Just why are we so bad at languages in the UK?

[Tournament]

Ds2 in in y5 and has done Spanish on and off for nearly 3 years. He can count to 10, say hello and goodbye and sing a few songs. DS1 ys yr7 he did the same at Primary, but is now learning French and German.

We were on an activity holiday at Easter and met a really lovely German family. After dinner, our DCs ran back to the accommodation for the TV by the time we caught them up, they were playing Scrabble, with the German family, in English!

Their boys were 8 & 10 and both could communicate well in English at the start of the week. By the end of the week, I'd say they were both fluent.

I don't think my boys would even have tried hello/goodbye willingly.

I don't know how old you were. When you were taught towards the French O level, perhaps dvds with foreign language functions and access to the internet were not universal. German dc nowadays have both the language fundamentals drilled and the easy access. If they are middle-class, they may well be tutored privately in addition to that. If they holiday abroad, quite often they will hear their parents having to communicate in English (wherever they might happen to be in an English speaking country or in a country where ENglish is not the mother tongue) so it is something they expect to do when they are adults too.

It is just another subject they have to get through, so they get on with it. I think that is how it is in most European countries tbh.

I have a wonderful knack for quickly finding myself surrounded by only non-English speakers on my travels to any country in the world (Sweden, Germany, Poland), which is why I know "everyone speaks English" is such a huge myth.

If you limit yourself to English, your travels won't be nearly as interesting.

I have encountered so many people who insist they would never want to travel, anyway (back to my xenophobic comment). It is easy to find people who have rarely been outside the county, even (note I said COUNTY, never mind country).

we teach it piecemeal

I'd like to scream my agreement to that.

My language classes were a 50 minute lesson DAILY for a full school year. And everyone was required to take 2 yrs of that language. This patchy nonsense of an hour of German and 2 hrs of French both from scratch, drives me very batty. DS spent all of yr7 unable to remember which was which.

I speak Spanish & it has come in useful in almost every job I've ever had (including many in the UK). But rarely essential. And little use for supporting DC because no secondaries around here teach Spanish.

daily lessons make a big difference IMO.

If dd is beginning to learn a new language, I always see to it she does something in it every day. I did this with Latin and then when we moved to the Czech republic, we worked on Czech every day, just a bit and now with Spanish. Might not be much that we end up doing but I think that daily exposure moves you forward best.

A good daily lesson would move you forward better than that but the school time-table can be so crowded already that it might not be possible to fit it in, unless something else was dropped.

Because we cannot be bothered as perfectly acceptable to many nationalities to communicate in English overseas + because we don't start teaching languages in school at an early enough age or with any sense of immersion + because some children (mine!) cannot find any self-motivation in learning French when by 2020 it will be the 27th most spoken language (or so they tell me) and schools are loathe to go through any process of managing out their French teachers.

You might like this story: when she was 6 and a bit my daughter was offered an academic scholarship at a Surrey school for Year 3 entry, however we then moved overseas and education in an international school beckoned. At the first parents' meeting at the international school we were told "Well she has an excellent report from her UK school and she has been offered a scholarship at another UK school, but she can't be that clever as she's the only child in Year 2 who cannot speak two or three languages fluently". At a visit back to the UK it amused me that schools with high percentages of children speaking English as a second language were seen as schools at a disadvantage whereas overseas the opposite was the case.

superfluouscurves Wed 15-May-13 10:01:15

"(1) Cory I wouldn't be so confident about English being the 'de facto' language of international communication for the forseeable future. If dd lived in the UK, I would make sure that she was learning Spanish and Chinese"

Did you mix me up with somebody else? I am certainly not happy with the deplorable attitude towards language learning my dd picked up at school and am doing everything I can to counteract it.

I agree that daily lessons, in the medium of the language being taught using mother-tongue teachers, is the way to go. My DD is at a bilingual French-English school and has lessons in both every day (3/4 of the day in French, doing the French NC, and 1/4 of the day in English). Next year she will start Spanish as her first foreign language and will have 30 minutes per day.

I don't think the problem is laziness. When I came to choose my A'Levels, I could only choose three subjects, and as I was interested in science, I did the maths, chemistry and physics as they fitted in with my career ambitions at the time.

I would have loved to continue with the French I did at GCSE, but something had to give. I resent any implication that I might be lazy - I worked very hard for my A'Levels.

On the other hand, not having good English is likely to put most young Western Europeans at a considerable disadvantage in their careers. So they presumably have more chances to study it at school.

Certainly they have one advantage over English speakers looking to learn languages. It being the most commonly-studied second language, the materials for learning English are excellent compared to nearly every other language. When I arrived in Japan, I had to use some tedious book about business Japanese, as there were so few alternatives. I'm at a high intermediate level now, however. But if you doubt this point, look at the material available next time you're in a bookshop. Even French and Spanish is utterly dwarfed by the range of books for learning English.

I think we worry ao much about perfect grammar and so on that we are afraid to open our mouths.

I must have worked with hundreds of people from primarily France, Spain and Italy, few of whom spoke perfect English but they did speak English fluently.

It is better to sound like Officer Crabtree than to not try at all, basically.

