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British monoglots! | ||
Tags: Monolingual | United Kingdom (UK) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6865 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 17 of 43 30 May 2011 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Its true. Irony is British expats are generally the ones who squeel the most about people emigrating to the UK and not speaking English 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 18 of 43 30 May 2011 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
But language learning doesn't have to be like advanced maths. The basics of a language are very small indeed -- Michel Thomas could teach the fundamentals of the grammar of a language in a week, and it's not difficult to replicate what he did. Right now, we prolong the learning process by distracting learners with too many words, either by teaching them consciously, or our obsession with "authentics" which means constantly throwing new, not-yet-learnt vocabulary into the mix. The problem we face isn't that we're bad learners, it's that we're bad teachers. Students don't enjoy learning languages because we're not teaching them right. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| boisjolie Newbie United States Joined 5293 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 19 of 43 31 May 2011 at 3:16am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for education for education's sake- but most people aren't, and shouldn't be particularly criticized for it. In the days gone by where education was simply seen as a character builder, it also wasn't accessible to everyone. I'd say this utilitarian view of education has emerged as a result of more and more of us "common folk" having access to learning.
Going through an MT course certainly wouldn't justify me saying "I speak French" (or any other language for that matter). Even if people learn the bare, bare basics of a language, they'd still be fully monolingual. I think you'd be hard pressed to find an American who didn't know how to say "Hello," "Goodbye," and/or "thank you" in at least one other language. Many may also be able to talk about basic grammatical concepts of another tongue, too- like Spanish having genders. I'd also contend that even if I did go through the Michel Thomas course for, say, German, there still wouldn't be anywhere near as much opportunity for me to practice/use that German as much as math. I think I may run into one German speaker every month or two back home, and they've all spoken excellent English so far. I use basic math more than hourly- making purchases, estimating time, drawing up schedules, etc. Arithmetic, unlike exotic tongues, is absolutely essential to being a functional person pretty much anywhere you go in the world. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5818 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 20 of 43 31 May 2011 at 8:20am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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1. Many Europeans speak English to a high level (or at least can attain a
functional degree of English quicker than say a Japanese person can due to word, culture, syntax similarities). 2. Europeans are Britain's most common visitors (after Indians/Pakistanis) followed loosely by Americans/Aussies/South Africans I would imagine. 3. Our closest neighbours don't exactly have a difficult time learning very closely related languages. porque, porquoi, porque, perche, because. amigo, ami, amigo, amico, friend. I imagine that there are more French who speak Italian than speak German and more Germans who speak Swedish than speak Portuguese. 4. We have no genders in our language so it makes European languages seem unnecessary/unnecessarily difficult. Learning something new in a language is always difficult and learning it for every single bloody noun that exists (and to a lesser extent adjectives) can be off-putting. It's like when someone from a two-gender language has to learn German for example. At least they have a basis for their understanding. We have no point of reference to help us. 5. The verb changes in English are rather simple. Have, Has. None of that tengo, tienes, tiene, tenemos, teneis, tienen etc for every single verb, every single time, every single person/thing you reference. Unnecessarily complicated for a native English speaker. 6. Subjunctive largely missing from English (learning something new point above). 7. Pluralisation in articles/adjectives missing from English. 8. With the influence of British imperialism, American movies, British/American TV shows/music, there is a lot of English around the world motivating others to learn the language. English speakers miss out on that influence. Visit a foreign country and see the sheer size of their American movie section compared to their native section. Also in regards to this one and point 4 I've met many more Asians who speak English than speak another Asian language. Multilingualism is not as common as people think. 9. In regards to my above point, you can ask a Vietnamese/Greek/German/Italian person why they don't speak German/Italian/Greek/Vietnamese. They'll say I'm not interested in the country, don't know anything about the country and have no interest in learning the language. Why did you learn English you ask and they say movies, music, financial reasons, travel etc. all reasons missing for a typical English speaker. 