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.

Your embarassement is what is holding you back, KC. Try to put it aside and just have a go. At first it will feel strange, but that's only for a short while at the start.

I learnt Norwegian as an adult. It took about 6 months to function in every day situations in Norwegian.

It's true that, abroad, people do speak to you in English, but I have yet to find an information sign that automatically translates itself (I'm sure there's an app for that though). Learning enough of the local language to understand signs is a useful skill in itself.

low status of MFL in schools due to all of the above

Depends on the school. Never been an issue where I work. High take up.

Parents are the worst, I find. If they do French, they want Spanish. If they do Spanish they want French. Lots of 'oh, I was never good at languages' at parent's evening which is code for 'Not going to ground her for failing in French'.

And everyone - not by a bloody long shot - doesn't speak English.

People speak to you in English but I've yet to find someone who insists on it if you say you want to practise the local language.

I think that's the case in a social situation, sonja, but in busy shops and stations, I've found that the staff (and other customers) can get quite frustrated and will transact in English to get you served and on your way.

As well as French, I have some very ropy Spanish. I've been to Valencia twice now and I think I've almost always had to use Spanish there (except at the hotels where everyone speaks amazing English). I loved that about it actually. My Spanish is dreadful but there was no other choice as nobody spoke (or admitted to speaking) any English in restaurants, tube stations etc. So we had to make it work and everybody I spoke to was very patient.

I'm fantastic at languages. I can communicate with a third of the world. But if I go somewhere they don't speak English French or Spanish, I'm still a dumb foreigner. Were I Chinese or Iraqi I can immediately transform my outlook and earning and travelling potential by learning one language. English.
Language courses at UK universities aren't filled with gifted linguists who worked really hard btw, they're predominantly peopled by kids who lived in abroad or who have a parent from that country. For a native English speaker speaking another language is a neat party trick. For a native other language speaker learning English can be life changing.

I've had the opposite experience, Pavlovian, unless the sale has required long conversations. I think shops and stations are generally excellent places to start using new languages. Short interactions with predictable questions and answers.

I really disagree that it's lazy - I agree with the points made about lack of teaching, lack of exposure and the fact that English is a default language worldwide.

I speak 2 languages as well as English and have a smattering of several more. It's nice to have and it's interesting but it's no use speaking French in Moscow or German in Beijing - English is so much more useful.

The only time it does enrage me is with experts - if you're going to live in a country have the decency to learn the basics of their language!

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? Three MFL's were pretty well standard and you can't explain them all by being such widely spoken languages. We never had any native speakers to teach us, and my first visit to France was when I was 17. Language teaching back in my day was very much centred around rote learning of irregular verbs.

This was before the days of videos, let alone DVDs. There was no Amazon, so if you wanted foreign books and didn't live in a big city, you had to wait for someone to travel to the country in question. And we still managed.

I remember there was a French programme on television once when I was a teen, and my dad and I hurried to watch it. It featured a man and wife who quarrelled in the opening scene and did not communicate again until she was on her death bed and he wrote two words on a piece of paper and held up to her. That was my sole exposure to French as a living language. But when I got to France, I found I actually knew a lot and it wasn't that difficult to pick up the spoken language. We had been well prepared.

These days it's so easy to keep a language up: you can buy DVDs and watch, you can join an internet forum in the language in question, you can sign up for online newspapers, you can watch YouTube. A friend of mine learnt Japanese to a very good standard with the help of Japanese soaps. I follow French and German people on twitter, I listen to music on YouTube, I have a collection of Italian detective DVDs.

As for school children, my Swedish nephews know an awful lot more French (their second foreign language) than my own dc (first foreign language) do. They are further away from France, have fewer big bookshops, and if they go there would have the same problem of everybody speaking English to foreigners. But they seem to manage. Because they expect to put the same amount of work in that they would with STEM subjects or history. And that, I think, is the difference.

It is not laziness.

I am bilingual, so my is DH and both sets of our parents. Both my DM and my MIL could be said to have English as a second language.

What a lot of people don't seem to realise is the continual exposure you need to a language in order to keep yourself reasonably fluent. My MIL constantly listens to radio in her mother tongue because, otherwise, living in Britain full time and speaking English 90 percent of the time, her ability in her mother tongue starts to disappear. She forgets more uncommon verbs and cannot remember the nouns for certain objects.

I find it myself. I suspect I've lost up to 60 percent of my second language ability over the last five years, purely because I rarely watch a film or have a conversation in the language these days. If you don't use a language, it starts to vanish from your brain.

So it's very difficult for people in Britain to learn another language to fluency and keep it if they do not have a parent or spouse that is fluent in the tongue because Brits have so little environmental exposure to other languages. In other countries, English can be found everywhere: from road signs and billboards to adverts, films, TV series, imported food products and pop songs in cafes.

Add to that the difficulty of learning a second language when you haven't been taught grammar (it's pretty impossible to understand how my second language works on a very basic level if you don't have a grasp of certain grammatical concepts, such as the subject and object of a verb), and it's hardly surprising that Brits find learning another language extremely difficult.

What I do find interesting ~ and if I ever went back into academia, I might consider doing some sort of research project on this ~ is how a lot of kids struggle with MFLs at school, but yet seem to pick up coding and programming relatively easily. I do wonder if there is something you could take from the motivations and environment surrounding the learning of code and apply to MFLs in some way.

I know code doesn't require speaking or listening skills, but the concepts of communication in an alternative string of characters in order to achieve a goal are ostensibly identical.

