Well, I have been trying to learn Dutch as I am visiting Amsterdam very soon. I notice how my attemps to speak it (given I am very crap at languages ) havent gone down very well with Dutch people It made me think how funny we in the UK can be to people who dont speak very good English. I don't know if anyone else has any views on this, but I really think in this global society we no live in that languages should be taught more in schools. If they started teaching us earlier in school, we English could have 2-3 languages under our belts by the time we left school as most other countries have. What do you think? Love Clairexxx
yeah.. they should teach us in junior school not senior, because when your younger other languages etc would be so much easyer to pick up, also the 'i cant be arsed' attitude tends to be less at a younger age
With the bigger european languages, ie German and all the Romance languages I'd say go for it and learn it, but with Dutch, I'd really say Don't bother. If you ask a Dutchman if he/she can speak English you'll be insulting them as it's the equivalent of saying "Can you count to three?". There's not a lot of point learning a language unless you learn it to the point of being able to use it with the natives, and since that takes considerable time and effort I would recommend you save the effort for a language which you'll really need. Languages are taught pretty well in schools. We all earn french from when we're about 7/8 up to GCSE at least, and then if we want we can learn other languages. People say the English are bad at languages and teh Continentals are so much better, but this is a bit unfair. The Continentals are all very good at learning English, and this is largely because they get so much TV, Films, Radio, and of course the Internet that is in English - and so they are as immersed in English as we are. Unfortunately they get Incorrect English most of the time and end up having to re-learn it when they come over here because they've picked up a lot of bad American habits. However, the rest of europe find it as difficult to learn non-english languages as we do, with the only exceptions being if they have a Romance language as a first language, say Spanish for Example, then they'll be in a better position to learn Portuguese, Italian and French. For us in England our best hope of achieving this is to learn Latin at school, for which we all have the option - that will give us an underlying knowledge of all the European Languages, including English, but not so much German. English is pretty much an international language now. On the continent they speak to each other in English a lot, they all learn English so they use that to talk to each other instead of having to learn eachother's languages. But the French, bless them still like to keep their own language as well - and will walk up to you in the street in England (or anywhere I suppose) and speak to you in French just as an English tourist would do abroad. And of course they insist on having Eurovision done in French along with the English. That's ok though because the English are better with French than any other foreign languages, and the rest of the continent have a reasonable understanding of French too, so we can all speak french and confuse the hell out of the yanks - Huzzah!
I think kids telly should be in different languages giving them a head start. I speak French very badly these days as i went to school in Geneva for a few years and it's great. Most nations appreciate you making the effort. (Likewise, scrap the news in the mornings and show comedy! Start the day with a cackle! Ban marriage and everybody sleep togethor so eventually we all end up the same colour, although the idiot fash would start on eye colour next.) THAT WAS A PARTY POLITCAL BROADCAST BY THE PLANET ZONK PARTY.
I'm saying nothing... I did French for 3 years (7-9), and German for 2 (8 & 9) then somehow managed to get out of doing either at GCSE cos I'm so crap :&
Well we used to have Tots TV - a childrens programme on ITV in the afternoons with this cabbage patch like puppets and a donkey. Two boys and a girl. Two boys spoke English like complete muppets (ok i suppose in a sense they WERE muppets) and a ginger girl who spoke immaculate french, repeating whatever they had to say. It wasn't really enough to teach children french but at least there was a token effort. Maybe it's just that French telly isn't worth watching, but if they were to show French children's telly regularly mixed in with the english telly - the sort that's used to teach young frogs how to speak then that could help a lot. Of course we need more french films in the cinema, and we need to make french a more prominent language across the internet. And we ought to be able to watch french news in the evenings as well. That'll be difficult because the Americans will be having none of it - they seem to be unaware that there are other countries in the world - "say, why's this innerrrnet nooz story about some otherrr country called Frayance? The innnerrrnet's called America Online, isn't it? Shouldn't it be about America?"
