People who speak English as a first language are always at a disadvantage when learning other languages. Which one do you even learn that can help you in the most situations?
Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Esperanto? There is no good second language compared to the pretty universally accepted English.
Why this idea that we need to learn a universal second language? Why not pick one, doesn’t matter if it’s different to what your friend or whoever picks
Because for most people there is little practical benefit. People who are specifically interested in learning languages are a much smaller proportion of the population than people who want to succeed in most other areas of life by learning the lingua franca.
English is the dominant international language of business, media, science and education.
Learning a new language is incredibly time-consuming and of little benefit when you already speak the lingua franca to a native level.
>little relative benefit
This is the same reason very few people have Danish or Romanian as a second language in Europe, because English is common and therefore useful.
If the world spoke Dutch as a second language, chances are we'd speak Dutch and the Netherlands would be asked why they don't have strong take up of second languages.
Sonce you said the country, I know a Romanian doctor and his mother insisted on him learning English from a young age because it would open up a lot more opportunities for him to seek a better life than what she had. That's not a consideration a native English speaker is going to make, even if they're in a very deprived area.
The problem with being stubbornly monolingual is that it reinforces the belief that "languages are hard" or that you have to be "good at languages", and so people assume you have to have learnt a language from the day you were born like you're Romanian friend. It's all rubbish. If Mandarin was difficult, there wouldn't be a billion or so Mandarin speakers. Most languages, especially the Romance languages (and much of the German vocab) can be learnt to a conversational standard in a few weeks. But nobody bothers.
The exception is Finnish. That is a silly, made up language the Finns use to amuse themselves that has no basis in reality.
Speaking Mandarin is surprisingly straightforward. It's got a simple grammar and lots of guessable vocabulary once you learn a few roots, and while the tones take some getting used to, it's not unsurmountable. I was surprised how confident I felt after just a few weeks study, and not even intensive study - I was just doing it for a bit of fun as we had some Chinese exchange students visiting.
Reading and writing Mandarin is a whole other challenge.
Languages take time to learn, but it's a skill like any other. If you go to e.g. India it's common for people to speak multiple languages, and nobody really even thinks about it - they just pick it up through regular exposure to lots of languages.
Any recommendations on a good place to start? I've been trying an app to learn Pinyin but it's not great and assumes you already have a vague idea of what the various characters sound like
I studied French at school for four years. I still failed my exam. I remember some vocabulary and grammar, but have a terrible memory. It doesn't come easy to me.
It's not like I'm thick, I have two degrees uo to post-grad level.
The general standard of foreign language teaching in the UK is terrible as is the level of expectation.
At 16, students in other countries would be expected to have a very high level of English while I got grade A GCSE French from just remembering some vocab lists before the exam and then instantly forgetting everything.
For some people learning languages *is* hard, just as learning maths is hard for some people. Not all people think the same way of have the same ability to learn things.
I used to know a guy who would go on holiday every year to learn a new language, he'd have a couple of weeks in a foreign country and come back speaking the language pretty fluently. But he needed help with even very basic DIY, his car and computer. His brain was wired differently from my dads (he was dad's friend), who could do many of the things that this friend couldn't do even though the car and computer weren't his own areas of interest.
\> weren't his own areas of interest.
This is what it comes down to. It's nothing to do with being wired differently (how can pretty much the entire population of the Netherlands speak two languages?)
It's fine to have no interest in a thing. It's much more difficult to learn something that bores you. You give up quicker.
I'm saying that we have been conditioned into that boredom through being stubbornly, culturally, monolingual. Because "they all speak English anyway".
It's objectively easier to learn a second language as a child than it is as an adult. Children in the Netherlands start learning English at primary school and they are taught it well. English kids often don't start learning a second language until secondary school _and_ we're bad at teaching it. Dutch children will also have much greater exposure to English than British children have to, say, french because English is widely spoken in the Netherlands when French is not here. It's not apathy - it's that the system is stacked against British children with monolingual parents learning a second language.
People do have different learning abilities, and some people are better at some things than others. To suggest otherwise only shows you know less than you think.
The fact that some places have more multi-lingual citizens doesn't mean that all people who live in those countries are multi-lingual or even especially good at learning a different language. I have no experience of the Netherlands, but in Sweden where English has been taught in all schools since the end of WW2 there are still people who are not fluent in it.
I've had years of teaching at school on French, German, and Latin. By the end of it I barely remember enough to ask for a croissant. My reading isn't terrible, I enjoy the etymology of words which helps. But remembering the grammar and vocab and genders and cases to string together a sentence, near impossible for me.
I don't know what a Vocaroo is. But what would it achieve? Do you honestly not believe that there are people in the UK that can learn a foreign language?
I think it is amazing that you could learn a foreign language in a few weeks. My dad definitely tried really hard to learn German over the course of many years, including immersive stays in Germany, and I don't think he ever had your confidence in his German. And I'm sure he was pretty good at it!
Mandarin actually has one of the most limited phoneme inventories of all languages. Even with the 5 tones, there are a fraction of the sounds of English or most info-European languages.
That is why writing Chinese with the Latin alphabet makes no sense. The language has tonnes and tonnes of homophones.
The difference is that you are far more likely to find someone who speaks English than the language you have learned so even practicing becomes difficult. Go to France and speak GCSE French - they may well just respond in English. We can learn enough in a couple of weeks to muddle through the basics for a single trip though if needs be though, sure.
I learnt Spanish until a level (and got an A so was relatively competent at the time though have forgotten some since) and am currently on holiday in Spain. The Spanish famously _don't_ speak brilliant English like, for example, the Dutch. And they still speak to me in English frequently and would often, although not exclusively, prefer to speak to me in English rather than have me speak to them in weak Spanish.
genuinely how are you managing to learn most languages to a conversational standard within a few weeks? unless you have a very different definition of that to me. i don’t really think it’s feasible especially for someone who has a life and a full time job and perhaps only an hour a day to the cause - for A1 even that is very statistically not the case in that amount of time
Mandarin (specifically, reading and writing it) *is* difficult, even for native speakers. It's not enough to learn to speak a language, you won't get far if you can speak it but are functionally illiterate in that language, so tackling reading/writing is a very important part of the learning task you can't just skip over.
This is absolutely wrong.
There are studies that show the population is split between people who can learn new languages in a decent amount of time, and the other half that find it extremely tough and will never/rarely get beyond a certain level of skill. It requires a unique part of the brain, it’s not like learning other information like maths/history/science etc.
This gets worst with age regardless of the brain type too. So those who didn’t learn when they are really young usually have an ever-decreasing cap on their skill level for another language that correlates with age.
You'll have to cite those studies, because pretty much the rest of the world suggests it's wrong. About 90% of Norwegians can speak English to a very high standard. The amount is roughly the same for Sweden and Denmark.
Where is the split between those who find it extremely tough and will never/rarely get beyond a certain level of skill?
It's \*all\* cultural. Brits use guff like "I'm not good at languages" as an excuse.
Me, personally, I'm not good at DIY. Because I've never given it a go.
I spoke english before I even had it in school, learned from watching subtitled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
It's not hard learning a language when you're a kid.
> Most languages, especially the Romance languages (and much of the German vocab) can be learnt to a conversational standard in a few weeks. But nobody bothers.
This is laughably incorrect. If you were trying to convince people bald faced lying isn't the way to do it.
My learning energy is currently focused on a more pressing topic.
I by no means am doubting you probably did this, but I think the idea that the lay person starting from 0 knowledge can pick it up in weeks is divorced from reality.
That is exactly what I am saying. *everyone* is a lay person, do you think I was born with fifteen languages in my head?
Go on. I dare you to better yourself.
I am bettering myself, I'm currently on an exercise and healthy eating journey.
My health is a bit more important than my ability to speak another language, sorry not sorry.
Cool. I wish you well in the three languages I can wish someone well.
If you’re ever bored and don’t fancy being facetious just because someone can speak more than one language, hit me up.
Nobody is stubbornly monolingual, if having another language was important people would learn it, if you already speak English it's not important to speak something else unless you want to live somewhere else.
It's not really stubbornness, if I live in England and don't go anywhere else as many people do, there's no benefit or need to learn a different one, being a stubborn monolingual would be more like moving to Denmark and not learning Danish because most Danish people already speak English.
Stubborn usually means refusal or distaste for change, especially when change would be beneficial.
That's not why people like me are monolingual though. I'm monolingual not because I didn't want a second language but because there was little teaching of it and even less need to acquire it.
Our brains are set up to learn language from the earliest age, which makes children growingup in bilingualhouseholdsvery fortunate.
It does get more difficult as you get older, but not impossible.
I'm not stubbornly monolingual. If anything I'd quite like to be able to watch or read certain things in their native language. I'm just trying to illustrate a different kind of motivation that us native speakers don't have. It's not a thing for native English speakers to think "You *need* to learn a second language or it will greatly limit your opportunities in life". That's not stubborn, it's an ambivalence stemming from a lack of need to do it.
My inlaws are all Romanian, most of the millennials and younger speak English and a lot learn German too because it provides opportunity.
A native English speaker in a deprived area would be more likely to learn a different language if English wasn't the dominant language all the films and TV we were watching were in Portuguese.
See it messes me up when I holiday in Italy, I'll say _buna seara_ but then get all muddled up and throw in a va rog and the Italian waiter can't work out why the Italian I'm speaking is in Romanian with a thick English accent!
Honestly, with how close ‘bună seara’ is to ‘buona sera,’ they probably almost get it until the English accent and a surprise ‘vă rog’ sneak in and throw them off completely.
Actually, not really. Bulgarian isn’t widely spoken in Romania. Our languages are quite different :) Romanian is a Romance language, so we usually learn others like Spanish, or Italian instead.
Oh that's interesting. I'd been led to believe there was a bit of a porous border (Schengen notwithstanding) between the two countries.
Always forget the Roman bit in Roman-ia.