I can speak English. Honest

I haven't read the whole thread, but on the whole, I agree with secretmusicteacher. What language would a UK person learn first? French/German/Spanish/ Eastern European? For a non-UK person (or at least a European person), the obvious language for them is English. It is very easy to listen to English in Western Europe, at least. It is all around. I speak French and German and to keep my skills up is very hard. I really have to dig around to find some language stuff.

Pop music is mostly in English. Films are mostly in English (unless you go to a very small cinema or sometimes they are shown on BBC 4), whereas if you are non-UK, there is english everywhere. They hear it in loads of places.

Also, we are, as someone else said, very willing to understand someone whose English is not very good. We make allowances and don't insist on their pronouncing it completely properly. I have also very often found that when I'm abroad on the first day, when I have not quite got my accent in, people are very rude and insist on speaking back to me in English, even though I have addressed them in their language. I would never dream of doing that, even if my French/German is better than their English. Perhaps I should start .

Once there is concensus in the UK on which language we all should learn, then I'm sure that we will be as good as any other populations.

Also, if people from different countries get together, they all speak English, don't they? They do at international companies and they do, even if they are on a French campsite, speak English as their common tongue. What chance do our DC have?

I also agree about the grammar thing. Even though I'm 50, I really only learnt my grammar through learning MFL at school.

I blame the way languages are taught - at least when I was at school. I was drilled with verb declensions, fancy rules for grammar and complex constructions all of which baffled me so I was rubbish at languages at school. I'm sure that had I been taught languages in a more relaxed manner; concentrating on vocabulary and stock phrases before moving on to the technical details I would have done a lot better.

I scraped a pass at French 'O' level but having visited Geneva for work a few times (on my own, so I either spoke French or went hungry) and got over the initial fear of making a fool of myself. I'm sure my French is dreadful but I have a reasonable vocabulary if almost no grammar and can understand a fair amount.

It's because English-speakers keep on meeting German families who want to speak English...

If they had met e.g. a Spanish family who spoke no English then they might have had a chance to practice their language skills!

Seriously though, the ubiquity of English makes it very hard to avoid and harder to immerse yourself in a foreign language.

When I lived in Germany, I had to practically force people to speak German to me until eventually I became fluent enough where they stopped doing that. If you're an English speaker and want to learn a foreign language you have to be either in an isolated environment where no English is spoken (rare) or very, very determined and refuse to engage in English with people who want to speak English to you. You have to go out of your way to avoid English and that can be lonely when it's so easy to make friends in your own language.

And I say that as someone who has learned 5 languages to varying degrees of fluency so I think it's a good thing, I just think that English speakers are rarely forced to make an effort.

None of those 5 languages are in any way useful or have added any value to my career, by the way, they're just nice accomplishments for me personally.

That's the other problem for English speakers. Learning a language doesn't help our careers or improve our employment prospects particularly.

Apologies Cory - was rushing - did indeed mix you up with someone else!

Sorry - still rushing - but was just trying to make the point that English may not be the lingua-franca of international communication in years to come - Spanish and Chinese are on the rise!

I did not mean sixth formers were lazy to give up their language. I meant that children dropping out at 14 from languages because knitting GCSE is much easier or whatever are often being lazy. You used to have to have a foreign language to go to university in the UK - it was regarded as a basic requirement that bright children learn another language. My children have gone to private selective schools and no one does not do a foreign language. 100% of the children do a GCSE in one language usually French and many do German or Spanish as well and some do that plus latin and even Greek if they are really into languages but certainly they all do one.

it is not just about usefulness when you grow up it is about brain development. It is about stretching yourself. I also learned a lot of my grammar in French and German lessons as English lessons in the UK then and probably now did not teach grammar in the same way and as thoroughly.

So I would force your children to do at least one foreign language GCSE if they have an above average IQ. if all the best schools make them then I suspect children at not such goods schools would benefit from copying what works in the best private schools and grammars.

Mind you I could have done with Spanish. Where my island is that is the language and most people do not speak English. However with French and German I can often work out what Spanish means so even there the language helps.

Quite a lot of scientists and doctors are moving to English - research papers (the French hate this), pharmaceutical publications, teaching of medicine all over Europe.

I agree with porto we don't learn it early enough.

I was also thinking about this the other day, chatting to someone I know who claims to speak five modern languages fluently. Now, I am not knocking his abilities because I am stunned by anyone who can come even close to fluency in one second language, let alone four - I can't. But, I did notice how he's quite happy to be not quite perfect in his English. And this is a man who's lectured in English literature at Oxford. But he just doesn't feel bothered by the fact that in casual conversation, he slips into non-idiomatic phrases or that in an email, he might make quite a basic grammatical error.

The way we were taught languages, we were told this was unthinkable and made to feel if we couldn't be perfect, it was pointless to try to speak. We were always taught to try to speak in complete sentences and never to muddle through.

I think personally this stops me being so confident. I used to have quite decent enough French as a child, good enough to cope because I wasn't too bothered about getting it wrong. Last time I went to France, I found it so much harder, not just because I'd forgotten things but because I kept struggling and instead of going with an approximation that'd be understandable, I'd be worrying what the difference between subjunctive and conditional was.

