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.

It's understandable in a way but also lazy! You said that you spent time and money learning Italian but then forgot it because you never used it. Languages need to be used or you lose them. Nowadays there are always opportunities to read/watch/chat in any foreign language so you really only have yourself to blame if you didn't keep it up! I learnt Russian at school and can't remember any of it - I blame myself!

It is very hard for most monolingual adults to learn other languages so if they don't learn at least one other as a child, it doesn't happen

Countless people learn foreign languages as adults, they certainly weren't all bilingual children.

Why all the excuses? British people tend not to bother learning other languages because they don't want to and they don't feel the need. It's not any more complicated than that.

Those who put this down to British insularity should know that Australia and NZ are also firmly monolingual

And you don;'t think the fact that they are culturally very British and English speaking has anything to do with that?

It's all English speaking countries which have the same issue IME.

And yes silly to say it's "very hard" to learn a language as an adult. No harder than to learn anything else. Can we stop perpetuating these myths? Besides, it depends what you mean by learn a language. It's extremely easy to learn a few words (Hi, bye, thanks, please; if you want to continue: sorry, I don't understand, 1-12, that one, yes, no; if you want even more: 13-100, I like, I want/would like, what's that [called], who, where). It's not even that difficult to learn a few hundred words and with that you can have basic conversations. Fluency and accuracy, yes, are difficult, but so are a lot of things.

Countless people learn foreign languages as adults, they certainly weren't all bilingual children.

No, most monolingual adults in the UK don't learn a language from scatch. The ones that do are usually already good at speaking another language if not already bilingual. It is usually very time consuming and difficult for everyone else.

Why all the excuses? British people tend not to bother learning other languages because they don't want to and they don't feel the need. It's not any more complicated than that.

That doesn't explain why the majority of children leave school without speaking another language very well. It just isn't well taught and the majority of films/TV are in English.

I agree with someone up thread who said that grammar isn't well taught. But I think there's also the fact that compared to a lot of languages English grammar is very easy. So when faced with several conjugations, where English has at most 3 then most English speakers find it difficult, couple that with the fact that the conjugations are poorly explained and it can throw people off.
I teach English as a foreign language, it's a myth that most people outside English speaking countries are good at English. I have a mixed group of high school students in each class, there's students ranging from almost fluent to vacant expressions. Almost all learn English from Year 1 (aged 6 or 7).
I also think some people have a better ability than others. I can give a perfect example. I have two students caled John and Mary. They are both 5 and have been learning English once a week since they were 3 or 4. John's parents are not worried about him learning fast, he's a boisterous boy who prefers to run in the playground than be in a classroom, he's an average student. Mary's parents on the other hand are really into her reading early, in addition to her once a week English at school, they pay for her to do additional classes at an English language school, two classes a week. Last lesson they were learning about ability, I asked John the question "Can elephants fly?", he laughed, shook his head and said "no they can't". Then I asked Mary "Can birds fly?", she responded "My name Mary". She hasn't yet picked up the concept that the words and sounds have meanings. Interestingly I know both parents well and have known both children since they were babies, John started talking earlier than Mary.
I think the ability for language varies between individuals, it's more than just what they learn and how.

there's a definite British "look"

Most nationalities have a "look". You can better identify them when you live in touristy spots.

And yes silly to say it's "very hard" to learn a language as an adult. No harder than to learn anything else.

I think it is silly to think it is easy just because you speak another language. Obviously it is easy if you live in another country and so are immersed in their language and it is very important for you to speak it. Plus, that is probably your main skill. That isn't the case for most adults in the UK. Unless they are particularly good at languages it would take a lot of time and effort for little gain.

@Jijhebtseksmetezels
Ooooh I didn't know about Algarvio. Well there's a day that's gonna be wasted to Google!

I was kind of joking. It's Portuguese, but they (natives of the Algarve) have their own accent(s) and many words that differ from your standard Portuguese.

Don't think it's laziness, I think it's about need. The greatest films & rock music are in English, as are most globals business language.

If Hollywood was say in France, I think we'd have far more incentive to learn.

People that shout two beers in English at Spanish barman however, are lazy & unintentionally hilarious

but you'd struggle to get a job there if you're monolingual.

This is another aspect to learning ESOL. In many countries, if you do not have a qualification in English, you simply cannot get a professional or government job.