Yeah, the geography might suggest more overlap, but linguistically we’re quite different. And yep Romanian comes from Latin, just like Italian or Spanish. That Roman heritage really shows in our language and culture. Also you’re not alone haha people are often surprised to find out Romanian has more in common with Italian than with our Slavic neighbours :)
When I lived in Sweden it was really frustrating as everyone under the age of 65 and a good proportion of the under 80s spoke beautifully in English. As a result I couldn't even order chicken nuggets in McDonald's without the server asking me in English 🤣 I could only really say things people taught me when drunk so things like asking you to come home with me! I was pretty good at reading though and I got decent at following conversation. There was an embarrassing incident where I was being talked about in Swedish by a friend from uni and another guy about the logistics of giving me a backy to the station on his bike, apparently that's not legal after you turn 16 and I interjected and was like no way I'm getting on your bike and I'm 21 I do not pass for 16. They both stared at me like I was mental and I convinced myself I'd got the wrong end of the stick then they were like shit when did you learn Swedish. I hadn't I'm just good at connecting the dots with snippets that I caught!
\> of little relative benefit
Everything you say is true. In short "they all speak English anyway" is the reason. But the benefit of learning a second language cannot be overstated. Precisely \*because\* nobody here speaks another language, when you \*do\* speak Spanish, lads, you automatically become one million times more attractive to the Spanish ladies, and more importantly, the English ladies.
You don't even have to be able to speak it. Just speak gibberish confidently.
I learnt Welsh, for one year, when I was about 11, so 40 years ago. Alas, what little I can remember has only ever been useful for:
1. Singing both national anthems at the rugby;
2. Shouting across the bar at large motorcyclists with beards.
Serves the same purpose though, in that it got me a beer.
Slightly different context, but reminds me of going into a museum in France with my sister and asking for tickets (in French). We were told, fortunately, it was free for under 25s (in English of course). We replied sadly we were both over that (and had to pay). We were then told, no, we were definitely under 25!
Exactly this, Sat in a hostel once with 7 people from different countries all using English to talk to each other. The question I had to ask myself if I was to learn a language is “what is the second most useful language in the world (for me). And that ended up being Spanish looking purely at the number of different countries.
This is truly the answer. It is not smug complacency. I studied French at school and German and Spanish just as a cheap and easy pastime. I have never needed my German, used mySpanish for one holiday and my French maybe every five or six years.
Even then, most Europeans are more comfortable in English than trying to decipher my strangled attempt at their languages.
My cousin did a masters degree in Spanish and lived in Barcelona for a year. Within a heartbeat they know you are English and insist on speaking English to you when you are there to practice and become truly fluent.
Probably depends where you are. In Barcelona and Catalonia in general, I get the feeling they would rather speak English than Spanish if you don't speak Catalan.
I studied Spanish for 7 years in school and it was one of my better subjects. The most use I got out of it was being able to read the warnings on dodgy cig packets so naturally I’ve forgotten most of it. To be fluent in a language you need to use that language. For many, there won’t ever be a reason to use the language again. At the minimum they’ll be like you and use it briefly on holiday to order “uno cerveza por favor” or “patatas fritas con pan” and have the native speaker feel pain at the misuse of their language and rejection of tapas for a chip butty but that brief use would never be enough to be bilingual.
I studied Spanish in school for 7 years and I wouldn’t say I’m fluent, but spent a whole day with Latin American friends speaking only Spanish recently. But I know some people who study for the same amount of time and just forget everything they learnt because for them it was more a subject to pass grades in rather than a lifelong skill that they wanted to retain.
Indeed, and when most Europeans travel to a European country with a different language they usually speak English to get by. But when Brits speak English we get accused of being lazy and ignorant.
I can understand B1 level French and my wife is almost fluent in German, neither if these were helpful when we went to Italy.
I am pretty good at French and due to my relatives being French and me speaking to them I even have a regional accent despite not being fluent. Even then, the second I mispronounce one word, the French switch to English. It’s really hard to practice a foreign language I am actually pretty conversationally fluent in if the native speakers prefer English.
We should all be taught Welsh from an early age. The UK has two official languages. It's a black mark that one of them just isn't taught in the majority of the UK.
Let's be honest though, people's motivation to learn Welsh is quite low, since it's not very useful. And this is coming from someone who grew up in Ceredigion!
There are a lot of first language Welsh speakers. As anyone who does business in other countries knows (or should know), there is a significant psychological bias to trusting people who speak your first language more than those who don't.
Just saying.
Yes, my primary school had quite a few (mostly) monolingual Welsh speaking kids in it (who were all English fluent soon enough). But I just don't think making a few hundred thousand people from rural Wales more trusting is worth teaching Welsh to English kids in East Anglia.
Learning a bit about Welsh and Wales, absolutely. Actually leaning Welsh, there are better/more valuable things to do.
The Quebecois have their little dual-language land
and I'm sure it makes it easier for them to learn Italian or whatever, and does all the other beneficial things bilingualism does
That would utterly pointless. Its only used in Wales and even the Welsh barely speak it anymore. Not only that, you've forgotten we have: english, Welsh, Scottish gaelic, Irish gaelic, cornish and I believe there's more I've forgotten. Can't teach all of them and there's literally no point anyway
I haven't forgotten anything. The other Celtic origin languages aren't official legally. No where in the UK can you apply for your passport in Cornish.
Wales has two official languages, but Welsh isn't an official language in the rest of the UK so it would make no sense whatsoever to teach it by default outside of Wales.
Which is why I said the UK, and not England. There no reason why Welsh couldn't be adopted further out into the rest of the UK, other than histic racism still influencing policymakers.
Since all of the UK has Celtic/Gaelic roots, I believe we should embrace it more. Welsh is already an official language, but I'd also support Irish and Scots Gaelic being more widely taught. I'm not entirely sure any of the "English" Celtic languages survived.
I'm all for preserving languages but the total lack of utility for Welsh still does stand as a pretty compelling reason to not waste resources on it in English schools.
I think the utility would come in fostering a larger "UK" identity, rather than the current separate identities that stem from the racist "Anglo Saxon" centric policies of the past.
The whole of the UK is of Celtic origin, and we would all be much weaker if any of the home nations went independent.
I personally think a Celtic national identity separated from the London English one would help unify us.
By that logic, shouldn't we all be taught English, Welsh, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Cornish? And that's before we need to start learning languages from other countries too?
Again. None of those other languages are official. Ie, a language designated by a government to be used for official purposes like government business, laws, and public documents.
You cannot apply for a British passport in Cornish. You can in Welsh.
No there isn't.
Official language has a legal meaning. It's the languages the government can officially operate in. English and Welsh are the only legal languages to fill out any official documents in.
There are also numerous studies into languages and kids will naturally drop languages they don't find useful. A French kid will use English because all the major western music and film are in English. An English kid has no need to speak French outside of French class.
Agreed. I'm Irish, not British, but I learned Irish from age 4 and French from age 13. I was able to learn both well enough to get an A in each of my final exams aged 17, but I have retained WAY more of the Irish because it's more engrained.
>We were taught French and German at school but we start far too late.
You don’t need to be learning a language from birth. It’s not a at all uncommon for adults to learn new languages.
Another good point. If I decided to pick a language how do I choose which one. For a lot of the world it’s an easy decision to learn English, maybe Chinese if you live in east Asia or Spanish in North America.
For a start it’s much easier to learn another language if you live very close to a different country with another language. Then it’s much easier to learn more once you are already bilingual from a young age.
Europeans are then also exposed to far more English language music, TV, books etc than we are to French or German music.
And they teach it in school like it actually matters
This is part of it. The language teaching in our schools is dire. Your average GCSE will take a high attaining pupil to CEFR A1/A2 standard, which is no level of fluency really. It's been a while since my GCSEs but it was very much being taught to the test and not to use the language.
I always find that just learning phrases is useless, because it never explains exactly what is going on so that you can built sentences of your own. Direct translation and slot analysis (especially with the German case system) works far better for me personally.
Yes! When I started to learn French and German, it was for O level, and we learned about Marie-Claudette playing her violin and her father pottering about in his greenhouse. I loved the grammar and all the building blocks of the languages. But then it became GCSE, and suddenly we had to learn phrase book stuff such as “I would like to book a double room in a hotel near to the station”. And my heart sunk. By the time my younger sister was learning the same languages, she had no idea how to conjugate verbs, or even where the verb was in the sentences she had to learn. Makes me sad. I explained this to my nephew who is just taking his Spanish GCSE, and he retorted “but those phrases are more useful, aren’t they?” And I just face-palmed.
Ironically a lot of the traditional grammar-heavy methods *should* make you good at building sentences, but rather than thinking "how do I say X?" it encourages you to frame it as "do I use the preterite or pluperfect tense here?" This adds another layer of complexity to the process of building the sentence because you're essentially translating an extra word in your head every time.
Yes! And going back to what others have said about bilingualism in Wales, with the second language Welsh GCSE we were taught how to speak and build a sentence so my fluency in that was far higher (maybe B2?) that my relative fluency in my MFL, both of which I got an A* in. I don't know that it's the case now but MFLs weren't taught as living languages.
Here's how I do it:
Learn all the basic phrases: Hello, goodbye, thank you, please, two beers, my friend will pay.
Then learn the basic grammar. How is a sentence built? Is it subject verb object? Is it, like German, subject verb object object object object? How do you conjugate the verb?
That's it, you've got almost everything you need for most instances. You just need to swap the subject, verb and object with vocab.
None of this
"What time is it?"
"Where is the ice rink?"
"I am 18 and I live in Northamptonshire with my mother."
I'm trilingual so no issue learning languages, my point is the way they are/were taught in most UK schools gives people a limited ability to have a natural conversation so many people stop after GCSE.
My UK highschool was classed as a "language college" as a speciality... now imagine what you think that meant in 2005-2010
-We were only taught French or Spanish
-We did not get to have individual foreign penpals
-We did not get to have class foreign penpals
-We did not get to do class webcam sessions with the target school in the respective country though we had the capabilities
-We did not get to have exchange trips, only a trip once a year in the last two years to a school of the target language (hotel stay)
-We got no encouragement to watch foreign media in the early days of Youtube
-We never watched foreign language films to improve our listening skills
-We never read stories in the target language, only the textbook
-No encouragement as to the benefits in life of knowing another language.
Suffice to say, other schools not claiming to be a language college had exchanges and even pushed some high achievers to do AS levels early because they were such good linguists.
Yeah, it's pretty crap in the UK for learning languages at school. I was taught Spanish and there was not enough input to help me progress with verbs and stuff. In ten years of i dependent study of phrasebooks, gradual introduction of learning apps and just translating things out on my own, I can read far more German under my own steam than I ever could with Spanish taught in school and with a private tutor to fill in the two years of it I missed due to illness.
