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Lack of languages stifles Brits and USers | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 3875 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes  Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 25 of 95 10 July 2014 at 9:32am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I dont agree. My guess is that having a foreign language under the belt (esp French) is a status symbol for the elite. As well as sending kids to schools which cost an arm and a leg and a kidney. When the kids of these rich elite grow up, how will they demonstrate their supposed intellectual dominance to the plebeians? Not via math/science. That is too hard, and many of the smart plebeians are good at it anyway. Philosophy, not really, it requires some brains, and is not accepted as a status symbol. Languages, yes. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4702 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 26 of 95 10 July 2014 at 10:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Saying that if US companies needed language skills they would pay more for them is a bit like saying if cheeseburgers were unhealthy McDonald's wouldn't sell them. Teachers don't get paid more (in the UK) for learning more about their subject. Doctors don't get paid bonuses for keeping up with medical journals. Pay isn't always a good measure of what businesses need. The other problem with this argument is that the companies are run by people with the same English-language prejudice, who went to the same type of schools, who avoided studying in the same language lessons, etc, as their monolingual employees. If a CEO is monolingual and believes English is all he needs, we wouldn't expect him to be motivated to change the situation, even if it would be better for the business.
That's what I took away from the article, and that's the point I'm trying to argue. If US business understood the world economy, we probably could have avoided much of the economic mess of the past 7 years. US and UK businesses are living in a language bubble. Currently, with the dominance of the English language, they can happily live in that bubble. When that changes, US/UK companies and employees will be playing catch-up. I found the situation with French InfoTech companies described by emk very interesting. From a UK perspective, I see that if a French company needs an English speaker, they can find a French person who speaks it. If an British company needs a French speaker, they hire a French national. I haven't quite figured out the implications of this situation, but I find it interesting. Any thoughts? Edited by Jeffers on 10 July 2014 at 10:14am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5000 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 27 of 95 10 July 2014 at 11:16am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It's the Guardian, they like to blow small issues out of proportion and their journalistic integrity is often questionable at best, using anecdotes as evidence and all the rest, so I'm not too surprised to see this article being picked apart.
I agree about the opportunity cost. I just learn languages for fun and for social reasons, and I obviously do so very happily, but I'm not under any illusion that they'll improve my job prospects and I realise that if that were my aim then there are far more productive ways I could have used the time. The example I gave last time a thread on a similar article (they get churned out every so often) was that of the international call centre that quite a few of my friends work in. I could probably take my English, French and Italian and go to work there... to earn literally half my current salary doing much less interesting work which by almost all accounts involves dealing with arseholes all day (callers and other staff). And hey, once my Spanish is up to scratch I'd even be able to start using that as well, for a great bonus of £500 per year! However, for most of the people who work there, it's better than unemployment and it's thanks to their languages. It beats waiting tables or cleaning toilets, and it's less competitive because of the language requirements: essentially if you speak a few languages well they'll give you a job. So I agree with the point made earlier that at the start of one's career, languages can give an advantage over the masses who have similar qualifications and experience, even if there are other skills out there that are easier to acquire and give better prospects; my example last time was programming languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6452 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 28 of 95 10 July 2014 at 11:41am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The source you're linking to is making up his own conclusions and if one reads through the comments several people points out that Peking a relic form the time when Beijing was pronounced with a k-sound. The argument also falls due to the fact that sh isn't really a sound that English are afraid of, as there are several. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4500 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 29 of 95 10 July 2014 at 12:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It is a minority in the Netherlands. Those who use English on a daily basis are: academics, international businesspeople, diplomats, journalists, English teachers, and probably doctors/nurses/hospital staff. There are some bilingual schools popping up now teaching subjects in English which require English-language fluency (I believe one or two exist near the German border where German is required, and in Frisia there is a demand for Frisian). But for the majority, English is a language used when you are being a tourist abroad. Even those with substantial English (there is a sizeable amount of parents these days that have good English and are capable of using it, because they consume lots of anglophone media), they probably wouldn't use this at their jobs. Speaking of required skills... over here I don't need them so much (unless a job explicitly states that they need French, I will apply and mention that on my CV, along with Romanian because I have used those two before abroad). However, once you get into a local situation, even when doing volunteer work, the fact you speak the local language is a great advantage. When I was in Romania, the fact that I spoke Romanian almost shocked half the population out of their general wits and made them warm up to me IMMENSELY just because I could. I did volunteering work at an orphanage where I had to take care of kids aged 4-13 or so. Those children warmed up to me immensely because I could speak Romanian - the boys confided in me, respected me, never said a word against me. If I said to do something they listened. They actively came to me with things they wanted to do: play, study, some children asked me to teach them mathematics, English, French, music, geography and biology (in Romanian!!!) because I spoke their language. The staff treated me with kindness because they could easily communicate with me and if there were other foreign volunteers I would be summoned to translate on the spot (if the translator wasn't there. I have had to translate their instructions to French and vice versa, and trust me, that is incredibly hard because my French is not perfect at all - they simply had no one else at their disposal. I had to do it because I was the only foreigner who spoke Romanian). At a daycare center where I worked it caused the headmistress to want to take English classes with me. When the children figured out I spoke Romanian I was an instant hero and EVERYONE wanted to play with me, the volunteer who spoke Romanian. At school I wasn't allowed to show I spoke it, but it was an advantage when I was talking to the teachers and the headmistress of the school specifically thought it was FANTASTIC that I spoke Romanian. They thought it was BRILLIANT. Keep in mind my Romanian isn't above about B2 in level. It's quite good and I can handle children in it (even when they throw fits). I only spent six weeks in Romania. So no, if you are in your home country, if you are not working locally, it isn't particularly necessary. But it can open doors for you, and three months later the children at the orphanage are still asking after me. I made that good of an impression even though I only worked there for 2,5 weeks. So learn your language beforehand, it WILL enrich your experience personally. Even when you're doing volunteer work. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5325 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 30 of 95 10 July 2014 at 2:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
No, but if businesses aren't going to pay for language skills, can we realistically expect students to invest 500 to 2,000 hours of their life into improving those skills? Personally, if somebody says, "Students should spend 500 hours reaching B1 or a weak B2 because it expands their minds and widens their cultural horizons," I'll say, "Sure, why not?" I believe in the liberal arts. But if somebody says, "Students should spend 500 to 2,000 hours studying languages because it will make their employers more competitive, but their employers will never pay for it," I don't see why students should be obligated to donate a huge chunk of their time for no reward. Once upon a time, I co-founded a startup. Unfortunately, I was confused about the difference between three things: 1. Things about which businesses say, "Sure, that's a great idea! We'd love that." 2. Things which would earn businesses a bunch of money, at least in theory. 3. Things which businesses want badly enough to pay for. (1) is just polite noise. (2) requires a massive, expensive effort to educate decision makers, and it can break your heart. (3) is the real litmus test: Are they desperate enough to write actual checks, now? Unfortunately, we mistook (1) and (2) for (3), and our startup failed. If the UK thinks that better language skills will make its businesses more competitive, they can invest serious time and effort into proving (2), and try to convince businesses that foreign language skills will make them a pile of money. Done right, this will eventually move businesses into category (3), and cause them to get aggressive about hiring multilingual workers. And then, as we saw in the Montreal examples I quoted, even adult anglophones will wise up and spend money on serious immersion courses. The other option, I suppose, is to make languages mandatory for the GCSE again. Then try to make the tests more demanding and try to make the students care. But honestly, students aren't motivated by tests, or at least not motivated to do anything beyond getting a good score. Some of them, however, are motivated by getting an interesting job with a nice salary. But to pull that off, the first two steps are (1) figuring out how much money UK businesses are actually losing, and (2) repeatedly drumming into their heads that they could earn some more of that money if they hired multilingual workers. If you create the demand, the supply will appear by itself. Seriously, if everybody here on HTLAL thought we could get interesting jobs with larger salaries simply by reaching C1 in another language, how much extra time would we spend studying? If I thought French would be seriously profitable, I'd be in France right now, attending a fancy business immersion program for advanced students.
