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What about the phonetic, grammatical, or lexical "distance" (similarity or dissimilarity) between two languages? For example, could it be that Swedish is in some sense (phonetic, grammatical, or lexical) "close" to English, and therefore the de facto international language, English, is easier for Swedes to learn than it is for, say, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Russian people? Or is English at least closer to Swedish than alternatives? - Like, is Swedish closer to English than it is to Chinese? (I would think so, since English and Swedish are Germanic languages, whereas Chinese is not.)
@@robertjenkins6132 Actually Chinese is much closer in structure to English than Japanese and Korean, or let's say Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, which are not Indo-European. I'm Japanese and can't utter a word in Chinese, but I was able to get by as an independent traveller in mainland China simply by handwriting Chinese ideograms in the exact order of the English language, which is completely different from my mother tongue. As an example, I realised I didn't have enough cash of Renmin Yuan when I got on a taxi, so I handwrote to the driver: "我要行銀行ATM。" 我 for "I", 要 for "need [to]", 行 for "go [to]", 銀行ATM for "[a] bank ATM". It's as simple as that. On the other hand, if this happened to be Japanese, it should have been: "私は銀行のATMへ行く必要があります。" 私 for "I-my-me", は for a topic post-position word No.1, 銀行 for "[a] bank", の for "---'s", ATM for "[an] ATM", へ for "to" but as a post-position instead of preposition, 行く for "go", 必要 for "need or necessity", が for a topic post-position word No.2, あります for "there is something, or there exists something". The Japanese structure is completely different from English or Chinese.
The main problem is exposure. At school I had the choice of French or German. I chose German. Other than the fact my German Teacher suffered a nervous breakdown at the beginning of my final year and was not replaced, the main problem is exposure. Who do you practice with ? In my entire lifetime I have briefly met 1 or 2 and Germans probably the same French. They say practice makes perfect so if you are thinking of learning a language consider Hindi, Gujerati or Polish......otherwise what is point.....its a bit like learning Latin, know any Roman's ? 😂😂😂
I am Swedish and I think what’s important to consider is that if you want to take part in Swedish culture as a Swede, English has become mandatory. Majority of classic films are in English, a lot of the series people watch are in English, the fandoms the youth are part of use English, a lot of books people read are in English and going abroad like a lot of Swedes do requires English. It’s a feedback loop where each generation becomes even more entrenched in the English language and even more influenced by mostly American and British culture. Learning English in Sweden isn’t easy though, it’s literally free. We do not have to try since we naturally pick it up sometime in childhood and continually improve it. This has resulted in the Swedish youth often struggling to say things without randomly throwing in English words mid sentence since that’s become so common.
Yeah I don't know so many words for certain ideas in my native language that I just end up using the English equivalent for it. And most people understand the English equivalents so i don't bother learning the actual word for it in my language
It’s also worth noting that Swedish and English grammar are quite similar, which makes it a lot easier. A lot of people watch English movies, tv shows, and listen to English language music in Japan, too, but the extent of the English knowledge there is mostly limited to learned borrowings. As always, everything is more complicated than any of us have time to discuss
considering how its increasingly becoming more prominent and the youth seem to depend on it more and more, would you say that Swedish proficiency and relevance could start to decline in Sweden?
Man I don’t know if that is bad or good, as someone who has spent a lot of their life working on learning Spanish and French in order to break from English it just feels like English taking over as the definitive lingua franca is inevitable at this point.
As an American I think part of it is our culture is incredibly insular. I think we just consume a lot less international media and news than ppl in other countries. You rarely encounter foreign language music or movies.
We’re only about 5% of the Earth’s population and yet the Dollar is the Reserve Currency of the World. The United States really is the most important country, that’s why we still don’t use the Metric System and we ultimately only speak English.
Yeah and people from the USA seem to think America is a country and not a continent. Maybe another facet of the same problem? American here, too. From.Brazil, in America.
Americans are worse for this than other English speaking countries too. It might be getting better, but while other English speaking countries consume English speaking media, Americans usually only consume American media, so they aren't even exposed to other English speaking media as much. I'm not american, but I think this has slowly been changing since the 2000's so you actually do get some other non-american english media?
It's definitely not as simple as making it part of the education system. In Japan, English is a required and consistent part of school, and yet it's pretty rare for a Japanese person to know English beyond a very surface level.
In Romania, we take 2 foreign languages in school, usually English and French, but no one learns French, we hate it and because we hate it we have no motivation to learn it. English has the exposure factor to it, yet there were always just a few classmates that could speak at the current levels I was in in each year. In a short time, I got so good at English, I passed my 8th grade English teacher in vocabulary and fluency. Also, the teachers' knowledge didn't evolve with the language, so the language they teach is polite and sterile. The best anyone can do is get the basic grammar right and then jump in to a language by yourself. Once I got a hang of the grammar, I improved much faster. It's not necessary to understand grammar, I sucked at Romanian grammar as well (especially at naming and explaining why things are the way they are), it's enough to be able to apply it well through practice.