I vividly remember my Spanish teacher just pointing to the answers for me when I did my oral GCSE exam in 2006 because she knew she had done a crap job of teaching us
I was high B1 in French entering GCSEs because I have French relatives. I lost my ability to speak it because I never had the opportunity to have actual conversations, and so am now reduced to GCSE level with a decent accent. When we had German exchange students at my school they were fluent in English. I wish we had better language education here. I’d love to be fluent in another language (I’m trying but have no time with A Levels etc.)
Not to be a dick, but it does actually matter to a far greater degree. Learning English will improve your life prospects far more than most other languages.
In terms of school curriculum allocated to learning a second language, it’s simply not prioritised in the UK national curriculum in the same way it is in other countries because it’s not as important because we’ve become used to everyone speaking English so we focus on other subjects
To add to this it’s only relatively recently that more people in the U.K. could even afford a holiday to France when I grew up it was a sign of the middle class to holiday abroad.
\> And they teach it in school like it actually matters
Gonna tweak this slightly and say they teach it like it's normal. It's us who teach it like it \*doesn't\* matter.
Because once the British got into there heads the strange notion that there was no point in learning languages and the working classes deemed a lot of formal education as "poncy ", becoming "one of them" (the rich folks) and that educating yourself made you a traitor to the working class you came from, serious interest in language learning really did deplete. I came from a working class background so I know of these attitudes, especially through the 20th century.
While we have to learn a language in highschool, most of the stateschools don't take it seriously or get people interested in other languages.
What doesn't help is that broadcasting Centers for TV and radio don't try and encourage people to learn other languages by broadcasting none-English music, films or TV shows as a standard. Even subtitled media puts many people off exposing themselves to other languages
I like to try and learn German and love listening to Austrian radio. I expected all music to be German language, but they play many- Spanish, Italian, French.... because they learn multiple languages and are not out off by the fact not everyone will speak the language being sung.
In short, the British as a whole are not interested in other languages. Welsh people try and hold onto their native tongue but the English have never wanted to learn it.
Just look at Brits in Spain where they have to work alongside Spanish people but never like to learn the language.
It's really sad and I attempt with my feeble memory to try and better myself by learning another language. But I'm also an etymology fanatic so that spurs me on.
Because, for quite a long time, our general approach was to simply invade and force people to learn English. Having dominated so much of the globe for so long, even European countries find it helpful to learn English. Then with America dominating everything, that makes it even easier. So it's been a lingering attitude.
Because English is effectively the lingua franca. If a Swede visits Prague for example, how will they communicate if not in English?
For us it’s just not so necessary to learn another language and which one would it be? Europeans will usually learn English as their second language (though Finns may learn Swedish and English or Poles might learn German and English etc.).
Language is no longer a school requirement. Also I have learnt German, French and Spanish but I can't speak or read those languages now because I have no one to practice with. The only bilingual people I know have either lived abroad for a while or have a parent who is also bilingual.
Because they are exposed to English continually. Everything is in English, I was watching a French detective show subtitled. One character said a full sentence in French apart from the word brainstorm . It just goes in if you are exposed to it. Like we all know lots of Latin phrases that are in common parlance.
Au contraire my friend, sorry to critique, but I don't think that cliche holds true. Language might not be a British forte, but it would not be unusual for anyone to hear a full sentence in English with the occasional French word or phrase.
I mean, the French do use a weird amount of English that isn’t even slang. Le week-end is one (which really bothers me - it’s such a common word and w and k aren’t even French letters - why have they not come up with their own version).
My favourite is “le wishbone”.
The Académie Française has occasional fits about people sullying “their” language with anglicisms. I vaguely remember them trying to enforce “la fin de semaine” a few years ago, and evidently failing. Thriving languages absorb loanwords very well, and it’s arguably one of the reasons for English’s global strength (along with all the colonisation and that).
For many bilingual Europeans, their second language is English. English people don't **need** to know a second language to be able to communicate throughout Europe, whereas someone whose first language is German may need to learn another language to be understood, and since English is more commonly understood than French, Spanish, or Latvian, that's a good language to learn. This reduces the need for Brits to learn another language and the cycle continues.
As a native English speaking Brit, the opportunity to learn a second language wasn't presented until secondary school, at which point you were randomly assigned either French or Spanish, neither of which had any appeal to me. I ended up taking Spanish, and at 31, I can remember a few key words and phrases, but that's about it. I've never had any use for the language and therefore no opportunity to practice. That, combined with a lack of interest in the language, means I never got past GCSE level interactions, and over time I've forgotten most of it.
Now, had I been given the opportunity to learn a language of my choice, that I could see having real-life implications or at least have an interest in learning, perhaps I would have got somewhere. I would have loved the chance to learn German in school. I've recently started learning Finnish, as I think it's a beautiful language (albeit bloody complicated) and would love to visit the country someday. But that's just it; for most Brits a second language is a novelty, something nice to have, not a prerequisite or expectation as it is for people in other countries to speak English, or the language of a neighbouring country with whom they are likely to interact.
Several reasons really.
1. We are already native speakers of the world's Lingua Franca. When we go abroad other people already speak English.
2. Which language should we learn? French? German? Spanish? Mandarin Chinese? For most people in Britain there is limited use for these languages outside of travelling to places where they are spoken. Where people can already speak English.
3. We aren't really exposed to *any* mainstream foreign media that isn't in English.
4. We don't start learning languages in schools until the age of 11, and then we only do it for 3-5 years.
Doesn't help that the most widely spoken languages other than English in this country (Polish, Punjabi, Cantonese, etc) are insanely difficult to learn for native English speakers.
One of my favourite films is an obscure Danish thriller called Besat.
It's in Danish, made for a Danish audience, so I watch it with English subtitles.
But there's a section where the Danish hero visits Romania and speaks to Romanian characters. And when that happens, they both speak English.
And that's the answer to the question. Many Europeans are bilingual because they have English as a Lingua Franca. If your first language is English, you already have the Lingua Franca.
Hungarian, I'm told, is a really difficult language to get even a tourist phrasebook level understanding of. But when I go to Budapest I can get by perfectly well with English. If a French or German person goes to Budapest - they also get by with English.
I'd say firstly your parents don't care and culturally it's not encouraged. Loads of Europeans start learning English quite late, but they want to learn English and so often already made the effort. Their parents speak it and they are encouraged to do so.
At school we did German from age 11 and at age 12 added French, but most kids didn't care. For example the school said we should have a German dictionary, but when I arrived at secondary school I think there were maybe three other kids who had a German dictionary.
Given how many Europeans speak english so well now, I'd say it's not that somehow they're amazingly as they're not, it's just we don't want to learn languages. I'd say we just don't treat it with respect and your parents won't encourage it or demand it.
I’m British and I’ll have you know I speak 5 languages - English, American, Kiwi, Australian and Canadian (tho not the French bit). If I can’t find someone who is fluent in one of those, talking loudly and slowly seems to work - I assume this is like sign language for the misfortunate people who babble incoherently.
That’s all I need to be getting by with in those foreign places.
🤪
Because we don't need to. Also, to become proficient in a language, you need to speak it every day and be around people who speak it. It's not as simple just learning it.
We have English as our mother tongue. Europeans learn English from a young age and have a lot of exposure to English, we don't have that exposure to other languages like that. It's quite the privilege to have English as our mother tongue
I had 5 years from year 5 to year 10 of German lessons. I had 1 year of french (I think year 3) in first school. Then 1 year (year 10) of french in highschool.
I remember 1 word of German. I remember none of my french lessons. I'm re-learning french now as of last September and none of what I learnt in school has come back to my memory.
In all honesty, we don't really take it very seriously. I was in the top set for German in highschool somehow. It meant I had to skip drama lessons to take french instead. I can say for sure, most people didn't care about taking either language and only did it because we were forced to.
Arrogant answer: You speak 3 languages, I speak one cause I know one of those is English.
Practical answer: every step a Dutch person makes towards learning English is practical and useful, and for an English speaker learning Dutch only becomes useful when their Dutch becomes better than the average Dutch persons English.
For myself I think we Brits have very little chance to speak another language. I learnt French from age 11 to 14. Living in London I did on a couple of occasions meet some French tourists and helped them speaking French to them. That was a long time ago I know I couldn’t remember enough to help them now. So although everyone in GB learns another language we get very little chance to speak as the whole world seems to speak some English
Also, we are taught French as a second language. Probably for historical reasons but it’s not a good starting point and puts a lot of people off.
It’s difficult for us to learn, far more spelling changes for the same word e.g va, vas, vais, allons.., we just use go and goes. Then there are feminine and masculine La and Le, we don’t have this, and a different grammatical word order.
Since English is closer to Dutch and German. These might be an easier starting point. Of the Latin languages, Spanish is the easiest. Some words are almost identical, and the masculine and feminine variants are easier.
There quite a few Brits able to speak a second language and many live or work abroad. It’s also having the opportunity to practice and use it too. Quite a few are fluent in German, Spanish, Welsh, French, Gaelic. Others can muddle by.
Not only is it not beneficial like it is to learn English as a non English speaker, but most people “learn” it through constant exposure to it. Anywhere you go, it’s the youth who will almost always know English. This is because they grew up on YouTube and social media now, and thus just picked it up the same way a kid would pick up any foreign language if it was spoken enough at home.
You’d be surprised by the amount of kids in some obscure remote corner of the world who have a perfect Californian accent.
I worked with a French guy who was really shy about his spoken English, he just needed that time to adjust and use it more. He was fluent in writing and reading, but just needed some more confidence and immersion to get his spoken sounds to be 100%.
I switched to French (learned since pre-school). He complimented me but then said he'd rather sharpen his skills as much as possible so we should continue in English. We are in the UK so that's understandable, so we just used English.
But imagine _everyone_ refused that for him. At every attempt at English, people just replied in French. Every big movie was in French, most of the internet as he encountered it was in French in videos, comments etc were all just in French and hardly ever English.
His learning would be stunted.
That was my experience when I was doing my C1 level. Opportunity for immersion just fell away, even when I visited France. I'd need to emigrate to push it much further.
Im a brit, I can speak 4 languages fluently, and a further 2 if the subject is simple.
Its all about exposure, as a kid i was an army brat, and spent most of my early years shuffing from country to country.
Most brits dont seem to be big travellers I suspect.