It just occurred to me chatting to this guy (German, if it matters, since people have mentioned German language teaching on the thread), that it didn't even occur to him to apologize for basic slips, he just saw it as a normal part of being a second-language speaker and he expected me to follow and understand.

I studied three languages at university and have had various jobs using one, two or three of these. I agree with the posters who say that there is often perceived to be little point in learning the languages traditionally offered in UK schools as English is effectively the world's lingua franca.

However - where does that leave us with regard to Mandarin and Spanish? Why not teach these rather than the more traditional (and arguably less useful) French and German (Spanish is obviously on the rise)?

I'd also echo posters who have said that as English language teaching is so bad in the UK, as a consequence, it is harder for British students to move onto a second or third language. All my knowledge of grammatical terminology comes from my German studies, not through learning English!

I think the key is early immersion in other useful world languages and teaching to be carried out by experts. I've lost count of the number of languages teachers I've met over the years who couldn't string a sentence together accurately in English, let alone in French or German. I know of one French teacher who was bilingual English/French and made to teach German with no prior knowledge of the subject! Needless to say, his pupils didn't do well. And that is not to castigate all teachers, before anyone jumps on me. That's just my experience - and it's really sad to see children 'learning French', when actually they're just parroting the badly accented holiday French of their primary school teacher.

I have been a TEFL/ESOL teacher for 17 years now and it still amazes me how so many of my students can speak 2 or 3 languages before English. I think it is a shame that we don't do more languages but as someone wrote on here before it does take a lot of work and motivation to learn a language and converse in it confidently. The motivation for a lot of my learners is that they need English for life and work.

I think it is important for kids these days to be learninig Spanish and maybe Chinese too - and Arabic?! Biased maybe as my DH's 1st language is Arabic - but it is very widely spoken.

I do think we will travel more for work in the future so we need to disregard our negative attitude to other languages - they understand English so why should I bother?! and open up the schoool curriculum to more time on languages.

If nothing else, learning a foreign language helps you understand your native language better and why therefore you shouldn't say 'should of' or 'if I was rich'. It's an intellectual exercise as much as anything else, with a bonus of being able to go abroad and actually use it.

My grandparents were Polish. My two brothers both learned to speak Polish to a reasonable standard but I missed out, as we moved out of my grandparents' house when I was about a year old, and I was also later diagnosed with a moderate hearing impairment. I have never felt very confident with languages. I have a good memory for vocabulary, got an A at O-level French and can still make out enough written French to find my way around shops, restaurants and so forth, but having a hearing impairment really screws my ability to make out the spoken language, whether French or Spanish or Polish. There are no 'reasonable adjustments' in real-life language use, unfortunately.

I chickened out and studied Latin at A-level instead. Useful? Well...some of the vocabulary sort-of overlaps in French and Spanish. And you get a good overall grasp of differences in grammar systems. But I don't think I'll be getting a job across the Channel any time soon.

I think that there is a lack of expectation in the UK ie if you speak more than one language you're looked on as some kind of rare genius, whereas in most other countries it's completely the norm.

I live in Moldova and DD1 who is 8 is already learning French (schooling is done in Romanian) and will start Russian in two years time. English is also fairly widely taught and all 6th form and University students have to demonstrate competent English. Even with that you're nothing special

I do think part of it's that the timetable just isn't set up for them. I was doing sciences for A level, and it was just assumed by the science teachers that I'd drop Spanish after AS. I didn't, but some of my friends did. The majority of people doing a language at A level wanted to do languages at university.

At university I had an awful lot of friends from all over Europe, all speaking English fluently (well, strong accents and odd phrasing in some cases but others were perfect). They all had worked hard at English because they wanted to come to university here and their schools recognised and supported that. If I'd said at school "I want to go to university in Spain to do Biology" for example, I don't think they'd have had a clue what to do with me!

Oh, and I agree with Xenia about the GCSEs at selective schools. When we were given the blocks with our options in, the first block was French, German, Spanish or Italian, no other choice.

Interestingly, we were taught Latin and French in the first year, then picked up German and Ancient Greek in the second, and Spanish and Italian in the third. I remember us all saying how easy Spanish and Italian were- we'd been well drilled in the grammar in the other languages by that point

Chinese is a red herring (no pun intended) - the level you can get to by learning it 2 hours a week at school in this country is of no practical use - it is just a gimmick to get gullible parents to think their child has some big advantage in the world of the future. Only if the child has one or more Chinese relatives in the home will they make more than elementary progress. English is so well entrenched now it is the de facto international language of business, and the influence continued to increase.
I used to work for a French company - the French are as xenopobic as it is possible to be, but it was the de facto international method of communication when we had meetings or conf calls with people of more than one nationality for purely practical reasons. I love languages and am training as a language teacher, but realistically the best we can hope for in school is to enthuse the children and imbue an interest. For the languages to be of practical use they need to continue after school and immerse themselves in the language, preferably by living in the country for a while.

It's simple. There is no burning urge or need to learn another language in the UK.