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Americans aren’t so bad at languages | ||
Tags: Using Foreign Languages | United States | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| jingwumaster Newbie United States Joined 4670 days ago 33 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English* | Message 17 of 34 11 January 2013 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I, like many, feel the majority (or at least a significant percentage) of Americans either think learning another language is reserved for geniuses or they are simply annoyed by it and think that everyone should speak English. Obviously there are exceptions and people who travel are more likely to be exceptions.
At the same time, I think many of the Americans that think learning another language is only for gifted people, would themselves, like to learn another language, but believe that it is not possible for them or at least not without living in the country. To echo Kanawai, this, for most people, has to do with their negative experiences with language learning in school. Unfortunately, people often get the impression in school that they can't learn languages and they carry that feeling into adulthood instead of learning to do things more effectively. (Transference, in the sense of carrying our outdated views of the world into adulthood instead of evolving.) Also, people that are not willing to go several months without significant or sometimes even noticible improvements will most likely if not inevitably quit before they discover that they can learn languages (somewhat ironically to). I'm not sure how this issue can be resolved, but I do think that if you are able to help someone experience a little bit of that beauty and joy that you get when you are able to connect with a native of another language because of your efforts, then they might become more enthusiastic and try harder. Reminds me of Moses's level up missions (laoshu505000). He has even said that the reactions he gets from the natives when he attempts to speak with them is a great source of motivation. So, if you can find a way for a person to experience a little bit of that, then they might fall in love with language learning. "May the odds be ever in your favor" 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Tsopivo Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4471 days ago 258 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: Esperanto | Message 18 of 34 11 January 2013 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not once in my entire life have I heard someone even remotely suggesting that a farmer in Iowa should learn French or any other language. The comments I have heard about Americans and languages (or really, about anglophones and languages) have always concerned anglophones outside of anglophones countries and the way some tourists, travellers and even temporary or permanent immigrants do not bother to learn ANY French (or country X's language) at all and just assume that the people they meet will speak English and then complain when they find out it is not true. On the other hand, I did hear a lot of native English speaker stating that everyone in country X speak English or should speak English because you know, English is oh-so-very-important - an in my mind, if you say everyone, you are including farmers. I also did hear English people moving to rural areas in France without speaking or learning French and then being surprised and disappointed to see that their career took a hit or it was hard to meet people. Of course, I am not suggesting that all anglophones think that farmers abroad should learn English - I hope it's a minority of people - but in my experience, it is specific to anglophones.
It's weird you've never heard it. It's quite common, especially in some American TV shows. I would also point out that a lot of those people are able to communicate in English, though with bad accents and broken grammar.
First, you have to realize that Americans are really really far from being the only one to be criticized for their lack of "language ability". Off the top of my head, I could come up with at least a dozen countries that suffer from the same prejudice. They might get a bit more of it but that's it. Second, there are some things that are specific to anglophones and that explain why they can get such a strong reaction - again, I'd like to emphasize that I do not mean that those things concern every or even most anglophones only that it's not seen among other languages monolinguals. One is the assumption that every one in country X speak or should speak your language. While I do see some French (or other nationalities) go abroad without speaking a word of the language - which I think is rude -, the only reason behind that is that they think they don't have the ability or time or motivation to learn it. They might try their language with the locals because they don't know anything else but they do not expect the locals to generally speak their language, they are not surprised or offended to see that the locals don't speak their language. Another issue is the double-standard. For instance, I recently came across a newspaper article about a meeting between a French minister and an English one. The newspaper went on to bash the minister for his inability to speak English which made the presence of interpreters necessary since, of course and no critic was emitted about that, the English minister did not speak French. The anglophones are not to blame for that double-standard, in my example, French newspapers showed the same double-standard in favour of English. Yet, it is bound to cause some resentment. Edited by Tsopivo on 11 January 2013 at 5:17pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| justonelanguage Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4462 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English, Spanish | Message 19 of 34 11 January 2013 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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[/QUOTE]
