English vs. the world
The people at Hotels.com have been busy conducting surveys recently, and their latest research seems to confirm what we already knew…British people are not renowned for their language skills.
64% of the 2000 Brits surveyed didn’t know a word of any other language. One of the reasons given for this was “expecting hosts to speak English.” (!)
63% of those polled had no idea what the Dutch word “goedemorgen” means. I don’t speak Dutch, but could easily guess that it would be “good morning,” due to the similarities when trying to pronounce it.
1 in 50 respondents claimed to understand everything that was said to them in at least one other language, but could not reply.
I think the results, even from a small sample of the population, are pretty embarrassing. What can we Brits do to turn this stereotype around? Obviously, Language Trainers students are at a huge advantage here!
I had a conversation with two friends regarding learning the other day; one is French, the other Italian. Both agreed that it wasn’t as necessary for native English speakers to learn another language, as English is the one language a lot of people know. They also both started to learn English at a young age, and live in the UK to understand the language better.
Is this where we are going wrong? Is it the education system, or are we simply lazy? What are your thoughts?
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Hugh Grigg said,
November 30, 2011 @ 12:06 pm
It is true that if native English is your first language there’s less incentive to learn a foreign language and it’s harder to do so.
Less incentive because you already speak the most useful language in the world. If you’re French, then learning English opens up pretty much the entire world to you. If you’re English, learning French opens up several countries, but by no means the entire world.
English is the easiest language to learn as a second language because it’s everywhere. You can get anything you want in English: books, films (at least subtitles), magazines are more likely to have English versions than any other language. It’s actually even difficult to get away from English a lot of the time.
Also, most countries include English in their curriculum. There is no obvious second language choice like that for English-speaking countries.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t learn foreign languages, just that it’s not quite fair to compare our situation to that of non-English-speaking countries.
Study English UK said,
December 5, 2011 @ 2:07 pm
i think the one knowing the English language especially the Britishers need not to know any other as its the main language
London Serviced Apartments said,
December 29, 2011 @ 12:01 pm
In my opinion, tourist popular regions within other language speaking countries around the world have incorporated English into their culture and systems in order to attract more visitors as it is the most widely used and accepted language. Hence, english speaking tourists like the British might find it more convenient to visit and travel to such destinations without needing to make an effort to really learn any other language.