To think it's understandable that English speaking people often aren't great at learning foreign languages?

[Treblecleff88]

When I was at school, I learned French. Do you know how many times I've been to France? 0. Do you know how many French people I know? 0. So guess how much French I remember? Pretty much nothing.

I used to a spend quite a bit of time in Germany and they are all so good at English. But they communicate with other foreigners using English as a language they have a mutual understanding of. They listen to pop songs sung in English. They are constantly exposed to English as are foreigners across Europe. It's easy to see why the stuff they learn in school seems to stick so much better. It is always being reinforced and they have a real, tangible reason for learning the English language.

I often feel we're given a hard time for our lack of knowledge with foreign languages but realistically, even if we pick one language in Europe and get to the point of being fluent, it's not going to be relevant when conversing with the vast majority of foreigners in this country. English is so widely spoken by comparison to say French, Spanish or German which seem to be the three languages which schools seem to teach in the U.K.

Interested to hear other people's views on this.

Strictly speaking there was no need for us, as Swedish teens, to learn any other foreign language than English. If the English can get by anywhere by speaking it, then surely so could we? But we had been taught that learning languages is the best way to understand other cultures and that this in itself is a worthwhile and interesting thing to do.

That is the difference between English speaking countries and non-english speaking countries

No it isn't! Stop making such sweeping generalisations, they get silleir each time.

My son has been learning Spanish since year 7. He is now in year 10. Every parents evening the teacher says he finds languages hard. He does practice but one hour a week isn't going to make him fluent. Even a good GCSE grade doesn't mean you are fluent. How many times has my son been to Spain - nil. Does he know any Spanish people - no.

No it isn't! Stop making such sweeping generalisations, they get silleir each time.

You're the one being "silly" if you don't think that there is a difference in the way children in the UK are taught languages (or not) vs. other European countries and that this has a great impact on how many are monolingual.

Everyone in mainstream education here in France has to do two modern foreign languages as a matter of course. There's usually also Latin and Greek and/or a third modern language as an option, we also have 'European sections' where you can have history and geography taught in Spanish, for instance. Whatever your higher education speciality you have to do one or more usually two foreign languages.
French people are just like English-speaking people in that some are more gifted for languages, others less so. The big difference is the emphasis laid on languages in the curriculum, they are compulsory for everybody just like maths, physics, history etc.
I don't know many monoglot people, those I do know are almost all native speakers of English.

But French people don't as a rule speak English well!
Scandinavians and Dutch do, and as a pp said they study other languages too, so I think it's down to both the motivation to learn English and the teaching.

I agree with you, OP. For the record, Dh and I have several languages between us that we can manage fairly well in, but if you're an English speaker then wherever you go in the world, people will be wanting to practise their English on you.
We lived in Cyprus many years ago and I worked hard at learning Greek, but virtually every time I tried to use it the other person would answer in English. (That didn't stop me trying, but it certainly made it a lot harder.)

More recently Dh bas based in Indonesia for quite a while, where he made an effort to learn Bahasa. I joined him for a holiday in a remote part, and there was the barman in a nearly empty hotel, dying to practise his English and talk about English football, about which Dh knows eff all!

Just 2 cases, but if we'd had e.g. Swedish or Italian or Japanese as our mother tongue, how many people would have been able/wanted to talk to us in those?

It's relatively 'easy' for non English speakers - if you're going to learn just one language there's no choice, and if you want to travel or do business outside your own country, or often even study at a reasonably advanced level then you more or less have to learn English.

Scandinavians and Dutch do, and as a pp said they study other languages too, so I think it's down to both the motivation to learn English and the teaching.

I think they spend even more time than the French on languages though at school. In comparison, language teaching in the UK is very minimal.

I agree about motivation, but really the state of language teaching in our schools is shocking.

As I said up thread. dh is Dutch, he is not a natural linguist, he is definitely one of those who finds language learngin hard, but he had not choice, at school he did English French and German. His French is rubbish, worse than mine, his English had to be good, as half his university textbooks were in English. He still speaks converdsational level German.
As an adult he has learnt Russian as well, to a high level.

He is appalled at how badly ds and dd1 are being taught languages. He is shocked that they don't come home with lists of vocab and verb declensions, he is shocked at how, after 3 years, ds cannot hold a simple French conversation. Ds is NOT motivated, but the school (super selective grammar school too) does not have a high expectation of their language learning, and does not enforce it. In any other subject this would not be allowed.