10. I think that if British Imperialism had died much longer ago and the Americans spoke another language (like German for example) then we would be less mono-lingual than we are now. That influence weakens our effort sadly. Though I am disappointed by the lack of languages I see spoken in England (and other countries) by its natives, I kind of know why it exists and why other countries don't have this problem so badly. And though I'll probably get flamed for the above reasons/excuses, I would like those who are writing in English while flaming me to think about why they learnt English and why they haven't learnt something like Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, Korean etc and then think about why an English speaker hasn't learnt their language yet. Edited by crafedog on 31 May 2011 at 8:21am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 21 of 43 31 May 2011 at 10:45am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm not suggesting otherwise. All I'm suggesting is that the teaching of the fundamentals of a language would be better than learning a bunch of fixed questions and answers as seems to be the fashion these days. Schoolkids would enjoy it more ("learning" is inherently fun, "memorising" is inherently stressful) and less would abandon languages at the first opportunity. And even if they did abandon it, they'd still have learnt something they could usefully build on if they came back to it later. Now you say you're against "education for education's sake", but if you look closely, you'll see that the problems in language education are because of taking a utilitarian view. We teach phrases because they're individually and immediately "useful", but this detracts from the learning of the underlying structure and logic of the language. Every other month there's a letter in the newspaper asking why we keep teaching our kids French and German when what they "need" is Chinese. (The answer? We have lots of French and German teachers and very few Chinese teachers.) Teaching utilitarian French or German doesn't help kids learn Chinese, but learning a language properly helps you develop your language-learning skills and makes it easier to choose to learn another language later in life. And that's actually the point. Very few people genuinely believe in "education for education's sake" -- what we believe in is building a firm, broad foundation that increases the individual's future potential for learning. We don't teach algebra so that everyone is a mathematician, but so that everyone can be a mathematician. General education is a means of allowing the individual to specialise as an adult, rather than being pigeon-holed by teachers and parents and shoe-horned into a specialism he might not like.... 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| dragon32 Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4954 days ago 12 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English* | Message 22 of 43 31 May 2011 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Why bash the Brits, or even fellow English-speaking nations? Monolingualism is still the norm across the globe.
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| boisjolie Newbie United States Joined 5293 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 23 of 43 31 May 2011 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm not sure what language education is like in the UK, but in the US it's not quite as bad as you seem to describe. Classes tend to follow a Vocabulary--->Grammar point-->exercises pattern.
In school, assessment is basically essential. The way they teach languages is essentially similar to the way they teach math, science, etc. Without major cultural change, I don't really see how it could work in a fundamentally different way. I think a major problem is that, sadly enough, many people these days don't find learning fun, and abandon it in almost all of its forms at the first opportunity. This holds true for languages, mathematics, science, literature, or you name it. Unless people have a passion for it after their introduction to it, few people specialize in things unless they can get paid for it.
You may have misread my post. "I'm all for education for education's sake," is roughly what I said. I agree that people treating everything with a cost-benefit analysis scope is a pretty weak way to pursue learning. Although I wish more people would find learning fun and interesting (as opposed to solely a means to an end) and that we'd generally be better off if that were the case, I don't think there's really much ground for criticizing people for not spending countless hours of their own time trying to pursue a goal with little or no practical benefit. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6439 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 24 of 43 31 May 2011 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Plenty of people learn a Romance/Germanic language, who are native speakers of the other family. English gives people an advantage with both families, compared to natively speaking a (non-English) language from one and learning a language from the other.
Minor issue. When was the last time you heard someone decide to learn Chinese because the verbs don't conjugate - or Persian, where they are similar to English in the amount they change?
Again, not a particularly big deal. Esperanto has it, and while people complain about it, it's easier to learn than all sorts of details you need even with very closely related languages.
There's also a heavy selection bias to this. How often are you actually going to communicate with a Japanese person who has only learned Korean? As an English speaker, you interact with foreigners who have learned English, not foreigners who have learned 3 other languages which you do not speak. English is the most studied language - for pragmatic, rather than grammatical, reasons. Plenty of the points you made are valid - but why include the others? 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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