In MIL's home country, you need the FCE and IELTS to not only get into university there, but also to work in a typical office environment where you may never actually have to communicate with any English speakers at all. Only being able to speak your mother tongue is extremely limiting, probably on a par to being a school-leaver in Britain without a C or above in GCSE Maths and English.

Put it this way, if you had to have an A level in an MFL to go to university in Britain, you'd probably find that the rate of MFL acquisition in this country among the young would go through the roof. You'd get language schools opening left, right and centre all over the country, and the BBC would probably launch a language channel.

In MIL's home country, children start learning English as soon as they go to primary school and many are sent to afternoon English language schools throughout their school life. So by 11 years old, most of them have a fluency in English that is pretty comparable to, say, a nine-year-old monolingual British child.

Personally, I think it is unreasonable to expect monolingual British children to learn a second language to an intermediate level when most schools only schedule two one and a half hour long MFL lessons a week at secondary. You need far more regular exposure to a language than that if you wish to acquire even a working basis. When I was learning my third language from scratch, I probably did somewhere in the region of two hours study/exposure every day.

Again, for decades, children of bilingual parents in Britain have been sent to Saturday schools at religious institutions or cultural centres to learn their parents' mother tongue. A number of my British-born friends went to Polish school at the weekend from 5 to 15 throughout the 70s and 80s. British children from monolingual families simply do not have this type of exposure to another language.

I have to admit that this is a subject rather close to my heart because I've taught ESOL in the ME, and had my own struggles with learning my own family's ethnic language (which isn't my second language ).

And when you get down to it, the motivation for learning ESOL for ESOL speakers can be extraordinary. It's very difficult for other languages to compete with the cultural might of American and British music, for example. Whatever we may feel about it, American hip-hop, alt-rock and pop music is very attractive to teenagers, regardless of their global geographical location. And then there's gaming, which is another huge English-language powerhouse.

Monolingual Brits really are at a disadvantage.

Jijhebtseksmetezels, how would you phoneticise English?

I agree it's about motivation and pay off. If you're Danish and only speak English, you're pretty limited career wise. If you speak English, then boom- your 'well paid job' opportunities just increased by about 1000 fold. Spin it around and the difference in number of opportunities isn't even close.

No, most monolingual adults in the UK don't learn a language from scatch. The ones that do are usually already good at speaking another language if not already bilingual. It is usually very time consuming and difficult for everyone else

I didn't say in the UK. All over the world countless adults learn languages, and plenty of them are not bilingual before that.
it's time consuming and difficult for everyone, but they do it anyway, why are british people somehow different? They aren't.

Yes is difficult to learn languages, but plenty of other people do it. That;s not an explanation for why you don't/

I don't think there is much encouragement in schools to learn another language. I started learning French when I was 10/11 which I think is a bit late as I went on a trip to France at 13 and saw a 5 year old learning English numbers etc.

I really wish I had continued French to GCSE level but I chose not to because the French teacher was not very nice complete twat and took a dislike to me (even though I was fairly good). I didn't feel that we were taught to actually chat to people in French is was just asking directions etc, nothing you can actually about 😕

I went on my honeymoon to Norway without knowing any Norwegian, I learnt how to say thank you but that was it. It was right after our wedding so I was concentrating on making sure everything was prepared beforehand. I am really going to make an effort to learn more for the next time we go. They put us to shame, everybody's English was excellent there 😮

Agree with PPs who have said

1. If you don't have basic English grammar, you may struggle to acquire another language unless you're doing it immersively by ear. Eg: je fume in French is I smoke/I am smoking/I do smoke - try explaining that to an 8 year old who doesn't even know what a present tense is let alone a future conditional or subjunctive.

1. Some people do have an ear for languages just like music and a mind that maps them hence all the wonderful polyglots on this thread . Some languages (not Europe) depend on musical tone like some African and Far Eastern languages.

1. Some people have the confidence to risk making fools of themselves in a foreign language and persist.

1. And you do need to maintain your ear - but there's so much online and radio and books that it doesn't take much. A lot of it free. My aunt is doing it in bite size snatches with a programme that sends her morning and evening exercises (spoken and written). I can't see why kids shouldn't have fascinating programmes from different countries as teaching aids. Preferably from age 2. If they can learn Pingu they can learn Japanese.