What I love about English people in foreign countries is that if they don't understand us, we just say it louder and slower (in English) and think this will help

I'm awful at languages, I actually got kicked out of GCSE German and I'm an intelligent person, I just can't bloody get it in my head but I do try at least.

Treble presumably you only visited big cities and tourist areas.

I live in Germany - everyone learn English at school, yes. However I live rurally and nobody has ever answered me in English when I spoke German, even when I first moved here and could only use a few set phrases! People make an effort by speaking high German instead of dialect!

Yes, starting with English as a native language is a massive privilege which most people take for granted though - it certainly makes travel and business far easier. There's an argument that non native speaker English will be the language of business soon though - not all native speakers are fluent in "non native speaker English" and many can't adapt well to a non native audience (use too many idioms and colloquialisms, use unconventional grammar, speak too fast, etc)...

But PickingOakum, surely it is your own decision if you rarely watch a film or do anything else to keep your languages up? With modern technology, all those things are so easily accessible these days. I very frequently read books in German, and watch films in Italian, or listen to French songs on YouTube. Dh has downloaded foreign books on kindle and dc (bilingual) spend time on Facebook and other social media talking to people in their other country.

Otoh, as I mentioned before, that total exposure to English in other countries is a recent thing: it wasn't around when I was a child. We still managed. And there is still no similar exposure to French or German, but people still seem to manage to do something about keeping them up.

I agree with those saying it is cultural - in many senses. While 'everyone speaks English' is a massive generalisation, it is almost certainly the world's most common second language. We grow up knowing that trying to get by in English, even very basic English, will be an option much of the time. As others have said, what other language gives you so many options?

Secondly, while it may have changed now, I wasn't taught French until I was 11. Because I was in the top group for French, I got to do German at 13. There was no other language option, and if you weren't good at French, you weren't allowed to do German. Then came GCSEs. One language was compulsory, but to do more than one meant using up your only other free choice. (Yet GCSE CDT was compulsory )

Thirdly, because fluency in a second language is rare in the UK, it has become a rarefied skill - that is, we treat it as a special talent. Speak three languages and you can probably base a career on it. In many mainland European countries, it's simply expected - waiters and shop assistants are virtually fluent.

I do agree that some Brits are very rude in just talking English at someone and assuming they understand.

Then again sometimes when abroad people have assumed because I'm English I can't understand them and spoken about me in earshot. Happened a few times in Peru. I guess some people are just rude.

My biggest regret was doing a level German. Biggest waste of time ever and something that's helped me a grand total of zilch since. Thankfully was talked out out of doing anything with it further as unless I lived in Germany what's the point. Think compulsory foreign language learning is waste of time that could be better spent on other subjects. Find to keep them as an option for those that want too but otherwise it's a colossal waste of time for children.

I don't think it's laziness at all. I was chatting with a Polish colleague who was telling me English is taught from early in their school life and it is drilled into them they will have better job prospects if they are fluent. I'm sure if we gave one language the same focus we'd see the same results. Picking French up for the first time as a GCSE option just isn't going to cut it.

You have to be immersed in a language to be fluent and continue to use it.
Im half greek cypriot, i ciuld speak to and understand my gm who could not speak english. Shecdied when i was 9 and i cant speak greek any more although i know words , i couldnt put a sentance together.
I also did german olevel. I under stood the grammar but couldnt remember which der, die or das so looked like i got grammar wrong so narrowly failed olevel. However i can follow the logic of languanges and work out what things are by connecing with languages i know, just cant speak them

Cory, my OH is Danish and he and his parents/siblings learned multiple foreign languages in school. However, whilst they're all fluent in English, their competence in the other languages they learnt is no better than my GCSE level languages.

Are you really trying to say that everyone in Sweden speaks French/German/Spanish as well as they speak English?

I understand what you mean OP. I've learnt three languages but find it hard to retain any of them. I travel with work and go to one where I don't speak the language (let's say Spain) and get the comments that I've not tried to learn the language. There are so many other languages and English often is used as a convenient second language.

Why is it a waste of time, zwellers? To me (and to the people I grew up with) learning another language was about learning to see how a different culture thinks, learning that the way we thought and expressed ourselves wasn't the only possible way, also learning that there were whole different cultures- literature, scholarship, satire, jokes, folk tales- just as rich as ours. Learning to put ourselves in other people's shoes. How could that ever be wasted?

CoughLaughFart, I think you've put your finger on it with your third point: speaking foreign languages is regarded as a bit odd, a bit "clever" (in the negative sense).

Don't think your second point has any relevance though: Scandinavian children weren't taught languages before 11 in my day and I don't think they are now either. The way it went when I was at school was: English started at 11, French or German at 13, and then you had the option of taking up French, German, or Spanish (or Italian in some schools) at 16, and Latin and Greek at 17 if you really wanted to go for it.

I agree that lack of exposure is a big problem.
I come from the other point of view and have noticed that nations with English language TV shows on voice over have the most difficulty in learning the language.
In Portugal we get most but children's TV and films in the original language. It has helped me pick up English as well as French, Spanish and Italian.

It's no coincidence that nations with small populations where dubbing films/tv shows into the native language is the exception rather than the norm seem to be excellent at learning languagues

drinkingtea I lived in a military town massively populated by the British Army. I made a huge effort to talk to all Germans in German but it got me nowhere. I think that maybe since their town was so heavily populated by Brits, they maybe got fed up of trying to hold German conversations with the English speaking people because they knew things would move along a lot quicker if they just spoke English.