I think they spend even more time than the French on languages though at school. In comparison, language teaching in the UK is very minimal.

Exposure is very different too.

I think as well regarding schooling: I mean IDK how it is in Scotland/UK now but when I was in school you could drop languages at 16. I went to uni at 17, and that was it. DH (Swiss) was in school till he was 19 and he had to study English and I think French right up to the end even though he was in a technical/science Gymnasium. And from there we both went into essentially the same degree course, so basically what I missed out on was the language teaching. I think I could get to a pretty high level of German and French if I was studying them 8 hours a day for 2 years!

So, OP, how do you explain why I and my peers in Sweden learnt to speak not only English but German and/or French too?

Well, if you are Swedish, a German is probably more willing to speak German with you, since you are not a native speaker of English. And if the German DOES try to practice their English with you, you are more likely to persist with the German because both German and English are foreign languages to you.

If you are a native speaker of English, the moment a German person senses this, they tend to switch to English and almost insist on using it. And when you are spoken to in a language which is actually your mother tongue, it is extremely difficult to refuse to respond to it. Even people who are trying to be motivated about languages tend to respond instinctively to their native language when they hear it--you have to be very self disciplined to just keep ploughing on and refuse to "hear" English when it is being spoken to you.

I am a long-term foreign resident of another country and I speak and write the language pretty fluently, as indeed you should do if you live overseas long term. For people who are not in this situation, I can fully understand not wanting to bother. It is an awful lot of work, and then people just insist on speaking English to you. I know we keep hearing on this thread about "People in XYZ still aren't very good at speaking English!" but the thing is, the people in that region will probably be an awful lot better at English 10 years from now; it's reasonable to take the long-term usefulness of a skill into account when you are considering whether or not to spend shitloads of time and effort learning it.

Most people don't go out of their way to practice a foreign language, which is why they don't get better at it!

Look, that pretty much sums up why it's different for native English speakers.

For people outside the Anglophone world, English is increasingly becoming a bit like being able to use Microsoft Word--a completely basic skill that reasonably well educated people are just expected to have (and even weakly educated people will probably have some idea).

For English speakers, it's more like learning a musical instrument. You can do it if you have enough interest to put in all the effort and self discipline required, and mostly you do it because you want to rather than because it is really necessary (long-term foreign residents are the exception here). We all of us love our pastimes, but it's a bit unreasonable to act as though everyone who doesn't share our particular pastime/interest is lazy or a bit thick.

Mary They don't though. I don't know whether it's the power of my resting bitch face or what - but I'm English living in Germany and nobody ever replies to me in English when I speak German.

It isn't my brilliant language skills - I didn't start learning until I was 32, don't speak another language, only knew afew phrases when we moved here, and even though I'm reasonably fluent now I can't get rid of my strong English accent.

I can't work out why my experience is so different - is it because (as someone up thread said) when people say they try to speak the local language they are opening with an explanation that they don't speak the language well or are slipping into English mid sentence? Or are people only talking about experiences in tourist areas speaking to staff expecting to speak English at work?

In most countries people are reluctant to speak English outside a work context even if they actually understand it well and learnt it at school, because (like British people) adults who haven't spoken English since school are often embarrassed speaking it aloud even if they quite enjoy letting you know that they understand the cheeky comments your child made in English in the supermarket queue :o

mmmm......I live in Japan, don't usually get English spoken to me either (now and again I do, mind you...). I think I have a glazed dead-eye expression that tells people I live in this place and am not a wide-eyed tourist ;)

Also, when you live somewhere you get more confident/proprietorial about the whole thing and find it easier to just state curtly "I speak [insert language]" when someone tries their crap English on you. I don't think many tourists or short-term visitors will have the confidence to do that, not least because if you try to cut off the other person's English and then find you can't understand something that they say afterwards, you will end up looking like a fool.

I think you're bang on OP and have often thought this myself. I lived in Germany and became fluent in German during various periods in my childhood, teen and adult years. I rarely had to use my German. I think that mostly when you're with friends everyone just wants to communicate as easily as possible. No one wanted to help me with my laboured German when we could be having a laugh in fluent English. I was fluent while I lived there but gradually lost it since. Can still read German easily though and had enough spoken German to impress my children on a recent trip to Berlin.

I get really irritated by this blanket "English people are too lazy to learn other languages" cliche too. We are so eager to criticise and slag ourselves off aren't we? This has never been my experience living in various European countries. The people I knew who were most fluent always had native spouses.