I'm lucky in the respect I grew up in a family that speaks another language (Ukrainian, which I am still learning) adn am lucky that in the states it's REQUIRED for us to take another language in school every year from grade 5 on till you graduate high school. So I've got 4 years of Spanish under my belt Sadly the language choices at my school are not too great (Only Spanish or French, and if you hit a good year they'll offer you Russian but that hasn't happened in a LONG time) Most schools offer at least 3 languages, but I guess with less languages it encourages us to take another language and stick with it so by the end of our high school career we'll be fluent in a second language, which seems to happen more often than not
In England, everyone has to learn french. Some people learn German or Spanish as well. In some of the more posh git schools they offer Italian or even Russian. At the same time, a lot of people do Latin, and a handful do Greek. Shame no-one ever suggested to me learning Portuguese - I would have found it useful now if they had. Still - I spent most of my time doing sax practice and that's been VERY helpful - and you can't have everything. The other thing I would have like to have done would be to spend more time out playing football and so be a bit fitter and also a lot slimmer, but well, I suppose I did ok.
Oh for fuck's sake! That's what you do when in America. Apparantly we speak so clearly and articulately that yanks can't understand us all that well. Must be awful for them when they meat Janners, Tykes, Scousers or Glaswegians! In Holland they speak English as well as we do - if it weren't for the Accent you wouldn't know they were foreign!
Meng i know what you mean.. as soon as they can hear an english accent in germany they revert back into english..mind you i dont blame them.. most english cant speka the language and dont try to.. plus the germans have got lots to gain from improving their english.. Foreign languages in this country are awful.. but then lots of people say 'id love to speak another language' and then they dont because they're too lazy or they think its too hard.. I admit its hard to learn a whole new grammatical system but its worth it. Conversing with someone in another language is an amazing experience. I just did a german alevel (dont knwo result yet...) and it was awful.. the worst subject i could have taken in the school.. not because the subject was bad, or the course wasnt that good... but because the teachers were crap.. they didnt seem to give a damn...i guess there's just not enough german teachers in the world...
I would love to be able to speak more languages. I used a fair bit of french while i was over in Spain (weird, I know) and it was so satisfying being able to communicate in a different language. I would love to learn more! Such a shame that I've only just developed my passion for languages after I finish school! I need to good basic Spanish in about two weeks before I go back over to work, so if anyone knows are good technics/books/websites or anything, suggestions would be appreciated
Looks like Welsh to me! What a crap language that is - they don't believe in vowels. I really ought to learn Gaelic - I only know a handful of words.
I started learning English when I was 9. By the time I was 12 I was fluent. By the time I was 15 I sounded very English. When I was 19 I moved to New Zealand and people thought I was joking when I told them that I'm not from England or even a native speaker (had been to London once). Quoting Jaz here, 'how is it possible that you English is so good?'. Because of TV, movies and music! I had my dictionary and I went through every single Petra song to find out what they were saying, and my favourite TV show was Monty Python ! It's that simple. Nothing is dubbed here, so it's everywhere. I've also done 6 years of Swedish, three years of French and three years of Spanish. But I can't say if our system is that great, or if it is just me and my interest in languages. I'm sure you can learn anything if you have to, eg my least favourite language German would suddenly feel very appealing if I met the coolest man ever and he was German...
Well I doubt India and Australia had much to do with it, or even Canada for that matter. If Only the Americans could speak English properly then it'd be all good! Wouldn't it be interesting if Brazil had turned out to be the major world power. We'd have Portuguese all over the world and we'd all learn it as our second language, and it'd be easy to do so what with it being all over the cinema and internet, and probably used as a marketing tool like what the Chinese and Japanese do with english (see www.engrish.com). Then we'd get all our chums in Lisbon moaning at us about how we learned Portuguese completely wrong! Oh and another thing about languages. I think we need to bring back the Latin mass in every parish. It's a universal thing, the Latin mass is the same in every country -so you can go abroad, go to church and still know all the words! Yes, if you can understand a language you can follow the mass there, but you can't instantly get all the responses right, and of course if the parts of the mass are in different languages they'll probably have different tunes to them as well.