Because they way we teach a 2nd language is ridiculous. It doesn't have a priority and there is no agreement on what the 2nd language should be. So some teach German or French and others teach Spanish.
They have the ridiculous notion of grammar lists being main priority rather than sentence building like we do in our 1st language. Too much priority on getting masculine/feminine right for individual words rather than focusing on sentence structure.
Yes! Oh God, yes! I just replied to someone else saying my biggest issue about being taught French at school was never having the difference in sentence construction broken down and properly explained. I was never going to be able to converse properly when I didn't understand what order to put the words in.
Then again, that seemed to have fallen by the way side even in English lessons when I was at school, so I guess it would have confused plenty of kids even more.
I've no idea what it's like now, but 20 years ago if you gave kids (teenagers, actually when we finally did it briefly) a basic sentence and asked them which was the noun, verb, adverb, adjective, article, preposition, etc were they'd mostly look at you like you'd grown an extra head. So, when you're not taught it in your native language what is the hope of understanding it in a different one?
I mean I definitely learned those things in school... and even did a brief stint as a teacher (I valued work/life balance so left teaching) and we broke it down even further in more recent years at an age kids don't need to know... but yeah it's definitely something that should be looked at.
If we want kids to have any chance at a 2nd language they should choose 1 to focus on and then integrate it as much as English is so kids can become bilingual
I suppose maybe we did it briefly at a younger age (clearly not well enough for it to stick) and i just don't remember.
Basically I remember it at GSCE: we had a newly qualified and very keen teacher who did it with us then, while fully admitting some of it wasn't even on the syllabus until A-level. Did it help us get better grades on our GCSE's? I'm not really sure. But it certainly helped when I started A-level and my teacher was surprised by how much I (and one other girl in my college class from my school) knew.
She clearly thought she's be teaching a lot of it (beyond knowing what a noun or verb was, I guess) from scratch.
I was tempted to go into teaching post uni because I was so keen on the subject! I was put off my my own memories of school and knowing I'd too easily lose my temper with the kids who didn't want to learn.
And also by some questions I got asked applying for a teaching assistant job (to get some experience) that I'm pretty sure counted as discriminatory, if not our right breaking the law. But that's another story. 😂
When were you teaching? I'd love to know it's better than when I was a school. My GCSE's were 2006.
Around 2010... I taught drama in a high school for a year to decide if I'd stay in teaching, but before that, it was in primary teaching... eg of what they're teaching kids as young as 6 - Split digraphs which are a diagraph split by a consonant eg 'a-e' (cake), 'i-e' (five), 'o-e' (code). So this on top of the normal adjective, noun, adverbs etc I sort of remember learning it at their age just we didnt get taught the names we had a video they put on called Magic Pencil with clips of sections like the Magic 'e' which changed the sound of other letters
I miss working with the kids but do not miss the politics, the parents, and the lack of work/life balance 😅😅
And good decision for you... too many teachers get into it anyway and then get stressed and snap at kids which isn't pleasant for anyone involved
Yikes, I have to admit a diagraph is new to me. I definitely don't see the need to teach that to six-year -olds, unless it's going to help with their spelling, but i doubt it does?
Yes, I'm sure I would have ended up one of those. Though maybe I'd have tried so hard not to snap with the kids I'd have ended up snapping at people in my own life. Or the parents. From what I read about some parents, probably the parents!
I considered secondary first, thinking that at least with Literature there'd be GCSE students that actually chose the topic. The disaster of the assistant interview made me think again about that. Then I thought maybe Primary would be better, some hope of getting reading and writing instilled as a positive thing in younger kids, y'know? But I guess not, at least now, when there are so many horror stories about kids that have never even had a book, just screens.
Yeah the brief time I was there you could tell the difference. We'd have kids who had never learned the alphabet at home. They had gaming consoles and that was it no books. I had 1 little boy who when he started the year he couldn't read at all as he said his parents were too busy and by the end of the year he was getting the basics. He was so proud of which book he was going to take home to read to his teddy bear
Teaching is getting harder and harder when it seems like more parents are checking out and letting screens and consoles look after the kids
>He was so proud of which book he was going to take home to read to his teddy bear<
That is so lovely that you managed to get him interested, but also so sad he only had his teddy bear to read to. 😭
I don't have kids myself, but my sister and BIL read to my nephew every night as part of his bedtime routine. He gets excited about choosing which book (or two) every evening. He'll even do it during the day when we're visiting and ask me to read something to him. 😍 He's not even three.
In a way, I worry he'll be ahead of so many of his peers when he starts school he'll find it boring!
He might do but as long as he has a good head on his shoulders he will learn to finish the work and then mess about 😅
A good teacher will find a way to extend his learning though. I had a year 3 boy who once I discovered his maths ability got to do year 6 maths and it meant his whole day he was better in class because he saw it as a treat to go to older kids
Haha, yeah, that's basically what my sister and I were both like at school. Some teachers on a parents evening would say we talked too much, distracted other kids, etc, but that was always the teachers that had nothing else prepared for us to do.
I actually have memories of year 2 where my teacher let me go sit in the 'quiet area' and just read if I was finished with whatever work we were meant to be doing. That worked as a 'reward' for me.
Being given more work to do felt like a punishment for being 'smart', though. Especially when whatever extra I'd already done was part of class at a later date and I'd zone out while it was being taught and get told off!
I don't really recall ever being able to join an older class to do things, it sounds like a great idea!
Though going back to English, when I was year 7/8 once a week some of us left class to help 'tutor' year 5's that were struggling with reading.
I know that sounds like it makes no sense most places because you'd expect those year groups to be in different schools, but we had a three school system, rather than two.
That sounds like a great idea... sometimes kids just explain things better to other kids!
Oh yes I knew the reading corner well! Towards the end of my primary school they had a few computers and then we were allowed to go play on them for the educational games obviously 🤣
Genuinely I really hope it did help. Having a 12/13 year old sit with a 9/10 year old, even for only an hour a week, while they tried to read out loud, or we went through practice questions with them probably helped more than having an adult do it (not to mention there just weren't enough teaching assistants to do it).
I loved the reading corner so much! We didn't have a computer until year three, and even then there was only one per classroom, so I think the teachers were a bit cagey about letting us use it as a 'reward', because what if several kids finished the work before the class ended?
I do actually remember at least one 'educational' game we were allowed to play: I don't remember the name of it, but it was based on 'Around the World in 80 Days'. Learning Geography and flags, etc. Other than that, I don't remember anything other than an actual IT class in middle school when we did Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. 😂
The majority of us only are taught a second language in secondary school. I personally love the French language, but whenever I try to practice it French speakers always revert to English so its very difficult to say the least.
The attitude to speaking English has changed massively in France over say the last 30 years or so. From being very reluctant to speak English, the attitude has changed dramatically. It should be said that is mostly within the younger generations, and perhaps there are some regional variations. My grand-daughter having attended a French-only infant school, had the effective choice of two junior schools this coming term - one of which has half of the day taught in English, and the other one with one-and-a-half hours per day tuition in English. As a regular visitor to France down the years, I have noticed a change, but this English teaching development has left me quite astounded.
I work with quite a lot of Europeans and they are always horrified to learn we don't start foreign languages until we're almost teenagers. "You'll never learn a language starting that late!" And then they realise that yeah we never do.
Also this. I had some basic German but when I went to work in Germany the office language was English and most attempts to speak it outside work were met with responses in English.
Even those of us who try are frequently knocked down 🤣
And then there’s the problem that faces all migrants - you don’t have a network in your new country so you might understandably gravitate toward people you can communicate with.
I’d end up socialising with people from work as it was the only community I had there. Koreans, Pakistanis, Americans, Spaniards… Germans who understood they’d need to speak English with that group if socialising with them.
A few people in this country would do well to remember that when it comes to migrants here.
I had this experience when I was an immigrant. There were basic lessons given for free locally to learn the language. And then because you were basically socialising with other people who didn’t speak it, you didn’t have the opportunity to practice. And then god for big you had to interact with the state because then you were expected to use all this bureaucratic language and there was no stepping stone. (At least they didn’t have all this convoluted language we have in official documents in the UK - our bureaucracy seems to have an allergy to plain English)!
Mostly it's a lack of education in schools, the only language most people get a chance of picking up is french and only then if you are talented at learning languages.
But also, and probably more importantly since we don't try and learn as adults, what language do we go for? If we want a language that helps the most often, we already speak it. Plus for most of Europe you go and try and speak the native language and they just smile and answer back in perfect English.
1/ We're an island. No neighbours, so that isolation discourages international blending of cultures and language.
2/ We speak English. Everyone speaks English.
When I lived in Germany, I had difficulty learning German because everyone *really* wanted to practice their English.
I traveled in P R China, I ended up being an 'English' to 'English' translator for two Chinese businessmen, both of whom spoke English I could understand ,but they could not understand each other: (In Chinese because they spoke different dialects) and (in English as their vocabularies were wildly different). They could write to each other (characters drawn on hands) and understand that way. It was simpler for me to be a translator of English to English , modifying words and sentence simplification.
Because it's a left over from when Britain was an empire. We have influenced everywhere and have had no reason to, we simply expect everyone else to speak English. It's lazy, and when you realise how much effort other cultures and countries put into learning other languages, it's kinda embarrassing
It’s way easier to pick up English if you grow up watching English language shows subtitled in your language.
There’s an added incentive because English is beneficial to many careers whereas there aren’t many careers where knowing German (for example) would confer significant benefit.
Because English is a strong second language in many European countries so there is less need to speak a second language in England.
We are taught French but I think Spanish would be just and useful globally.
Agreed. I did a year of German (a whole year, like we got anything useful out of that!!) On top of French, and i thought even back then it was odd to have German rather than Spanish. I knew far more people that had been to Spain than I did France, even, I doubt any of us would have been to Germany if we hadn't had a school trip there. (Where everyone spoke to us in English, anyway, of course.)
From personal experience foreign language lessons in English schools are crap. I have been to Spain to learn Spanish and the way of teaching a language is so different to what is done in schools in England and that's why most English people are rubbish in another language. Also it's not valued in the UK when you are proficient in another language.
100%. I did friend from year 5 to GCSE (from 9/10 years old until 16, for those not British) and it was basically useless for actually trying to converse in French about anything you might need to talk to someone about if you actually went there.