There is, though, a widespread belief that though it's true that the Japanese aren't great at English that that's actually caused by a lack of confidence in speaking, rather than actually being worse at the language at any given stage (obviously, this does hinder development). People aren't confident in their ability to speak and that undermines their actual speaking, and I've found that the Japanese aren't actually that bad at the other facets of English. They also don't get as much practice in everyday life, because they're rather insular. Also, a lot of the statistics are self-reported, so I'd be surprised if there weren't countries where people are over-confident and others where people are under-confident. And, of course, it might just be that the teaching system in Japan isn't fully-geared towards English learning and that it just needs to be updated.
You cannot force someone to learn a language and become fluent in it no matter how much you improve the education system. I live in Finland where all students are required to take compulsory Swedish courses in school. The language has extremely limited practical applications here and as a result, not many students progress past the basics (myself included) in spite of having to take Swedish courses for years. On the flip side, not being able to speak any English is almost unheard of. I essentially consider myself to be a native speaker because I almost exclusively use English and prefer it to Finnish unless I'm speaking to my family or in class. Additionally, nobody who I've spoken to online has ever managed to correctly tell my nationality from my accent, guessing British or sometimes Australian instead of Finnish. I feel like exposure outside school has contributed more than formal education. In the case of Swedish, I'm not willing to deliberately get exposure to the language as I see it as being useless in comparison to English. That goes to show that in order to really become fluent in a language, it must be useful enough for you to be willing to immerse yourself in the language like I have done with English, resulting in high proficiency.
@@stuartbeacham Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are similar but Finish is a completely different language tree, Finnish is not a Scandinavian language it's a Uralic language. You could argue that Finland isn't Scandinavian but merely Nordic.
My first exposure to English was Lego Star Wars II at age 6 or 7. At first I was bummed out that Swedish wasn't an optional language, but when I started playing it didn't matter since there weren't any dialog anyway, and the game mechanics and menus were easy enough to understand through trial and error. The game lit the interest for the Star Wars films, as did many of the following Lego games. Those franchises helped to develop my English skills tremendously in the first 5 or so years of school
I had very little exposure to english as child, but didnt start to learn it, unitil I was nearly nine years old, because I first needed to go through the basics. Nowdays I know nearly 7000 english words and im only nineteen, so it could be said that im nearly fluent in english. I played many lego games also as kid, but didnt always understand what was said in there, unitil I grew older and easily got what was said in there.
@@jout738 You only need to know ~3000 words to be fully fluent in a language. English might have a larger vocabulary than most languages due to its widespread use in various places and disciplines, but a 7000 word vocabulary is definitely more than enough. Judging from the way you wrote your comment, I'd say you're probably fluent already.
I'm learning Russian and although it's tough, I do the same exact thing when I play video games. When playing Minecraft, Overwatch, etc. I usually switch it to Russian and I feel as though it does help a great deal.
I don't believe that solely making learning a foreign language a required education subject would be enough to "cure" monolingualism. I live in the US and my school district (or maybe just my state) requires that students take a foreign language class, yet the vast majority of the students are still subpar in their languages including myself. I would agree that the curricula for foreign languages in the US are still pretty faulty, but at least for Spanish, in my opinion, my teachers provided an engaging and effective learning environment. At the end of the day, you can study a language all you want, but you're not going to be able to actually use it well unless you get a lot of exposure to it and actually use it a lot. I wish it were as simple as making it a core part of education, even with all that's required to do even that.
I'd also like to add that, in recent-ish years, my state began offering dual language immersion programs in elementary schools to all kids and I've seen really positive results from them; I hope this will be a huge step towards the rise of bilingualism in the states.
what age does the required language education start in the usa if you dont mind me asking? google results say most people start in fifth grade, or around the time they turn 18, which is pretty late for both cases in my opinion (in my country you start learning a second language as soon as you start your education, so when you're 6-7, and maybe even earlier since its common for preschools to include some basic language introduction as an option)
Good point.Having a language class in school doesn't necessarily mean you are actually learning that language.I had two mandatory foreign languages in middle to high school: English and French.Although I "learned" French in school for 7 years, I still can't speak any French.😂
I think that although people might not become fluent in a language, learning languages still increases your capability to understand different languages/cultures and makes it easier to pick up new languages later on. In Finland we need to learn Swedish but many people do not really speak it after studying it for 6+ years. It's probably a combination of lack of motivation and exposure, and could be thought as waste of time, but it think that it still provides the learner with wider perspective and help for later language learning, was it Swedish or anything else.
I agree, in order to properly learn a language, one needs to actually practice it properly. I know some people who have been learning French for years in school & even forget what être is likely due to lack of good resources or immersion, which seems like a pretty major issue. Also hey Hayden, idk if you recognize me but I sure do recognize you
I think no matter how well taught foreign languages are, if there's no reason or much oppurtunity to use them outside of the classroom it's still going to be futile.
