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Boris Johnson on Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| languagenerd09 Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom youtube.com/user/Lan Joined 5104 days ago 174 posts - 267 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Thai | Message 17 of 57 16 October 2013 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't even think an incentive will change it, even now we hear from students (as my sister and I have friends who are teachers) these whimsical ideas, in which I quote my friend's year
6 student saying "when I grow up I don't need maths or English because i'll just win the x factor and become really really famous" What happened to numeracy and literacy being the core of education especially in primary school? When I was at primary school we did English, maths and science every single day without fail. I didn't learn Spanish in primary school, that started in year 7, even then I can remember hearing fellow classmates outside making it sound like it was a daunting, horrible task with key phrases heard such as "urgh I can't stand this subject, we're from England" I think it just needs to be approached in a different sense, perhaps do what my niece's nursery does, teaching basic sums like 1+1 = 2 except saying the numbers in French. On a side-note I also studied A-Level Spanish and there is a massive change in how it's taught and what is taught between 2 year GCSE and 1st year A-Level. At GCSE you talk about family, going on holiday, buying clothes then all of a sudden my first year at A-Level was topics such as deforestation, highway code of Spain, the history of Francisco Franco, tourism in Spain, anorexia and bulimia, science topics ... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4711 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 18 of 57 16 October 2013 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Because numeracy is getting more and more implicit and nobody's reading as much as they used to. It's a culture change. I did all of these subjects every week too, but out of all the things I did in high school, how much do I actually use? I can tell you it's very little. I use English every day, and essay-writing skills, and some basic maths and physics. I used to use chemistry more often because I studied chemistry at university. But most of the knowledge I got is general knowledge that doesn't exactly do much except make French teachers raise their eyebrows when I correct them on mosasaurs. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4832 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 19 of 57 16 October 2013 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Partly the fault of a xenophobic tabloid press, the product of which I wouldn't want to use to line my parrot cage (if I had one). (ruder versions of that metaphor available on request). And a general anti-intellectualism that seems to pervade modern life. Witness the closure of libraries, with some protest, but we should be marching in the streets to stop it, not just giving in, as we always end up by doing.
Ah yes, the A level, the famous "gold standard", beloved of traditional British educationalists and politicians. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5412 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 20 of 57 17 October 2013 at 9:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Relying on what I've read here and there, language teaching in the UK is not that much efficient (I guess some would say it is an understatement). So, would substituting Mandarin for French/German/Spanish change anything ?
Does the system produce confident speakers in these languages ? If not, how will students/adults learn to any reasonable level a language that is so much different from English when they can't find motivation/good methods to learn/teach the closely related languages of countries they can visit very easily ? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 57 17 October 2013 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If the school children in London were to learn Chinese as their first foreign language I am fairly surely they would fail utterly and then believe for the rest of their lives that they couldn't learn languages at all and they would fail learning all subsequent languages and end up as embittered sad monoglots. If you teach Chinese after a European language or two and then only to particularly interested volunteers then it might function. But it is an illusion to believe that pupils who barely have passed a test in broken Mandarin in London will be able to conclude business deals in Shanghai on that basis. Maybe it would even be better to stick to English and let the Chinese businessmen struggle. Edited by Iversen on 17 October 2013 at 12:34pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4312 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 22 of 57 17 October 2013 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Two things: 1. Yes Mandarin is being considered because of economic reasons. 2. German would probably be dropped over Spanish because Spanish is more popular for whatever reason. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| languagenerd09 Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom youtube.com/user/Lan Joined 5104 days ago 174 posts - 267 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Thai | Message 23 of 57 17 October 2013 at 2:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
In terms of myself, I was always confident in languages, I knew when I started high school that I wanted to be either a language teacher or a translator and Spanish was the subject I was always giving 110% in. Before I went to high school I already knew basics of Spanish so I was ahead of what other classmates were learning all due to my grandfather ensuring that every time he and my grandma were babysitting me whilst on holidays in Spain, he made sure that we went to Spanish speaking cafés only and that I therefore had to speak Spanish, so I knew (because I used to get taught words and phrases from the natives) by the time I got to high school how to introduce myself, talk about family, saying colours, counting past one thousand etc which accumulates to why I was getting a range of 98 to 100% in tests for the subject. I think motivation is something that we need in the UK, a lot of teachers in my other subjects just weren't motivational at all and people didn't want to go their lessons. Whereas teachers like my Spanish teachers, English language/literature, philosophy and ethics were extremely motivational to me and my classmates and the outcomes of that came out really well, especially given the fact that entering high school I was predicted a grade D in English literature but by the end of high school my official GCSE grade was an A and I was 3 marks off an A* - due to the motivation of my teacher who kept on track with me, helped me when I had misunderstandings, told me what to re-read, gave me extra-homework to help guide me and told me what textbooks and pages to read etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4177 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese | Message 24 of 57 17 October 2013 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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From what I've read, even for native speakers, learning and maintaining Chinese (particularly as a written language) is basically a full time job. Schools are already failing to produce a reasonable number of bilingual students when they're teaching French, Spanish and German. What makes them think that switching to a language that takes nearly 4 times as long to learn (according to the FSI) is going to improve matters? Yes, it would be lovely to have a generation of children who were bilingual in Chinese and English, but if you look at the resources and time they're willing to put into teaching languages, it's not really going to happen.
Add to this the fact that in a recent survey of British businesses about which language they found most useful on a CV, they placed Mandarin 4th......behind German, French and Spanish (German being the most desired btw). Here's a link to the survey. "Germany remains the largest single export market for British goods outside of the USA, and Europe's largest economy – with a GDP of more than €2.4 trillion – continues to defy the eurozone downturn. So it's no surprise that UK companies want to hire employees who know their umlauts from their eszetts." Not why I'm studying it btw.  Edited by I'm With Stupid on 17 October 2013 at 3:11pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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