frighteningly large amount of Norwegian teenagers are very bad at English. And I believe that this proves that it has to be much more than TV that makes us good at English.