Off the top of my head, I could come up with at least a dozen countries that suffer from the same prejudice. don't know anything else but they do not expect the locals to generally speak their language, they are not surprised or offended to see that the locals don't speak their language. [/QUOTE] The general rule is that the less powerful or influential the language is (or the smaller the country is) that is spoken in the country, the more multilingual the country will be. You see this in the US and Great Britain, where the de facto language is English, the most influential global language. Spain is guilty of the same; outside of the Galician, Basque, and Catalán autonomous communities the average Spaniard does not know many languages, just Castilian, which is a very powerful language in the world. Russians and Chinese have less of a need to know English than countries like Malta, for example. Conversely, countries like Singapur or Switzerland tend to be very multilingul, mostly because they are small/smaller countries that have to do the best they can to be competitive with larger countries. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Tsopivo Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4471 days ago 258 posts - 411 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Esperanto | Message 20 of 34 11 January 2013 at 6:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree with the general rule (though not necessarily with the Switzerland example), however, I have no idea why you would answer that to my post and to the specific passages that you quote. Could you explain me ? Edited by Tsopivo on 11 January 2013 at 6:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| zerrubabbel Senior Member United States Joined 4600 days ago 232 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 21 of 34 11 January 2013 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
by making the comment about that cranky attitude, Im targeting the preposterous expectation, and often made excuse that its no use because the rest of the world does/should know adequate English. I live around this comment a lot, and its usually accompanied with "why waste the time/money?"... its the ignorance that really gets to me... either that or the occasional disdain from someone, likely stemming from a similar mentality. so the way I experience it, is not that Im on my high horse, but being ridiculed because Im wasting my resources for doing something productive. and I wasnt boasting my own skill in my languages, but if you would like to know, I will tell you... I have done no official tests, but I can relatively confidently say : Japanese B1- writing A2 Spanish A0 [I can hold a basic conversation, spoken or written, of which is about what I know, what I do, and what I like] Mandarin A0 [by which I mean I know a few phrases, and can read about 40 characters] Edited by zerrubabbel on 11 January 2013 at 10:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| justonelanguage Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4462 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English, Spanish | Message 22 of 34 11 January 2013 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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[/QUOTE]
I agree with the general rule (though not necessarily with the Switzerland example), however, I have no idea why you would answer that to my post and to the specific passages that you quote. Could you explain me ? [/QUOTE] The Switzerland example isn't *that* great since they speak Swiss-German, French, Italian, and Romache? as their main languages. However, it is a relatively small country with few natural resources so they have had to work hard to be as successful as they are. (They are dominant in chocolate and watches, for example) I quoted that part of your post because you said that you could think of "12" examples of countries where they weren't great at languages because of lack of need. Thus, I talked about how the countries that speak influential languages as official or de de facto tongues don't have as much incentive to learn so many languages. Germany *may* be an exception, as they seem to be very good at English yet have one of the world's strongest economies and a major language to boot. Personally, I don't think that the average Swiss person that speaks two languages natively and several others at lower levels of competence is any more talented than a monolingual American; they learned those languages at birth so they didn't really "work" to learn the language in my mind. There are immersion programs that teach Americans in non-English languages starting in elementary school and they reach native level in the languages. Heck, I didn't learn English until 5 and didn't speak any when starting school. However, within about six months, I think I got the hang of it. And my native language (since forgotten) is vastly different from English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 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 23 of 34 11 January 2013 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I agree with Mark on this; the anglophone world has less need for foreign languages, so
they don't learn it as much. But they're not less capable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4338 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 24 of 34 12 January 2013 at 4:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In my experience, the people who already knew two (or some of two) languages as a kid or have close ties to foreign countries, such as their parents always speaking another language to them or having close family in another country that they maybe even visited, they usually go on to either improve that language or learn others. In the UK this is probably far more common than in the US because, as someone else said, it's also just harder to leave America in the first place compared to Europe where every "state" is an actual different country with likely a different culture and language. I have heard tons of times about Europeans going on SCHOOL TRIPS with the entire class to foreign countries - gasp!! They offered for us to go to Peru or something for the Spanish class, except only five people could go and you still had to pay thousands of dollars to go, which was not possible for most families.
