Just come back on holiday
from Dominican Republic, would recommend this to anyone, anyone been to
Dom Rep or anywhere in the Carribean???
Whilist I was out there
in our hotel we had so many different nationalities from the likes of
Germany, Holland, France and Russia and they all seem capable of
speaking the English language. I managed to get to know a few european's
and one of them stated they support Newcastle. Well at least they did not say Palace lol
Why
is it that we seem to be lazy in learning other languages and relying
on the rest to speak the English language, what is it they are doing
that we can't seem to do over here? I know that the English language is
well known but surely we should do more to learn other languages???
Comments
Languages are a simple tricky thing if you get my drift. Most of us learn our mother tongue without even thinking about it. So on one the hand it's child's play, but on the other learning a new language, especially from a distance so to speak, is pretty difficult.
My son is lucky in that in our household he had a different mother tongue to English, but grew up here, in an English speaking environment, and acquired the language automatically.
As a result of being bilingual it has helped him to acquire other languages pretty well, and generally helped with his overall learning and intelligence. I also think speaking more than one language has helped him to be pretty good musically.
Loads of people ask what the point is of learning/doing another language given everybody speaks English. I wouldn't be so sure; they say that this century will be the Oriental/Chinese century, and maybe English is on the way to being as quaint as Latin.
The rest of the world learns English, because it is relatively easy (no male/female nonsense), because it is the language of business (and will continue to be so, forget the idea that one of the languages spoken in China or Asia is going to take over, ain't gonna happen). A form of it is spoken by the most powerful country in the world. It's the language of pop music, as Italian is to opera, so the world hears it all the time. As GH said, what language should we learn?
In Portugal all English language TV shows and films are subtitled, so again, they are subjected to it all the time. It makes it so much easier to pick up a language when you can hear it in English and read it in your own language.
I learnt French at school, and I am pleased that I did, and when in France I find it does not take long for it to come back. It also helps a little with Portuguese, but I don't criticise anyone who doesn't speak another tongue, it's up to them but I do think they are missing out.
I traveled extensively across Europe in business a while back. All business meetings were conducted in English despite being made up of Danes, Dutch, Poles, Finns, Swedes, French, German, Spanish and Italian colleagues.
I remember a conversation with some Finnish business associates when I remarked at how good was their English. I remarked upon my lack of multilingual skills and they said that as Finns, their language is very difficult to learn and only spoken by a very small number of people compared to English. That made it imperative that they learn it.
Over here in China the kids learn to read and write English from a very young age, however they don't do any speaking/listening unless they come to a private school. However the education over here is kind of mental, I have students who go to school at 6:30am, finish at 9pm and then have 3 hours or so of homework, to make it worse when the weekends arrive their parents make them come to the school I work at. It's crazy. I tell them I started school at 9am and finished at 3pm you can almost see their hearts break
Esperanto estas OK sed sonoro stulta kiam vi paroli.
I'm more of a Volapük man myself.
Its success as a world language stems from its ability to add loan words and phrases from cultures around the world. Unlike the academic French for example who devote their time keeping French pure.
Our language does have foibles but compared to say its Germanic roots its much easier to learn.
I just think that we have a remarkable language and it surprises me not one bit that because of the supremacy of English as a spoken language throughout the world, we don't have a culture of learning other languages.