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Countries good at 2nd foreign language? | ||
Tags: Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5337 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 9 of 41 10 July 2012 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
When you start English at 6, you do songs and you learn colors,how to tell the time and simple little sentences. When you start a second foreign language at 13, there will be more grammar and structure. In both cases though, there is a lot of emphasis on the spoken language.
You lost me :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4752 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 10 of 41 10 July 2012 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As for Europe, this Eurostat paper is interesting
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-SF-10-0 49/EN/KS-SF-10-049-EN.PDF ''The highest shares of the population aged 25 to 64 who said that they speak two or more foreign languages were found in countries with a small population, such as Norway, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia (55 % to 75 %). In Denmark, Sweden and Belgium slightly above 50 % of the population speak two or more foreign languages. The highest shares of the population speaking no foreign language are found in Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria and Greece (between 43 % and 75 %). The Nordic countries, Slovenia, Belgium, Estonia and Slovakia report the highest numbers of foreign languages (1.5 and above). Countries with low averages include Hungary, Romania and Turkey (below 0.5). After English, German is the second most widely known foreign language according to the survey with almost 20 % of 25-64 year olds from the 24 countries for which data are available putting German as one of the languages they can use. The highest proportions with knowledge of German are found in Norway, Denmark and Slovenia (46 % to 48 %) and the lowest in Spain, Portugal (3 % each) and Greece (4 %). Knowledge of Russian is concentrated mainly in the Eastern European countries, where it is spoken mostly by the ‘older generation’, for example in the Baltic states which were part of the former Soviet Union until the beginning of the 1990s. Knowledge of Russian in Western European countries is generally very low. Germany is the non-Eastern European country with the highest proportion of respondents with a knowledge of Russian (9 %). Knowledge of French is generally low within Europe compared with German and Russian. About 12 % of adults aged 25 to 64 in Europe put French as one of the foreign languages they can use. The countries with the highest proportions declaring at least a basic knowledge of French are led by the United Kingdom (40 %), Italy (34 %) and Portugal (29 %). French is one of the national languages in Belgium, where the survey showed that 38 % of the population indicated a knowledge of French as a foreign language. Four per cent of Europeans aged 25 to 64 declared Spanish as one of the foreign languages they know. The highest proportions are found in Spain’s neighbours — Portugal (13 %) and France (12 %).'' Edited by Camundonguinho on 10 July 2012 at 6:22pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5337 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 11 of 41 10 July 2012 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thank you, this was very interesting :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4681 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 12 of 41 10 July 2012 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Oh, I just meant there is no reprocity in distance. Perhaps some people consider that Spanish is easier than French for an English speaker (I'm sure many do). That doesn't mean English is easier than French for a Spanish speaker (and I suppose it is not the case). That's all :) But it may be true that German is difficult for both English and Norwegian people, simply it doesn't come from logic. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4781 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes Speaks: Russian | Message 13 of 41 11 July 2012 at 2:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This thread seems to be focused mainly on Scandinavia, but I would like to put in a good word for Armenia, where most people speak decent Russian, which is incidentally about as far away from Armenian as English is from Greek. Russian is mandatory in Armenian schools, as many Armenians will emigrate there in the future. Some Armenian TV shows switch alternately between Armenian, Russian and English.
Same goes for Lebanon--Arabic, French and English. That's 2 examples of countries where they speak multiple languages which are not that closely related, unlike northern Europe. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Vihelik Pentaglot Newbie Estonia Joined 4600 days ago 17 posts - 56 votes Speaks: Estonian*, Mandarin, English, Russian, Korean Studies: Tibetan, Spanish, French | Message 14 of 41 11 July 2012 at 2:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Two foreign languages are mandatory in the Estonian educational system. Some schools require three. I started with English in the first grade of elementary school and Russian in the third. Naturally, the quality of education varies from school to school, so not everybody becomes equally fluent in the two required languages. One can typically choose between English, German, Russian, and French, but some schools offer more exotic languages as well, such Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese. The northern half of Estonia is conversationally functional in Finnish, mostly due to watching Finnish television and the two million Finns that come shopping/traveling every year. I am from the south and can only speak Finnish, but I don't really understand half of what they say (yeah, sometimes it's easier to speak than to understand). When I went to college years ago, then in the history department undergraduates were required to take or test out of three modern languages plus Latin (I tested out of English and Russian but had to take pretty intensive German and Latin). Maybe things have changed now.
In Estonia learning foreign languages is really not a choice but a necessity. For a language that has only 900,000 speakers it is impractical to translate all the necessary technical manuals for a handful of specialist in narrowly specialized fields. It is cheaper to teach these people a couple of foreign languages, otherwise it would be quite impossible to keep abreast with the changes in their respective fields. In fact, many companies (including retailers in tourist hotspots) offer 5% increase in salary for every additional language that the employee knows. My impression is that the inhabitants of any country whose primary language has less than 8-10 million speakers globally are pretty good with at least one foreign language (usually English). Once the magic line is crossed, learning a second language ceases to be an existential necessity (that's why Hungarians tend to be monolingual while the neighboring Slovenes are not). The only exception to this rule (my personal opinion) are the inhabitants of the western half of Germany who tend to be reasonably conversational in English. Luxembourg is another example of a country where the small number of speakers (in global terms) of the primary language (300,000+ speakers of Letzebourgish) has given rise to an educational system that emphasizes the study of foreign languages. I don't think I have ever met a Luxembourger who, in addition to his or her native Letzebourgish, wasn't also fluent in German, French, and English. Edited by Vihelik on 11 July 2012 at 8:46pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5786 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 15 of 41 11 July 2012 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@Camundonguinho: this was a really interesting post, but I have to tell you that there is
no way 40% of people in the U.K. have a basic knowledge of French. Around 40% of us studied it at school, sure, but unless by basic you mean "Please" "thanks" "hello" and "goodbye" then no way it's 40%. If only! I would say about 10% of the population could ask for directions in French (with a bad accent), which I would say is a basic level. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Matematik Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4522 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes | Message 16 of 41 12 July 2012 at 1:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Agreed. It's a rare thing to come across a Brit who is proficient in a second language.
Even Brits who live abroad seem to constantly struggle to attain even basic proficiency in the native language. There are plenty of Brits who have lived in Spain for 10-20 years and can just about utter basic greetings, order things in a shop and ask for directions, but few can actually hold a sustained conversation in the language. However, on the other hand, many Spaniards like to practice their English, so if you can get around perfectly well just speaking English than why break a sweat trying to become fluent in Spanish? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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