UK at risk of being 'cut off from world' for not learning more languages
245 replies, posted
I feel really dumb when I play online and hear someone younger than me who can speak their native launguage and English fluently. When I was at school French lessons were a joke, don't get me wrong the teacher was fantastic but they seemed more concerned with grades than actually teaching anyone the language.
Also speaking exams are terrifying, it's like going into an exam knowing you are going to do really badly and the teacher who has toiled for 2 years to teach you this stuff is the examiner so it makes you feel bad when you fuck up saying stuff like "MY SCHOOL IS LARGE" in English with a fake French accent.
I've already forgotten all my French at Standard Grade even though I got a 1 in it. Waste of time.
[QUOTE=mobrockers2;32653011]Tbh I hear next to nothing about the UK in the news.[/QUOTE]
I think that's the same for most countries that are not currently blowing themselves up, nothing much of great importance to foreigners happens on a day-to-day basis. Like we don't hear much about France, it's a little different to the the point you were making but you understand.
I'm all for cultural variety, but "at risk of being 'cut off from world' for not learning more languages"? Everyone's learning English, I always imagined native speakers have it the easiest in this era of globalization. I thought there was even an official voting on what the "world language" should be and English was picked for being most practical.
[QUOTE=GunFox;32653107]Oh yeah, forgot about that one. Good call.[/QUOTE]
What are you sinking about?
I did French and German up until 3rd year here, what's the point really, the classes don't even run at GCSE in my school :v:
And for people that think English is the easiest language to learn, you are sooooo wrong.
[QUOTE=FlubberNugget;32654088]I did French and German up until 3rd year here, what's the point really, the classes don't even run at GCSE in my school :v:
And for people that think English is the easiest language to learn, you are sooooo wrong.[/QUOTE]
Name a language easier than English.
We all should just learn Esperanto
[QUOTE=glennman94;32654199]Name a language easier than English.[/QUOTE]
Esperanto
Ich bin sprechen enormen und dick deutschen bitte!!
[quote]Omelette du fromage[/quote]
[i]On dit:"Omelette au fromage"[/i]
There, worry no more, insular friends.
Also, what's all this racket about English being the easiest and most spoken language of all ? Mandarin Chinese is piss easy once you get your accent right; no conjugation, no words longer than one syllable, all you have to know is how to form a basic sentence, express possessive, and some other simple grammar.
[QUOTE=Crhem van der B;32652987]Rofl... If you think that's "complicated" than you have never seen any other language's grammar. As many, including me, have said, English is piss easy for foreigners. You have zero forms of words, you don't even distinguish between female and male when using adjectives![/QUOTE]
blond/blonde
english has the most retarded gender rules in the world
"all nouns are neutral! (except boats, which are feminine)"
What a load of bull.
Arabic? One of the WORST sounding languages in the world. No thanks, they aren't that important that people should be learning that language.
All we should know of those languages is how to say "get on the ground", and "drop your weapons".
Assuming the war continues.
As said multiple times in this thread, english is one of the few prominent languages of the world.
If anything, they should be learning english so they don't get cut off from the rest of the world, not the other way around.
Edit: There are NO gender rules in the english language. A boat can be called a she or a he, it doesn't matter.
Sailors just decide to call it a she because it is referring to it has a woman they love.
It isn't like french where a damn table is feminine and a chair is masculine. Now THAT is retarded.
[QUOTE=glennman94;32654199]Name a language easier than English.[/QUOTE]
spanish
[editline]6th October 2011[/editline]
[QUOTE=DiBBs27;32655005]What a load of bull.
Arabic? One of the WORST sounding languages in the world. No thanks, they aren't that important that people should be learning that language.
All we should know of those languages is how to say "get on the ground", and "drop your weapons".[/QUOTE]
what about "please keep selling us cheap oil" :rolleyes:
[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;32655013]
what about "please keep selling us cheap oil" :rolleyes:[/QUOTE]
Technically, not everybody needs to learn how to say that, only the people buying the cheap oil.
Over in english land, we can speak english when we want to buy cheap oil.
Or inflated prices for oil.
Spanish is okay, but its conjugation is a bitch.
[QUOTE=DiBBs27;32655005]If anything, they should be learning english so they don't get cut off from the rest of the world, not the other way around.
[/QUOTE]
So what you're trying to say is, the world is more dependant to the UK than the UK is to the world ?
That's some egoistical bullshit right there.
[QUOTE=DiBBs27;32655005]It isn't like french where a damn table is feminine and a chair is masculine. Now THAT is retarded.[/QUOTE]
[I]Chaise[/i] is feminine, for the record. [img]http://sae.tweek.us/static/images/emoticons/emot-eng101.gif[/img]
[QUOTE=DiBBs27;32655005]What a load of bull.
Arabic? One of the WORST sounding languages in the world. No thanks, they aren't that important that people should be learning that language.