Why was I ever going need to talk to someone about my school timetable, or what rooms were in my house, for instance? But I recall having lessons about that over and over. Things that would be actually useful (understanding a menu, asking directions, etc, the things you might actually need when visiting France) I barely recall ever coming up.
My biggest issue, though, was it was never properly explained how sentence construction is different in other languages to how it is in English. So, we could learn to translate word for word, but not how to actually speak French, if that makes sense.
Have you tried being bilingual in Europe as a British person? I'm reasonable in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Every single time I try talking in the native language in these countries I get responses in English - how are you supposed to become fluent in a language when the native speakers only want to talk in English? Believe me, some responses here to the contrary, plenty of British people want to be fluent in other languages but most Europeans are unwilling to deal with your halting attempts at conversation when their English is near perfect.
This. I've not be to a huge amount of mainland Europe, but whenever I have been everyone had spoken back in English. Seen it happen with people who aren't English, too (Germans in Spain for instance) because it's a common language they can converse in.
I actually met more people who spoke Spanish and no (or little) English staying with a Hispanic friend in Miami than I ever did on the few holidays I had in Spain. (She didn't warn me that was the case, or I'd have made some effort to try and learn some Spanish before I went! As it was, she had to talk for me regularly and I found that awkward.)
We had a school trip to Germany when I was around 14, supposedly to help us improve our German, but no one wanted to speak to us in German.
I also don't think it helps that, unless you grow up bilingual, our school system isn't very good at it, at least it wasn't while I was at school! We started too late, and weren't really taught in a way that was conversational.
It’s a lot easier for someone to pick English as a second language as it’s widely used atriums the world.
As a native English speaker it’s harder to pick a second language, most schools offer a minimum of German, Spanish and French so more choice ultimately means less is actually chosen.
What is your metric here? I know 4 languages and can communicate in 3. In fact it would not surprise me that the number of British people who are multilingual is not bigger than entire nations.
I guess that the 2nd language of the majority of those Europeans is English. Which I guess answers your question. By the way:
1)Britain is still in Europe
2)Many many Welsh, Scottish, Irish (plus a number of people from Cornwall) would disagree with your view.
I had this argument with a Dutch girls once, she said English were ignorant because we only speak one language, I said “you need to learn one extra language to communicate with all Europe, we just happen to already know it”
This would be one of those arguments I'd walk away from with an "I should have said..." realisation in the shower the next day. I'd want to know if they learn the local language of every country they visit before they go though. I do try (count to 10, please, thanks, chicken) but there's no point becoming fluent for the sake of a 10 day holiday.
Just about anywhere on the planet where you have the internet, you can have an immersive English experience. It’s nigh on impossible to have that even in Spanish. It’s pretty obvious, really.
I wish I was bilingual but the opportunities aren't there for us griwing up. And realistically, what's the point in learning a language for a one week holiday once in a lifetime? There are much more benefits to Europeans learning English in terms of career etc.
That aside, English speakers might be fluent in another language, but it goes unnoticed. I could speak French fluently, yet in Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy etc. I won't know the language, and have to put up with the attitude of "this English-speaker doesn't know my language so I am going to be mad at them for being too lazy to learn other languages when I've had to learn their language".
What’s the point of learning a language? Idk making friends, getting a job?! It’s not just you but a lot of people only see it in the context of going on holiday, when it can be a lifelong skill.
How about you actually read my comment before jumping down my throat. I literally said I wish I were bilingual, but we dont get taught languages growing up. Children dont have control over their education.
>It’s not just you but a lot of people only see it in the context of going on holiday, when it can be a lifelong skill.
This is not the narrow-minded view you've implied. It's the genuine reality. Do you know how many times I've not been able to make friends, not got a job, or needed another language for my job? 0.
If you're referring to working in another country, let's look at visas and realistic opportunities for that too.
Yes speaking another language may help you make friends and get a job if you're fluent by your teens, but that's simply not a possibility/opportunity for most English speakers.
Maybe actually read my comment before jumping down my throat. I've literally said I wish I was bilingual, but we dont get the opportunities to learn languages growing up.
I've looked into it learning a language as an adult (properly, not just Duolingo, which I've being doing for years in French btw) and it costs so much money to get the help needed to learn a language to fluent level, as well as time around full time work.
>What’s the point of learning a language? Idk making friends, getting a job?! I
By the time an adult has the money to put into learning a language, and then the time it takes to become fluent, they're already well into full time employment. And if you're referring to getting a job in another country, let's look at visas and the realistic possibility of that too...and this links back to my point of we dont get opportunities to learn as children, from which yes it could benefit in making some friends of getting a job, but hardly.
What language would you recommend all English speakers learn growing up that would genuinely benefit them in making friends and getting a job?
My view is not narrow minded as you imply but realistic and unfortunate.
People like you are part of the problem as you've jumped down my throat about something that is factual purely because it's the stereotype. Maybe actually read my comment. I've literally said I wish I was bilingual, but we dont get the opportunities growing up. I've looked into it as an adult and it costs so much money to get the help needed to learn a language to fluent level, as well as time when having a full time job, and if you're not fluent abroad you get spoken to in English anyway.
What language do you suggest Brits put money and time into as an adult that will genuinely lead to them making friends and 'getting a job'. Because so far in my life it's never come up. And if you're referring to getting a job in another country, let's look at visas and the realistic possibility of that too...
Languages are learned because you need to communicate
English is a skeleton key language usable more widely than any other language
French was widely taught when I went to school but I have zero use for it so I don't speak it
I learned more Japanese from videogames and Dutch from living there for a few months than I did in 5 years of school - I genuinely think learning a language you never use is a waste of time
Last bit makes most sense. Teaching something because you have to do a language in school puts people off. There’s no perceivable benefit to most people.
English is the de facto second language of the world. Large parts speak it fluently or semi fluently. While it’s good to learn another language unless you’re regularly travelling to one for work it would be impossible to visit places and be consistently fluent. You could argue French or Spanish are the best to learn with how widely they’re spoken but that’s about it.
Because English is the single easiest language to get away with only knowing, internationally. Also, because language education in our schools is shit.
Not quite true. French is the official language of the EU/NATO/UN so if you’re working at those institutions it’s probably worth knowing a word or two and a lot of companies work internationally.
Not THE official language of the UN, there are six, Arabic, French, Chinese, English, Russian, and Spanish.
The EU has 24 official languages.
NATO has two, English and French, out of which I'm sure English is the most spoken.
Not saying french is a bad language to learn just nowhere near as useful as English in Basically any capacity apart from moving to France
French is the official language of many international institutions though. If you really want to look smart at the UN for instance, it's best to know French. ;)
Lack of teaching in school. Like it used to be compulsory to take a language to GCSE level and it's not anymore. And not all primary schools do languages.
We (as a society) allow this happen.
We should at least consider teaching Spanish or French from primary level.
Well... English is the universal language; we can get away with travelling or doing business etc. and most people will speak English to us.
For another, most people who live in England who are bilingual don't tend to identify as British; they'll identify as whatever their inherited/previous nationality is. So if you meet someone, even if they live in the UK, they'll probably say 'I'm Pakistani' or 'I'm Indian', or 'I'm French etc.' Which skews things a bit.
Also, our second language is French, and we learn pretty quickly that it's a pretty useless one to learn, so most people quit.
If you're saying, why don't people learn other languages to a high level, then laziness and arrogance mostly!
But to be fair, in modern UK, more and more people have grown up bilingual - English plus Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Bengali, Polish, Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian and many many more.
Also a significant percentage of Welsh people are bilingual.
There's no arrogance involved, or laziness I'd say, it's just not necessary if English is your native language to learn anything else, unless you move to a different country and don't bother learning the language, that is definitely lazy and arrogant. It's not an achievement to be bilingual if you are raised in both languages, eg mother speaks polish to the child all the time or other cases like that.
That’s because there’s been a concerted political effort to increase the amount of Welsh speakers, the same could be done in the rest of the country if the government wanted
Yeah and it’s getting better. I’m unfortunately a product of Welsh language education in the 90’s, I only really started to learn more Welsh as an adult.
My nieces are both under 10 and are pretty much fluent, certainly conversational. I think it’s wonderful.
To be fair. English is spoken all over the world and a European's 2nd language is usually English. Wales is a bit of an anomaly when compared to Scotland and Ireland as it has a relatively high number of bilingual who speak Welsh and English whereas there are few people in Ireland who speak in Irish on a daily basis and even less people who speak Scots Gaelic in Scotland.
We do learn Spanish, French and German at school (usually not all 3) so it depends on how much someone wants to learn another language as we kinda have the luxury of not really having to.
Me, personally I was born in London but moved to Ireland when I was 5 for 6 years (dad is Irish) and learnt to speak basic Gaelic and I found basic German pretty easy at school as there are a lot of similarities between English and German. So I think in my case it was learning a 2nd language from a young age that kinda made me enjoy learning new languages.
My family all speak French (with varying competency) both my grandmothers learnt it in Switzerland when teenage girls were sent there after school. So it’s kind of been in my family’s DNA to learn languages. It’s just…a thing you do
I guess it depends on your parents nationality as well, but being British you only need to know English or some of those tourist languages, Cornish, Welsh, Scottish, Gaelic, romulan and Latin.
The premise is flawed. I’m what is classed as British and am what might be considered natively bilingual.
Linguistically and culturally I am not English, and because Englishness has hijacked Britishness, in self-identification circumstances i would not identify as British — my culture is native to Britain and pre-dates English culture.
I live my life in my native language, work daily using it, speak it and English with fluency (as I do a third language), have a decent working knowledge of another three languages and a smattering of a few others.
And there are some 800,000 others of the same basic background as myself, many of whom woild also balk at being termed a ‘Brit’.
British polyglot here. English is generally considered the language of business so most are OK with just going by that.
We also have a problem with teaching for the longest time I thought I would never speak another language. Then I started travelling and picking up other languages and using them, that gave me confidence so I built on that. Now typically if you ask me on the spot I struggle but when I'm doing it naturally it's much better.
There are quite a few boards where Brits have asked questions like “how do I get a local to reply to me in Spanish rather than English when I’m ordering in a restaurant in Madrid?” etc.
Said people always get told that the staff aren’t there to help you with practising Spanish.
And therein lies the answer. When English people try to learn another language, unless they get good very fast, the people they’re conversing with are going to have better English because it’s the world language.