1. As other PPs have said, if you have a need to learn a language to improve your employment prospects you do it. I always seethed back when monoglot English South Africans said their black servants weren't bright when those servants spoke 2-4 languages.

1. And as yet more PPs have said, speaking English in a business discussion is our advantage. Understanding what's said in the canteen/under the breath is highly useful. Anyone else remember Nice Work by David Lodge? Top scale printer owner reluctantly takes university lecturer to Germany with him as a job shadowing thing. Negotiates million pound printer and thinks he's done good. Germans think she's his secretary , discuss how they've diddled him in German in front of her. She spills the beans. A bit far-fetched, but I wouldn't like to be David Davis at Brexit without a multilingual interpreter alongside.

Off to pull up latest arabic grammar

About the BBC opening a language channel.

Anyone else old enough to remember the regular language learning series they would have on?

I was fascinated as a kid and usually picked up a bit!

Jo was that the open university programs they had on BBC2? It rings a bell, I remember watching people repeating things in certain settings and in other languages like Spanish and French.

Northern European countries in particular immerse their populations in English. Ds just went to Amsterdam. Much was written in English - only English. He was astonished that museum exhibits had only English explanations by the side, no Dutch. In fact I wonder whether in 100 years Danish/Swedish/Dutch will have died out.

Italians/French are largely crap at English. Years of learning and most people I encounter can't string two words together - much the same as the English. It's funny - they are bombarded with the same English language pop music lyrics/films as their northern European counterparts, but seem more impermeable to them.

There was Japanese Language and People, Kontakte for German (still have the book!), Chris Serle from That's Life did a Greek one. And there were many more..

A highlight of my (living room bound) youth they were!

I'm sure they encouraged me to get out and travel when I hit 18. My own kids have had the benefit of foreign travel when young and yet seem far less adventurous..

I speak a northern European language and I only speak it because my grandmother is from the country and I picked it up. It's really easy if you speak English but a little pointless to learn, so not something English people learn, but if it were reversed and their language was dominant I can bet most English people would pick it up very well, especially from childhood. My childrental are learning it and finding it easy. Latin languages are more difficult and vice-versa. Especially with pronounciation.

Pronunciation and enunciation is important. In some languages, a slight change and the meaning is lost.
English people often don't speak properly and I think this is because they've not learnt the language, they've acquired it.

Jijhebtseksmetezels, how would you phoneticise English?

Make it so that 1 sound = 1 spelling.

So, for example "way" and "weigh" would be spelt the same. But the "ough" in "bough" and "enough" would be spelt differently.

Observe 5/6 year olds because they tend to spell based on the sounds they've already learnt.

It will be fab

It is very hard for most monolingual adults to learn other languages so if they don't learn at least one other as a child, it doesn't happen

there is a grain of truth in this. You do not have to have been a bilingual child, but if you learnt any language at school, even badly, it is definitely easier to learn a language as an adult. I have lived overseas in several places amongst people trying hard to learn the local language, and we saw again and again that adults who had never ever been exposed to any other language found it much harder.

I speak several languages. I learnt basic French at school, and have learnt the others since. You only really ever learn a langugae well if you live in a country where it is spoken and speak to people a lot.

It is also true that some people find languages harder than others, havign seen my kids grow up in a multi lingual environment ds found it very hard and it never came naturally to him, dd on the other hand just picked up 3 languages without any trouble at all, trilingual at 3 and automatically speaking right language to right person. ds struggled.

It is a falacy to say that people will only talk to you in English when in other coutnries. Dh is Dutch and when I was learning people spoke to me in English, but I replied in Dutch and they very quickly accepted that and used Dutch with me, even though their English was better.

MFL are so badly taught at our schools. Ds grew up with 3 languages, but then we moved and he lost them. He is learning French at school and dh is appalled at how low the standard is. He is not expected to learn vocabulary, to practise, after 3 years his level of French is pathetic. In Holland they have much higher expectations and they are expected to actually learn another language well enough to speak it. Dh learnt English, French and German at school. When he went to University his text books were all in English as it is too expensive to translate them to Dutch. Can you imagine going to uni and all your technical textbooks are in another language?

The thing I have found is that when you speak someone's language with them, you discover who they really are, changing language changes how you communicate and who you are. You cannot get inside someone's culture unless you can speak their language.
As soon as you get off the beaten track, you find that many people really don't speak English!