All we should know of those languages is how to say "get on the ground", and "drop your weapons".
Assuming the war continues.
As said multiple times in this thread, english is one of the few prominent languages of the world.
If anything, they should be learning english so they don't get cut off from the rest of the world, not the other way around.
Edit: There are NO gender rules in the english language. A boat can be called a she or a he, it doesn't matter.
Sailors just decide to call it a she because it is referring to it has a woman they love.
It isn't like french where a damn table is feminine and a chair is masculine. Now THAT is retarded.[/QUOTE]
English is rather hard for people who've grown up on non-germanic/latin based languages.
[QUOTE=DiBBs27;32655082]Technically, not everybody needs to learn how to say that, only the people buying the cheap oil.
Over in english land, we can speak english when we want to buy cheap oil.
Or inflated prices for oil.[/QUOTE]
the point
your head
[QUOTE=_Axel;32655102]
So what you're trying to say is, the world is more dependant to the UK than the UK is to the world ?
That's some egoistical bullshit right there.
[/QUOTE]
Well no, that not what i mean to imply. I'm simply giving those examples because we are currently at war with them.
And this isn't really about the UK just by its self. The UK speaks one of the most spoken languages in the world, English.
As stated ealier in this thread, english is the official language of business in the world, and one of the most spoken languages there is, it's used all across the world.
Edit: english is also known for being one of the harder languages in the world.
I'm just trying to say that the UK has nothing to worry about. business wise, english is going to stay the official language of business in the world, not Arabic.
So effectively, UK isn't going to be cut off from the rest of the world for speaking english, but countries that don't speak english risk being cut off from the rest of the world.
Theres no ego in this, just fact.
It's probably because we mostly start learning french and/or spanish/german in secondary school, and the problem is, we don't want to learn [I]those[/I] languages, we'd rather learn something more interesting and useful such as chinese. Plus language lessons in our schools are absolutely abysmal (from my experiences anyway). Then it gets too late, and people don't care anymore
My wife's half Finnish half Russian. I already knew Russian, it was easy enough, but god forbid anyone try to learn Finnish, FUCK FUCK VITTU FUCK
Generally speaking, English is pretty easy for anyone to talk. If you throw a few of the right words into a sentence, people will generally get the gist of what you want, whereas it seems to me like in other languages, if you say mostly the right words, but in the wrong order then no one knows or gives a fuck what you're saying.
[QUOTE=Charybdis;32655205]It's probably because we mostly start learning french and/or spanish/german in secondary school, and the problem is, we don't want to learn [I]those[/I] languages, we'd rather learn something more interesting and useful such as chinese. Plus language lessons in our schools are absolutely abysmal (from my experiences anyway). Then it gets too late, and people don't care anymore
My wife's half Finnish half Russian. I already knew Russian, it was easy enough, but god forbid anyone try to learn Finnish, FUCK FUCK VITTU FUCK[/QUOTE]
Vittu you.
Meh, I don't see anything useful in chinese, it's just all ching chao to me.
German or French needs to be mandatory for primary education.
By the time you start learning a foreign language at school it's basically too late to speak it fluently.
I've been learning German in school for five years now, and I'm barely even able to follow a spoken conversation.
Swedish is pretty damn useless.
[QUOTE=DiBBs27;32655171]I'm just trying to say that the UK has nothing to worry about. business wise, english is going to stay the official language of business in the world, not Arabic.
So effectively, UK isn't going to be cut off from the rest of the world for speaking english, but countries that don't speak english risk being cut off from the rest of the world.
Theres no ego in this, just fact.[/QUOTE]
What about Spanish ? You know most South-Americans/Spanish don't know more than a handful of english words ? Same applies with Chinese, which is more widely spoken than english.
[QUOTE=Garik;32655229]Vittu you.
Meh, I don't see anything useful in chinese, it's just all ching chao to me.[/QUOTE]
If you learn it supposedly you can already talk to like 1/5th of the world or something like that
Also dude, Finnish is a freaking cool language, it sounds magical, I just can't learn it :v:
[QUOTE=Charybdis;32655294]If you learn it supposedly you can already talk to like 1/5th of the world or something like that
Also dude, Finnish is a freaking cool language, it sounds magical, I just can't learn it :v:[/QUOTE]
More people do speak English than any other language though.
[QUOTE=Coffee;32655298]More people do speak English than any other language though.[/QUOTE]
english is third most spoken after mandarin and spanish
[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;32655310]english is third most spoken after mandarin and spanish[/QUOTE]
As a native language.
But if we include it being spoken as a secondary and tertiary language, and written via text, it is the most used.
[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;32655310]english is third most spoken after mandarin and spanish[/QUOTE]
If you remove the people living on less than five dollars a day, it shoots up.
As a lot of people have said we get taught languages too late and the teachers are usually below standard anyway.
I wish I was bilingual though. Should just get a Rosetta Stone CD I guess. :v:
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