Of course many immigrants who have since naturalized into citizens still know their languages. I don't count them. I think the majority of Americans who have no ties to foreign countries and who did not grow up around other languages do not learn others to a point where they are actually useful. People tend to give up as soon as their courses end, even if they actually like the language. My stepmom for example studied Japanese for three years in Uni then went on exchange to Japan for a year - then never used Japanese again. Now ten or so years later she can't even remember her hiragana or katakana. However I have also met many Americans who actually do like the languages they are learning in school and do want to learn more, they just don't realize that ex. a huge amount of learning resources are available online, for free, that are better than their courses and textbooks. Americans are taught "this is how you learn", and so that is how they learn. For example I tell someone "you should play this flash game in Spanish since you like Spanish and are learning it!", and I get in reply "But I won't be able to understand it!!" and no matter how I try, I can't reason with them. Very, very, VERY often have I helped out people learning Icelandic (writing them personal lessons, etc.) only to find that they quit after one or two weeks, sometimes even they quit after the second day. Part of this is Americans "have no time". They have no time most likely because they are managing their time unwisely and doing a lot of things they don't need to do (ex. Facebook, watching tv, even simple things like waiting to get home to study instead of studying on the bus ride home), plus many of them eat bad food which doesn't give you as much energy, I think... They don't want to substitute their ex. English tv that they can understand perfectly, for a Spanish show they can't understand. Likewise Americans are very "instant", they want everything done here and now - whether it is making food, getting stuff, or many other things (yes I have heard girls complain "it takes FOREVER for water to boil for my instant ramen!" and "no you're wrong, the gas station does have real food - chips!" absolutely seriously). On top of that, anything that is learning is seen as work. Even if they "want" to learn the language, they don't want to have a difficult time or have to work at it. If they even think it might be work then they are largely put off by it. Part of this (honestly, a good half at least) is also the fault of American schools. I think private schools are probably much better, seeing as they start learning a language in seventh grade instead of ninth for example as far as I heard. American public schools teach at an insanely slow pace and teach you that "the teacher is right", even if the teacher is wrong. For example my Spanish teacher didn't actually know Spanish well at all and was often wrong, but of course you couldn't correct her because "she is the teacher and she is right, what do you know, you are just an insignificant student". Then the next Spanish teacher was even worse because not only was she also teaching us wrong, but she was also mad at us all the time for knowing wrong stuff from our old teacher. Then when I went into Uni, I learnt the same amount of Spanish in literally three months, that they took a year and a half to teach me in high school Spanish. So you see, Americans (especially younger ones who haven't been to Uni yet) are very used to that extremely slow speed - they think that speed is normal. In reality, even twice that speed is slower than normal for a European. So of course learning a language is hard, tiring, and difficult if they never teach you how to really learn a language, never tell you "Pokemon exists in Spanish, you can watch it on youtube!", and you think you are doing good if you are managing such a slow pace as that. Textbooks teach you dumb travel phrases you are never going to use, not much actual useful vocabulary - they are often also very expensive and full of tons of filler material (my Spanish books were always practically half culture articles and half actual learning). In my Spanish courses we never once got native-made material that wasn't meant specifically for learners, we never did any translating (we only answered questions by using a full sentence), we didn't learn about any Spanish other than Mexican and occasionally a couple words that were different from the other Latin American countries, we never EVER did speaking practice or even actually learned more than very basic pronunciation rules. We were also actually forced to make flashcards and study from them in class (they also had pictures instead of the English word for the word), never of course did we get anything like a plain old bilingual easy novel, and we only did listening practice maybe twice per year. Plus the courses were by no means taught by fluent speakers. In Uni it was better because we at least had native speakers for teachers, but still we didn't do translating and did little speaking, we mostly focused on grammar and again on "answering a sentence by rewriting the question into a sentence". Not to mention, Americans cannot go into any random bookstore and buy books in German, French, Italian... maybe Spanish if they are lucky. They cannot turn on the tv and watch foreign dramas, documentaries, or movies without having bought a special channel, and if DVD rental stores have foreign movies they are a small selection and probably only the very major ones (ex. Asian horror movies). When you get videogames, they usually get rid of the foreign-language options that English people would have had with the European version - they even Americanize what was originally "British", they change the dialogue (sometimes even re-dubbing voices in videogames) to be much less English for example because "Americans wouldn't understand it". Many European sites and stores actually only ship to Europe or to the surrounding countries, and of course shipping is most often at least twice the cost of the actual item. And finally, foreigners who have learnt English perfectly will most likely not mention to you that they are foreign (with good reason since Americans are so dumb about it), and learners of languages usually do not mention they are learning either (also with good reason - it is really tiring to get the same exact questions and answers over and over and over). I will give you one more example. As a kid I thought it was impossible to become fluent, or even fairly good, in another language unless you moved to the country for several years. Everyone I knew or heard about who became fluent had permanently moved to the country. Likewise I thought it was insanely expensive to go to another country and I needed to be an adult with a good job with lots of money saved in order to do it. Even though I always loved Japan and wanted to learn Japanese, my dad thought Japanese was useless so he would not buy me textbooks, a