That said, I can see a case for learning a smattering of another language at school:

1/ It is a reasonably clear way to study the grammar of your own language (by translation and compare/contrast). You can either study the grammar of your own language in isolation OR you can study the grammar of another language and compare it with your own, and that way you get a bit of knowledge of a foreign language thrown in as well. What's not to like?

2/ It makes you a better listener and more patient when dealing with non-native English speakers

3/ It gives you some preparation should you ever live overseas and actually need to learn another language properly. That is to say, it gives you the confidence that you can actually do it, it gives you some practice in the whole embarrassing process of trying to say things and making a fool of yourself, and it gives you a template for how to learn languages (find an interest that uses the language, keep a vocab book, know how grammar works etc. )

4/ Depending on the language, a little bit of basic language knowledge can be culturally important for understanding high-level English. I am raising my child outside the UK, and I'd like her to learn some basic French because I would hate it if she didn't understand random bits of French that turn up in literature and historical writing and other writing/cultural references. It would be awful to try and read (say) Poirot, and not be able to understand the little French snippets, and start to feel that there is a body of knowledge that you have been shut out of. It's an unpleasant feeling that can intimidate people and put them off from participating in books or conversations that they might have enjoyed. I suspect that having at least a dabbling of Spanish will also be increasingly important for participating in American culture in the future--so much Spanglish and Spanish snippets/references seem to be found these days.

So, I think there's a good case for studying some Latin or French almost as a theoretical exercise. I don't think there is a good case for sneering about people who aren't good at speaking these or other languages, however.

I still maintain that we were required to learn not only English but one or two other MFLs to a pretty high standard before we had ever got near to those foreign countries where people might or might not be willing to converse with us.

I could read The Three Musketeers in the original long before I had ever met a real Frenchman. We were expected to work with the same level of delayed gratification as someone who learns GCSE maths or chemistry many years before they can use it to build bridges or mix pharmaceuticals.

My own dc, who were brought up in the UK, otoh, ingested the idea that language learning was only for special clever (read: pretentious) people and that if you didn't get any benefits straightaway it wasn't worth doing.

For me, it's very much about the things MaryTheCanary was saying: the cultural understanding that comes with language learning.

I am working class, I know that because I often see my more middle class friends cringe at me.

I decided to learn Spanish, and within 6 months of self-study, could converse with natives. After a year I can, er, converse with them even better.

Yes, it's harder because we don't have a) the economic need or b) the immersion factor, but honestly? Not every country throws loads of resources at it (English teaching in Spain is patchy and TV/movies are usually dubbed) and it still takes a lot of self-drive.

Throughout our education system we treat learning another language like some exotic bit of nonsense to wile away a half-hour, not an actual tool to communicate with other people. It's really depressing. There's only ever talk of 'how you can earn money' and never 'sometimes it's just really nice to talk to someone in their native language'. Honestly, it's fucking magical. I don't learn it for money or some career glory, I do it so I can grab a drink with new friends and have a chat and really, REALLY hear their true feelings, their turns of phrase, their accents and slang. Crack a joke and make someone laugh in their native tongue. It's wonderful.

If they sold THAT as a benefit, I think more people would be enthusiastic.

I'd like her to learn some basic French because I would hate it if she didn't understand random bits of French that turn up in literature and historical writing and other writing/cultural references. It would be awful to try and read (say) Poirot, and not be able to understand the little French snippets, and start to feel that there is a body of knowledge that you have been shut out of.

I read the Poirot books at an early age and worked out what Mon Ami or Mon Dieu meant from their context, not from context, not from my knowledge of French (which I've never studied). Likewise when I got older, I worked out what words like bourgeoisie and carte blanche meant from their context, just like I would with an English word or phrase I was unfamiliar with.

I do it so I can grab a drink with new friends and have a chat and really, REALLY hear their true feelings, their turns of phrase, their accents and slang. Crack a joke and make someone laugh in their native tongue. It's wonderful.

If they sold THAT as a benefit, I think more people would be enthusiastic.

There wasn't a huge Spanish speaking contingent on the Black Country when and I grew up. Most people I went to school with, live in the same town now. The idea of moving to Birmingham was fanciful/ something to be feared. The idea of hanging out in La Rambla, ordering drinks and cracking jokes with Spanish friends would be seen as akin to walking on the moon.