I speak Spanish but it has taken a huge amount of time and effort. And while I’m pretty much fluent I’m still not as good as most Spanish colleagues are at English.
It's likely to do with the fact that there is greater motivation to learn English as it is default language spoken in many industries and even the language that two nonnative English speakers will most commonly communicate in.
There is an enormous volume of popular media in English language, especially music, which is ubiquitous and has a way of sticking in our memory, enhancing language learning. So a person can be practically immersed in English without travelling to an English speaking country.
If I wanted to learn Danish for example, I would need to seek out materials and would have very limited options in terms of surrounding myself with the language without actually moving to Denmark.
I actually do happen to be "bilingual"...that's a stretch as I'm not fluent in the second language, but to get to this point I've had to make a lot of effort to seek out the other language.
Because Britain is a poor country. Everyone here is in a bad mood all the time and are constantly worried about money and showing off and wanting to impress people/strangers with possessions that they can’t afford.
And when they save up 10 K for something that is worth 10 K they will buy it straight away just to show off and act rich.
British people are fake.
Put very simply we don’t need learn a second language to in the same way or for the same reasons people who do learn English as a second language, if you do fluently speak a second language as an English speaker it’s far more likely you learned that at home as a kid than at school.
If I go to France and try to speak the GSCE French I can recall they will instantly know I’m English and speak to me in English as it’s significantly less painful for them.
We didn’t spend 400 years sailing around the world subjugating and exploiting people, just so we’d have to learn a multitude of foreign languages.
/s, just in case.
The statistics are pretty clear learning a foreign language isn't very beneficial economically in the UK.
If there's no market demand for it people will only do it for fun.
And there aren't many people with that kind of motivation or time.
We're really bad at teaching languages at school.
What's crazy I did German and gcse, I did ok nothing special.
I found out a few years later after uni my dad was actually really good at german, he never once told me when I was at school.
Only realized since my brothers partner is fluent in German and had been teaching my brother German, one day they were talking and my dad joined in.
Maybe I would have tried harder if the access was better.
Only once have I had a desire to learn a language and the was Japanese, I progressed well with the adult learning course I could find but I reached the end of what wa offered near me and life got in the way couldn't justify commuting to London to learn Japanese for an hour a week.
I do travel to Japan and what I have learnt has been useful both on my social trips but really good for my business trips my customers seem to really appreciate the effort.
Because I don’t have the money to use DuoLingo or something similar, I don’t have the time otherwise I would be learning BSL; and I’ve always had difficulty getting my head around the differences between nouns, verbs, adjectives, whether this word goes after this word but not after that one and I’ve always had trouble with making the correct letter sounds in English, so how am I going to fare with a foreign language.
I can’t afford to go abroad and I’m not about to anyway so there’s that too.
They're typically bilingual with English or their bordering country if they live close to the border. We speak English and have no bordering country. The need to speak another language fluently is limited if you don't want to move to a non Anglo country.
Everyone learns their native language, plus American. We're different in that the American dialects pollute our own rather than being a separate language.
In our defence, we are very familiar with our large variety of accents and dialects that we can actually understand foreigners with thick accents and broken English which is more than can be said for the French.
Because we speak English, many foreigners also speak English. So we don’t need to learn other languages.
Also, the UK is not physically connected to other countries.
In addition to the other answers on here, English is one of the easiest languages to learn. Fairly simple grammar, no cases, no grammatical gender. I don't know of any other languages that don't have any of these. Yes, it has some very odd spellings but that doesn't matter for speaking.
Whilst we’re taught other languages at school it’s seen as more a “good to know” rather than “essential” which I think the English language is seen as in a lot of other countries. It’s a shame as we really should be more bilingual and while a lot of us make the effort to speak another countries language when we visit on holiday, the majority of English tourists come across horrible obnoxious when they order food etc in English rather than even trying.
Because English is a widely adopted language spoken throughout most of the world — if you speak English you can, in theory, "get away" with not learning any other languages. On the flip side, far less of the world speaks Norwegian or Dutch (for example) and so there exists a motive to learn English as a second language.
Don't mistake this for justification. It's basically laziness.
For one thing, our foreign langauge education is really bad. You can get great grades in A Level French whilst being completely unable to actually speak the level to any meaningful degree. Meanwhile you can find teenagers online from all across Europe who are completely fluent in English, and they're not particularly academic, it's just normal for them to be able to speak two languages.
But yes it's also true that we're not particularly motivated to try harder because we can easily get by speaking english and being understood pretty much anywhere you go.
In addition to the whole everyone speaks English thing.
The other reason I suspect for some of the population is the way that grammar was taught or in fact not taught at all during a period of history in English schools.
I don’t really understand grammar, I can ‘hear’ when something is right or wrong but it’s instinctive. I can’t tell you what the underlying rules are that make it work. A bit like being able to play music by ear when you can’t read a note of it.
This means when trying to learn another language we don’t have the most basic tools from our own language to act as building blocks.
It’s cause native English speakers mostly don’t need to learn another language, most of the developed world already accommodates the English language within their nations. If you aren’t a native English speaker learning the language opens up many more avenues of opportunity, much more so than if an English speaker was to learn another language.
“Everybody speaks English, so why should I bother?”
It’s actually trueish, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to broaden our horizons and learn new things.
I’m all for speaking other languages, but I’ve had limited success. I speak not quite fluent French and a bit of Spanish, as well as some Tamil (don’t ask). You can’t get by a lot better with speakers of other languages if you have at least a few words. It shows willing.
I guess most of us are just lazy.
Britain had a large empire so English has emerged as pretty much the dominant common language. The attitude of many British people is why bother learning another language if a lot of people speak yours.
Short version is that we don't need to be, you can get by in a lot of the world with just english.
Moreso if you have a phone that can translate local signage.
We live on an island. There’s not been much need to be bilingual throughout most of our history and this persists culturally. Nowadays, English is spoken everywhere so there’s less pressure or need to learn another language.
I’m dyslexic and learning another language is a little difficult. But I’m slowly learning Russian from my girlfriend. It helps to be using it daily and if I lived in another country I would 100% learn the local language.
Because British people speak English as their first language. Most Europeans don't speak English as a first language, so they have to learn that as well.
Back when I was in school, they made learning Welsh mandatory. And they insisted on learning a 2nd language during GCSE options, so not only was I learning Welsh (had to give up History as the mandatory thing was pushed to my year as well) but had to try to learn French on top of that.
Yeah, I kind of gave up on both as it was getting a bit much. 2 languages on top of English, Math, Sciences, Religion, Geography and Drawings (got a job out of this one) was too much
Saying that, I have learned basic Welsh in recent years.
Because English people already speak English and most people who are bilingual in Europe speak their own language + English.
Either you're dense or you're just trying to throw some shade at English people.
It varies. Essentially English is most other nations second language, so it's easy for Brits to get by never knowing another. It's also that I don't think many Brit parents, certainly working class ones, give much value to second languages, so their kids are raised being pretty dismissive. Even back when I was at school, I was one of perhaps 3 or 4 in my whole class who were motivated to learn one. My daughter just went to Uni to study languages and her experience was even worse. Her A Level German class was 2 kids, and she helped teach kids GCSE and below while on her A Levels and those kids were just completely unaware of the benefits, dossing about in lessons, being xenophobic etc.
Years n years ago I did french school.
all about pens & aunts and other such useful phrases
then about 2 months before final exams we were told there was 1 hour oral exam. 🙄😱
Thing is, nowadays it's so much easier. You can find foreign chat companions with ease, so you can improve and practice. My daughter missed a lot of school, but when she went back for A levels having missed her GCSE years, she was so good at German because she used it talking to Austrian gamer friends that she went on to A star her A level and take advanced German at Uni. The only reason I lost my high school German was lack of use.
Yep, super proud dad. She's taking advanced German and beginner Japanese, while studying Russian as a sort of evening class. She's already conversational in Spanish too.
She wants to be a teacher too. So she'll be giving back. I'm just glad her skillset will also gove the ability to basically do any job where her languages are important. It was a fact I'd overlooked before but companies who need a language tend to employ the language speaker and teach the actual skills for the job afterwards, as its cheaper, quicker and easier in most cases, than teaching the language from scratch to business worthy. So my initial belief she'd be limited to teacher, translator or interpreter was vastly underselling it.
think more like
world is her oyster, especially with such a good range
it's a lot different but I used to know Swiss man.
loved skiing and tennis
so summer in France, Germany, Italy (all swiss languages)
winter anywhere with snow, last seen slowly working his way around top latitude lines as ski instructor or guide
just finished uni couple of years earlier, couple more years and he'd decide where to settle down.
lost touch though
beauty of certificates, tend not to go out of date languages always useful
just make sure you visit often, don't want to miss anything 💕
So a Frenchman and a German and a Dutch woman are at the table I was at for breakfast, what language did we speak?
The fact we refused to learn another language forced the world to learn English and meant I could converse with all at breakfast.
Because there’s no point in English people learning another language. English people travel to almost any part of the world and find people who understand them fine, if a Swedish person goes to Japan, the chances of someone in japan understanding them is almost nil. In Europe you need to know English more importantly than an English person needs to know Italian or finish.
A combination of poor motivation and bad teaching methods. Learning English opens up global opportunities, learning other languages largely creates more localised ones.
English itself is taught poorly. There's no structural education that can then be applied to other languages. It's more like turning the language into a cypher and then awkwardly decyphering it.
Foreign languages are not taught for many hours nor practiced with anyregularity. Kds in other countries are practicing English ever day online, on television, in videogame, immersion comes to them. For an English speaker, creating immersion demands a great deal, little of which resembled what you were going to do anyway, or traveling abroad. And in class it's taught less like a language you can speak and more like a combination of hobbyish code-breaking and extremely amateur theatre.
I speak French and German. I just rarely get the chance to practise as every time I go overseas the second they find out you are English they insist on speaking English with you
Inbreeding for generations and a mistrust of all things foreign mentality. Yeah, they might go to Spain for hols, but they will stay in a hotel that's 80% English, and they will only speak to other English guests. Doesn't occur to them that they might learn some Spanish. In their heads, the Spanish should speak English.
It's more difficult to travel than it is in continental Europe, and you have to make more of an effort to cross borders.