tutor, lessons, courses, anything (I almost never got any money and never got allowance so I couldn't buy them myself, even though my family is rich). No one ever told me that there were lessons online or that you could learn anything from self-study, instead I only heard "you have to take a class with a teacher in order to learn". I never once had anyone tell me otherwise, (and still haven't, not from Americans anyway - even the Americans learning languages that I meet are usually still "MUST TAKE COURSES alongside studying abroad"). My dad's favourite thing to say when I told him I wanted to learn Japanese was always "Japanese is for your hobby, Spanish is for life." (yes he made me learn Spanish which I hated - completely ignoring my protests of "Japanese is not just for a hobby if you live in Japan" and "You get paid more as a Japanese translator than as a Spanish one"). He personally took two courses in Spanish, failed the second one (he was working full-time at the same time so it's reasonable that he failed), and then never tried again. That was when I was around fourteen and he had already made me take two Spanish "classes" (for kids where you learn absolutely nothing, like fifty words max out of the whole course). Now I am nearly twenty-one, he made me take five more Spanish courses after that (he wanted me to take them when I was in Uni abroad too but luckily I had the excuse that they don't let you dabble in courses outside of your major unless you have perfect grades) and nope, he himself has not picked it up again... Most Americans I have talked to also think like I did as a kid. That is why I do my best to explain to those that i meet that, no, if you come to Sweden you can literally go to school for free, no it only costs four hundred dollars from your local airport to fly to Iceland, no you can stay in hostels which may only cost ten dollars a night or you can couchsurf or pitch a tent, no there are tons of learning materials online, here i will find you as many as i can... The problem is that many still don't listen. I think there may be an incubation period where they don't do anything about it (the number-one excuse I hear is "I am too busy with school" even though they are not exactly studying to be doctors or are even in Uni in most cases. I managed to study a language on top of all my American courses just fine and so have others). Eventually they will meet more people who are doing the same thing, see more and more that it is possible, and then maybe they start doing it themselves. Since foreign and language seem so untouchable to most Americans. As my wife puts it, "Foreign countries and languages to Americans are like Disneyland, it is not a real land and is cool and exotic but doesn't really matter and it is tiny and insignificant and you will live life perfectly fine never having visited". So that is why I think Americans are "bad" at language learning. However I am seeing a DEFINITE change nowadays thanks to more and more people using the internet and finding out about countries and languages much easier and much earlier on. On the internet you can't avoid foreign languages or countries - there are always country wars in youtube comments or people commenting in their own language, related videos of commercials from other countries, someone replies to your post on Tumblr and you go to look at their Tumblr and they are a college student from Poland, etc. This doesn't happen in "real life" to most Americans (by "most Americans" again I actually mean "most Americans who have no ties whatsoever to foreign countries".) I too never knew anything about Iceland or Icelandic (except where it was geographically) before I randomly made a friend from there online, they eventually told me snippets about Iceland, I liked what I heard so I read up on it and saw and heard the language and liked it and... I would never have heard Icelandic if it weren't for the internet, I had never even heard native French or German in real life until I was seventeen. I have no ties to foreign countries, not really - my great-grandpa who is still alive is fluent in German, Russian, Polish, and English because his parents and the maids spoke them to him when he was a kid. But he never taught his wife or his kids any of it and never talks about his parents, those languages, or "the home country" etc. He has spoken German about twice in my lifetime and he only said a couple words. But I did first "learn" about foreign countries thanks to anime (yes it sounds dumb). I really liked anime, I found out this was some specific thing, I found out it came from Japan, I read all I could about Japan and started watching more anime that was subtitled and I liked Japanese and wanted so badly to study abroad there since I knew it was possible... I carried on that thinking and managed to study in Iceland, I moved from Iceland to Sweden - if it hadn't been for anime, how sad would my life have been, hahah! After all this long struggle learning the only way I was ever taught, you can imagine just how much it blew my mind upon discovering you can learn tons of a language (with me at least, even more than through studying) through context without even looking words up, memorizing them purposefully, or studying grammar over and over... I only tried this method due to an unfortunate eye problem that was making it painful to move my eyes and difficult to read (so no glancing at grammar charts!). And then you can imagine how upset I was when I found out my Swedish wife thought it was extremely obvious and the better method and it was something she knew even when she was eight. Well, I am also pretty sure my parents and brother believe that no one can truly become fluent in another language and most of all, that no one can assimilate to another country. My dad especially tries to rub it in my face that "you are American, you will always be American, it is not in American culture to do this" etc. He is also the type of person who cannot tell Swedish or Icelandic from German (and cannot recognize actual German when he hears that either) and cannot hear one bit how badly he is pronouncing "uno mas, por favor" to the Mexican waiter (these things are despite that he has even taken Spanish courses). They have even said to me that the whole family is certain that I, someone who has constantly told everyone I wanted to move to Japan ever since I found out Japan existed, will move back to America within five or ten years of living abroad. Even though I don't live in my childhood-dream country (I will try that out in four or so years after I can discard American citizenship), I am almost on year three and if anything my desire to never move back (I even dread just visiting) has gotten far stronger. Now if only I can get over the inferiority complex of only knowing English. Edited by kaptengröt on 12 January 2013 at 5:36am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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