Well, sort of. It's more that the French startups were proud of their English, and they sometimes insisted on using it even when it was a bad idea. I watched a poor French women with a very interesting company—one that could clearly generate millions of dollars in profits—try to pitch her company to a group of VCs on stage. She was maybe B2, with weak listening comprehension, but she had a good accent. She had grammatical errors all over her slides, her presentation was poorly organized, and she didn't understand the questions from the VCs. The last word from one of the VCs before the time ran out? "I really like your numbers, but I still have no idea what your company does." Ouch. Now, this was the most extreme example. But she wasn't the only French entrepreneur who could have benefited from hiring somebody with better English skills. However, I saw no evidence that fixing this problem was a major priority, except in the sense that the entrepreneurs would prefer to practice their English even if it cost them opportunities. I totally sympathize-I often use my French when my English would work better. It's a matter of stubborn pride for me, too. But then again, after I translated my business's website to French, I paid a freelance French journalist to rewrite it, because I'm not so stubborn that I'm willing to make a bad first impression.
One interesting benefit of my French is that it makes it a lot easier to hire French speakers. Let's say I want to create a French-language website that sells something. Now, as I mentioned above, I know better than to write French advertising copy myself. But I can do a first-draft translation, find a freelance French writer with an appropriate style, and conduct the entire business transaction in French without any problem. And when it's done, I can say, "Oooh, that sounds so much nicer than my version. But I think you misunderstood my goal here and here. If I want to communicate X, how could I say it?" In other words, my French isn't good enough for really high-level communications tasks, like persuasion or sales. But it sure makes it a lot easier to find somebody who can do a good job at a reasonable price.
Oh, yeah. I totally agree that learning languages pays off in all kinds of awesome, amazing ways. My life is immensely richer for having French in it, and even Egyptian is actually pretty awesome. But I still think that if businesses are losing tons of money because of weak language skills, the most productive solution is to (a) convince them of that, and (b) let them work hard to hire more multilingual workers. I honestly don't think that the US or the UK can actually fix this problem by increasing the supply of multilingual workers without first increasing the demand. Neither country has a good track record when it comes to teaching languages. Edited by emk on 10 July 2014 at 2:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4326 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 31 of 95 10 July 2014 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I think we need to be careful about conflating: the personal level; with the company level; with the macro-economic level.
Of course there is true for at least one person, me. And if your circumstances were different - say your wife absolutely needed to live in France - then it would be true for you too.
But isn't there at least some evidence that the economies of countries like the UK/US have benefited immensely from being essentially immigrant cultures where lots of languages are spoken? I don't disagree with your own personal assessment: you as a English-speaking programmer in the US won't benefit from higher salaries by learning french, but I think you are painting way to broad a brush to say that no company/person/economy would benefit economically from multilingual skills. Edited by patrickwilken on 10 July 2014 at 3:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4702 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 32 of 95 10 July 2014 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't think business are losing money. But I do think they will when the balance shifts away from English. I don't understand what you mean by "first increasing the demand". That's not something anyone can do; it is something which will happen on its own (if at all). Unfortunately, when the demand arises, there won't be national workers to fill it. Luckily, we can outsource our jobs easily these days. It is, of course, something of a catch-22. People don't want to invest time unless they see money. (Someone has even argued the point on HTLAL that unless we need it for work we shouldn't study languages.) Businesses don't want to invest money unless they see a return. But the problem the article was getting at is that once the demand arises, it's too late to train employees. It's preferable to patch holes in your boat before you get out to sea. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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