There's a reason why the country that has had more EU Presidents than any other is Luxembourg - as a country it almost seems engineered to produce people bilingual citizens. It's small, it's very central, it's located between countries that speak different languages. It's got land borders, which means you could literally *walk* to France or Germany, basically for free, if you wanted to. Even in bigger continental European countries, the fact that there's open land borders is a big help. Take a night train from Austria to France or whatever - you'll be there in no time.
Contrast that with the UK - it's an island nation where you have to pay quite a lot of money, or otherwise own a boat, to get to a country where the majority of people predominantly speak a language that isn't English. Yes, Wales and Ireland exist, but in both of those countries, it's still rare to find exclusively non-English speaking people.
From age 3, most parents tell their kids they don’t need to know foreign languages, so it’s engrained.
It’s crazy to do this as just 1 extra language opens up a million recruitment options for a kid leaving school but that’s the country we live in.
We're not allowed to practice.
You know what happens when I go to Spain and try to practice my limited Spanish? They reply in fluent English better than I can speak as a native.
I've been on holiday in Turkey and saw an English guy have a full argument with his boss because his boss would just speak English rather than let him practice his Turkish.
The issue with English being the world's lingua franca, everyone speaks your language better than you can speak theirs.
This is very much part of it. Everyone wants to practice their English. I speak fluent French (only because I lived there for ten years) and when I go back, I still end up speaking English to people whose English is much weaker than my French just because they insist on it! 🤣
Why bother? Unless I'm planning on living abroad and need the language to integrate or intend to visit a place often enough it has almost no value.
I studied French in school and have never been to France so everything I learnt has been long forgotten. People learn English because its useful almost anywhere, the same can't be said for most other languages.
Every where I’ve ever travelled has had signage and most everything else menus, atms etc able to use English. Hollywood films etc are in English almost all the time.
This means two things, we don’t have the need to learn another language and secondly we don’t have the exposure even if we did. I speak to a lot of non-brits who learnt English from the tv and music as they often only subtitled shows rather than dubbing them.
Because it is sadly really not needed and even when you have some knowledge its laughed at (hello France!) 😄
Living and working in another country or job sector that needs a language would be different of course.
Language education is appalling in England there is no support for it anyway.
Neither of my kids have anything other than the very basics of French and Spanish despite most of their classmates being bilingual or even trilingual.
Honestly, TV. When I lived in Holland most yound people spoke English with American accents. Baywatch was HUGE at the time. We just don't get much European TV in the UK.
This is my perspective based on having a bilingual European wife (and kids) and I can speak very good Italian having learnt over many years.
* It's really hard to do
* Which language do you choose to learn?
Learning a language without being able to immerse yourself is really hard to do. Yeah you can learn the basics and chat along to Duolingo but actually speaking with a native speaker is very hard. Now let's throw into the mix the fact that we live on an island where everyone primarily speaks English. There is no possibility of immersion in any meaningful sense of the word. When I visited Sweden a few times I was amazed how many things were in English, their immersion is next level. We simply can't do that here.
Now think about which language you'd learn...in Europe it's simpler. You learn English as it's the language of the EU, and the language of business, etc. Or maybe you live in Switzerland so you learn German, French, and Italian. Or perhaps Spain so you learn French or Portuguese. Geography and ease of travel makes this simpler. But the British already speak the international language so which one do you pick?
Because our schools are terrible at teaching a language. In a lot of European countries they start to learn languages in primary school, but we don't start here until secondary school
I remember meeting a group of English lads who were doing a tour of Eastern Europe just steer the Berlin Wall fell (summer 1991). My dad asked them how they were dealing with language problems, the one lad from them said “it’s easy, you just speak louder and slower until they understand”.
Haha, this reminded me. I went to Belgium with a few mates in the early 00s. One, Scottish lad in his mid 20s, had never been on a plane before, and never left the country. Let's call him "A". Some of the things he'd said **genuinely** on the trip still make me laugh:
A: "I don't understand why they don't use pounds like everyone else"
Me: "Because we're going to Belgium and the use Euros there"
A: "But it's part of Britain "
Me: "(slightly shocked) er .... Belgium isn't part of Britain"
A: "Yeah, but it's part of **great** Britain isn't it?"
Then going down for breakfast to the hotel
A: "I want coffee with milk:
Lady: "Je ne parle pas anglais"
A: "Milk. You know, cows. Make it" (makes milking udders hand movement) "MOOO! MOOO!"
The lady just stared at him like he was an idiot. Which, to be fair, was a reasonable assessment of him.
Then, after we got back, another mate told me that he'd asked A how his trip was, and A replied "It's amazing, ken. They all speak Belgian, even the weans". Still find it absolutely hilarious that he was fully under the belief that everyone spoke English naturally, and they were making a special effort to speak in "Belgian".
Haha, this reminded me. I went to Belgium with a few mates in the early 00s. One, Scottish lad in his mid 20s, had never been on a plane before, and never left the country. Let's call him "A". Some of the things he'd said **genuinely** on the trip still make me laugh:
A: "I don't understand why they don't use pounds like everyone else"
Me: "Because we're going to Belgium and the use Euros there"
A: "But it's part of Britain "
Me: "(slightly shocked) er .... Belgium isn't part of Britain"
A: "Yeah, but it's part of **great** Britain isn't it?"
Then going down for breakfast to the hotel
A: "I want coffee with milk:
Lady: "Je ne parle pas anglais"
A: "Milk. You know, cows. Make it" (makes milking udders hand movement) "MOOO! MOOO!"
The lady just stared at him like he was an idiot. Which, to be fair, was a reasonable assessment of him.
Then, after we got back, another mate told me that he'd asked A how his trip was, and A replied "It's amazing, ken. They all speak Belgian, even the weans". Still find it absolutely hilarious that he was fully under the belief that everyone spoke English naturally, and they were making a special effort to speak in "Belgian".
my contact now with other languages is as a tourist.
if I attempt to switch to their language I'm told they need to practice for their job, we usually end up giving literal translations to stock phrases
best learning session I ever had was deal with a German Lady
I spoke to her in German, she replied in English
then we'd swap
Well, I'd say Britain and the USA share the credit for English being the lingua franca.
This came about post-WWII. When international organizations were founded and were establishing standards and treaties for things like global commerce and travel, the Allies had the strongest seats at the table. Britain and America had the two most well developed industries for things like aviation and banking so their standards led the way. Britain's position as head of the Commonwealth was every bit as important as America's.
Once English was designated as the official travel of international travel, it effectively ensured every country in the world would have to teach it to some extent. They'd need it to run their airports and staff their own air crews if nothing else. Add in banking and the rest of the infrastructure that supports global trade and it's easy to see how it gained traction in the modern world.
I can’t fault your argument, and it would be too glib to say it’s all America’s doing (which tbf I kind of did say). As I said in my other reply, though, I do think American influence has built on the foundations provided by the British, and were it not for the way that influence has been sustained English might have had stiffer competition.
I mean, the USA could easily have ended up speaking Dutch or German, or even French. For a variety of reasons English won out.
I mean yes, this is a big element of it. Especially in more modern times but I think the world dominance of the English language began before the US was the global superpower. The trade networks, education systems, communication networks etc. expanded or directly set up by the British empire play another massive role in why English is the current lingua franca. You're right to say of course that this is proliferated by US dominance approaching and post WW2.
Yes, I’d agree it’s rooted in British trade, etc. But that doesn’t by itself explain how English dominates the world (Brazil - random example - wasn’t part of the British Empire). American economic power has been the bedrock on which American cultural influence has been built, and that has penetrated into *every* country on Earth. When you slap that on top of the established spread of English through British trade, you’ve got a steamroller which has made all other languages take a lower priority.
It’s not anti-American to point this out (I suspect that’s where the downvotes are coming from). Many people would say American economic/cultural domination has influenced the world for the better, and I think there are strong arguments for that.
Right? Reddit is so weird. Europeans learn English because it's the language of international trade and commerce, which is because of the massive economic influence of the USA
I'm not saying you're wrong in today's view, but I think there's more to it than just the USA being the current economic super power.
The English empire, for all of it's sins and accomplishments was so vast, it pretty much oppressed English onto every nation it invaded...which was a lot. I reckon that has a large amount to do with why English is so universal. If we really strip it all back, it's the entire reason the US speak English.
The United Kingdom obviously had the world's largest economy at the time and it just so happens the current largest economy for the last century or so also has English as a first language.
If China took over as the world's largest economy and that sustained for a century, I genuinely don't think that Mandarin would become the universal language of choice. I could be wrong of course.
This was a long winded way of agreeing with you but adding additional detail. :)
But widespread efforts to teach English as part of standard education across Europe didn't really happen until the last quarter of the 20th Century. Visiting Europe frequently in the early 2000s it was extremely common to find that older people around retirement age could not speak much English at sll but people who'd been schooled through the 70s, 80s and 90s were almost all near fluent.
The move to teach English from a young age as a matter of routine across Europe took place because of the economic dominance of the USA making English the de facto language of international trade.
Never seek to explain Reddit downvotes. People just pile on sometimes. I once got downvoted for wishing someone good luck because his wife was about to have a baby. 🤷
Because learning languages is barely taught at primary level and optional (after a certain age), whereas on the continent you are learning several languages through your whole school life.
In school, we had to do lessons on religion, which took up far too much time. I've always thought if you want to change religion, that's something you do as an adult not push on children. So it was a waste of lesson time when we could be learning something useful like finance or another language etc
Why do I need to learn another language when whether I go to Poland, Morocco or Saudi, every fucker speaks English, I have a great respect for polyglots and have many bilingual friends, I at this point have had no need to learn another language at this point. I definitely wouldn’t be against learning another language tho.
Being a native English speaker is a blessing and a curse. It’s the global language, useful when travelling and doing business, I feel extremely lucky to know it, however it means there is absolutely no motivation to learn a second, it wouldn’t help me. 🤷♀️
There are more non-native English speakers in the world than native English speakers.
In the days of the Great British Empire, it was the other way around, and as a result, Brits were known for fishing more than one language. The present situation reversed that.
I know many Brits who are bi or multi-lingual - in my corner of the country there are large ethnically Indian, Pakistani, Polish and Italian communities who are second, third and fourth generation so legally British. We use English because it’s the common denominator, not because we don’t also speak other languages.
It’s because of the dominance of American popular culture. Kids all around the world see and hear American stars speaking English. There isn’t the same in reverse.
Many Europeans are bilingual and the with vast majority of them that second language is English. There is a real business need to learn a second language but not just any second language, the need is for English specifically.
British people don't have a business need to learn a second language like Europeans do because they already know English.
I have a degree in French, tourist level Italian, and a GCSE in Chinese. I have never needed the French (people always want to speak English). I use the Italian a bit on hols and people are pleased. The Chinese is Mandarin and most Chinese people over here seem to speak Cantonese so not ever used it. Work used to send me to Germany and Holland. Those colleagues would say, why don’t you speak German / why don’t you speak Dutch? I would say - how many languages do you want me to speak? Anyway all work was done in English as it was an American company.
Most Europeans have English as their second language and find it useful to speak with others from all other European countries. They only need to learn English to speak anywhere, whereas Brits would have to learn ALL the other European languages to have the same level of communication. If an English person learns a second language, they only get to use it in one or two other countries and have very scant opportunities to practice and hone it.
If English is your first language and you travel to other countries, you can try to speak to people in their language and they'll just chat back with you in English. Also, languages aren't taught well in schools in the UK.
Mainly arrogance of historic Brits so the rest of the world had to learn English and the English didn’t bother learning anything else and nothing has changed
Former foreign language teacher in Britain, AUS, and the US- feel I can comment on this:
The main reason so few Brits, Aussies, and Muricans are not bilingual is two fold:
1. The effort by so many other nations to learn English means that learning that country’s foreign language isn’t emphasized. You’ll try haphazardly communicating in broken German to someone in Munich and that German will respond in perfect English because many countries emphasise English from an early age and -crucially- don’t let their students drop the language. The result is hoards of proficient English speakers from other nations meaning the Poms, the Aussies, and the Yanks don’t need to learn a foreign language.
2. In Britain, the early 2000s decision to stop learning a foreign language as a requirement for GCSE meant people just stopped learning even the basics. It was very hard for most teachers to recruit students for GCSE and A Level back in the 2010s when I was teaching them, and that was only a few years after the government made that decision. In Aus there never seems to have been as much an emphasis on learning a language, though I only taught in Victoria. In the US, they have to do 2 years of foreign language in High School in Florida, but they can smash through this in 9th and 10th grade and they also teach to the test, so speaking the language isn’t the objective, same with those ridiculous GCSE exams in the U.K.
There is very little emphasis on languages as a subject at school. While our European neighbours do intensive language-learning, to the extent of learning other subjects in the new language, it's a minor subject in British schools. This is partly a leftover of the period when English was the dominant world language - two of the four post-WW2 superpowers spoke English, and the dominant pre-war trading powers were the UK and US. The thing is, that's just not as true today, but our attitudes haven't caught up. We tell ourselves that English is the dominant language in modern business, but we should be teaching our kids the languages of our major trading partners - French, Dutch, German, Hindi and Japanese.
English is post-European slang, it's a mongrel language built mainly from french, Saxon and latin.
We don't have grammatical gender, and despite there being certain set rules... English am easy for understanding when even words be wonky, and as long as comprehension does being achieved then you have done an successful English. At least in my opinion. (Which I think is the real beauty and strength of the language.. also English swearing is king. You fucking can bloody stick shitting one fucking in bloody every bastard other arse word)
Because of this, I think English speakers can struggle to grasp all of the nuances of European language rules. I have been asked so many times by European friends about if they are saying things correctly when they speak English better than a lot of English people I know.
As many others have pointed out, english being widely used across the world, and people consuming a lot of english-language media are the main reasons.
However from experience living in europe, while it is very common for people to speak the native language + english, I also found a lot of people were pretty competent in a third language through schooling, at least more so than in the UK.
Imo a large part of it is that when they are taught their native language it is in a much more structured way than we are taught english. Fundamentals like cases, genders, tenses, sentence structure etc are learnt and can easily be transferred to similar foreign languages.
I may be misremembering (getting old lol) but other than subject/object and complex sentences I really don’t remember being taught english grammar at school. My first exposure to lot of key language terms came from studying foreign languages, and I’d never heard them used in relation to english
When I lived in Netherlands it was incredibly difficult to learn Dutch as even when I tried Dutch they’d hear my English accent and answer in English
Pump attendants on the highway could speak 5 languages typically
Lack of education really. I didn't start learning French until I was 11 whereas I would imagine a lot of people in European countries would learn English from around 5. As we speak the lingua franca of the world there's not any motivation for learning another language. Would definitely recommend learning a second language even if it's just French on duolingo, it's very good for your brain
If we learn a foreign language, in order to get any use from it we have to learn it to a higher standard than speakers of that language have learned English.
No real opportunity to practice. Go to any European country, start speaking in your broken version of their language and they just respond back in English.
We aren't flooded with foreign language media. Kids around the world have English from childhood, we don't have that with other languages. Schools were absolutely useless at teaching languages, often leaving it far too late to pick it up easily.
My kids are dual nationals, so we made sure they had Spanish media from before they could talk. Now they speak both English and Spanish fluently.
We generally don’t have any foreign languages as part of our education until 11 years old by which time it’s orders of magnitude harder to pick them up than if we’d started at say 4 years old.
So most of us start learning at 11, and by the time we’re 14 we can choose to stop as that’s the point at which we choose our GCSE subjects and a foreign language isn’t (or wasn’t when I was a kid) mandatory like English, Maths and the Sciences.
There’s very little incentive outside of that to bother doing something incredibly difficult and time consuming given the more or less global status of English.
No use for multiple languages I'm most parts of the country. English is one of the biggest languages so for the most part even with foreigners in our country they can have a basic understanding of English.
I'm glad to have been raised in the Highlands and learned both Gàidhlig and English growing up.
The biggest thing is media.
Most of the world’s biggest and most popular media is in English. Movies, TV shows, books, etc - all originally in English. Yes a lot get translated, but it’s not ‘the same’, and there’s often an extended wait for the translations to come out.
Because of this, a lot of kids in europe spend a LOT of time watching english shows or movies with subtitles in their languge, and pick up a lot through that. Plus learning English almost universally in school, making it easier to pick up more from the shows.
If your native language is English… name another language with such an overwhelming quantity and quality of media in it. There’s not many French or German TV shows that have international acclaim, for example. For an English speaker… there’s just not the constant exposure to a singular second language that non-english speakers often have.
As other people have also said, we do study languages in school in the UK, we all study French for many years, many of us are taught German and Spanish as well, and Latin. And other languages. I have a GCSE in French and my wife has an A-Level. We use this when we go on holiday in France maybe for two weeks every five years and at no other time, therefore our French is shite. That is not an excuse, I could have carried on with my French, I could practice more often but to what end?
I get that this might come off as British arrogance, but I'd argue there isn't a language that benefits us like English does. Learn German and it's good in a handful of countries, French is obviously spoken in many countries, but how many of those do British people visit outside of Europe and Canada, similar argument for Spanish.
English is just more beneficial, if a Swedish guy and a Polish guy meet in Portugal, what language are they most likely to communicate in?
I'm not excusing it, but i don't think its a fair comparison.
What is the 2nd language of these europeans? If it's english then there's a reason, but how many germans speak Portuguese for example or French speak Dutch?
Because that's a better comparison than europeans speaking english (let's be honest, it is the language of trade for the vast majority of the world)
Rory Sutherland speaks about this here:
https://youtube.com/shorts/Dh5HEYzNOPs?si=N_HQYnv0we7OAVuM
Basically it is far more difficult for English speakers to get any value from speaking other languages because inevitably they speak fluent English and so unless you're fluent in their language English is the best choice.
English is pretty much the default second language for most nations. Someone in Europe can learn English and know they'll have a change of being understood in the rest of Europe. If a German and Spaniard met, chances are they'd talk to each other in English for instance.
In the UK, that necessity isn't there so isn't pushed so hard in our education system.
As people have said, as a Brit you'd really need to have a specific interest in languages to bother to learn another one fluently, as you can make yourself understood in English by at least somebody present in pretty much any country in the world.
Why would we need to be? English is the standard language across the world for international conversations.
Europeans often learn English because they need to understand it for things like the internet. There’s no reason for a Brit to need to speak another language.
Because it's not seen as important because most people who are bilingual speak English. It's shaming how little importance is placed on our children being taught other languages.
Because English is the global language. If you go to Disneyland Paris, for example, you’ll hear the park attendants start talking to visitors in English as a starting point, even French people in France. It’s because they don’t know what nationality they are so they start in English. I’ve seen this happen in various places over the years, in Spain, Dubai, Italy, Cyprus, Holland & Belgium.
There’s your answer.
Market access.
As an English person, we don't really need to learn say, Japanese to get ahead. It would be nice, and useful if you go to Japan regularly, but that's where it's uses begin and end.
If you're Japanese though, if you want to do business, and connect with the largest markets in the world, you *need* to know English. By and large, the largest consumer market in the world is the US, which speaks English. The second largest consumer market in the world is Europe, and among the largest consumer economy in Europe was/is Britain, which speaks English. From a simplicity point of view, English is the no-brainer language to adopt, because it opens up the largest amount of opportunities. And as English becomes the standard, other countries will adopt it too as their language of business, thus raising the value of the language ever further.
So as a Brit, there is probably the minimal amount of incentive to learn another language possible. If a human doesn't have to learn something, they probably won't. For other countries though, it's more of an imperative, because statistically, you're going to interact with a market that speaks English at some point in your life, and not speaking English would be a huge disadvantage.
cause it is asymmetric.
Normally their second language is English. And they spend a lot resources making sure populations are good at it as it is the global language.
Our language learning at school is then naturally split between French German, Spanish, Mandarin etc etc. It dilutes effort, focus, and usefulness.
Loads of British people are. There's a real resurgence in Welsh, Cornish and Scots/Irish Gaelic. As well as lots that speak various European languages at home and often more than one African or Indian language.
But English people often only speak English fluently. Most media is in English. Most business is conducted in English. There isn't the same need to speak another language fluently. English is the lingua franca for people in various cultures (there's a fabulous you tuber who is Vietnamese living in Germany who talks to her boyfriend in English). So many people worldwide have English as their second/ third/ fourth language that it becomes an effort to speak in that language even when you go abroad as they are so much more fluent in English than I am in Greek/Dutch.
Hello u/flower5214! Welcome to r/AskABrit!
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