This my case with Arabic unfortunately, I just can’t be bothered with it because most of my country’s population aren’t even natives. I only really use arabic when I feel like I’m forced to, otherwise I stick to English.
Pretty much. Though even if Spanish isn't usable for any sort of communication in my place, listening and commenting on Spanish speaking videos keeps my memory up
@@litinup Although Arabic has the special difficulty in that it isn't really one language: what Arabs actually speak has roughly the same relationship to the standard written language (right down to the loss of declension in the spoken dialects), as the Romance languages do to Latin.
@@GCarty80not true at all lol, people who speak romance languages don't speak lating, I understand basically all arabic dialects, without out any issues and I never learned any of them so no they are not a different languages and I don't remember learning 22+ languages.
The whole language schooling discussion makes me want to share this In Indonesia, we learn English for 12 years iirc, from year 1 of primary school to the third year of high school. And guess what? Almost all of my friends who are at least somewhat fluent in English actually learn it from games and the internet (so through exposure, not schooling). Maybe only one or two people I know that actually getting better at English through schooling And this is probably heavily related to exposureness (if that's even a word). Almost all of my friends don't have anything to do with English in their daily lives so there's really no point in learning it, right? Almost anything is available in Indonesian anyway (except in-depth articles about niche subjects or something) So yeah, I think what really drives people to be multilingual is exposure and necessity, schooling just helping a little bit
if I could go back in time I would put on cartoons in a different language for myself. I'm not especially confident in any of the languages I've tried to learn. The only thing that would help me is immersion and it takes a lot to move countries.
Adding to your point: in Poland we also learn English for 12 years (13 if you go to college) and most people speak English either because of exposure, necessity or both. We also have compulsory third language, mostly German but that depends on school (in one of the highschools which I could go to, option was between French and Japanese). Still most people speak English at best. Also changing third language between middle school and high school, when middle schools were still a thing, was quite popular. So a lot of people learned one language for 3 years then second one for other 3 years (like me) which gave proficiency in none.
Growing up as a Dane, at least half the songs I heard on the radio were in languages I didn't understand, English being a large majority of it. I struggled with the language in school until I started using it all of the time online. At some point when I was getting the hang of the language and realized that I understood some of the lyrics of those songs on the radio, and it felt like a super power.
...or you can understand native English people in a bar talking to each other. Which is actually one of the "endgames" to learn a foreign language, because in bars the people do not care about speaking slowly and clearly at all. :)
I think you should also take into consideration how easy it is for people to learn a languge based on how closely that language is related to their native language. It may be a big reason why countries like Japan and Sweden, despite both putting aside a lot of time in school towards learning english, differ so much in the percentage of people that can speak english. English and japanese are very different languages, not even coming from the same language tree, while english and swedish are both germanic languages from the same tree. Growing up learning english as a native sweidsh speaker myself, the process of learning english was made a lot easier by that language just making a lot of sense to me, in everything from how sentences are constructed to individual words. For example, in english you would say "A red car", and in swedish you would say "En röd bil", "red" and "röd" in this case both being adjectives, "car" and "bil" both being nouns. In french, it would become "une voiture rouge", the noun and the adjective switching places as opposed to the english and swedish version. Just looking at the words "red" and "röd" you can tell the languages are similar, and that trend continues, using colours as an example: "green" and "grön", "blue" and "blå" and "grey" and "grå". While other factors such as the percieved usefulness of the language and ones exposure to it play a large role, you should not forget that us scandinavians in particular have it pretty easy learning english in contrast to a japanese person.
Personally, the word order isn't what made French difficult for me in högstadiet, it was all the bloody silent letters. Which is why I dropped French and switched to Spanish. It makes so much more sense. On that note, for some reason about halfway through our Spanish lessons just sort of stopped. One day we, the students, came to class with our supplies and the classroom door was locked and the teacher didn't show up. Same thing next lesson, with no word from the school about what was going on. Eventually we just stopped going. Even to this day I have no idea what happened, and the class didn't show up in my grades when I graduated. I picked up Spanish once more in gymnasiet, had a great teacher that came from Peru originally, and graduated with a pretty good grade. Then I never used it again and forgot most of it.
Exactly this. I’m American and fluent in English and Japanese. Japan is culturally different from America (the style of English they primarily learn) and Japanese is linguistically different in almost every way. People who speak Romance or Germanic language are going to find it much easier to learn English overall.
Well, as a child in japan if you try to speak english in a more or less correct way, you'll be laughed at or even bullied. Yes, they prefer the katakana "version" of english. I don't think they really want to learn english.
@@tcbbddddBecause they are using loanword from English instead of English language in everyday life. It is same that English speakers are not trying to pronounce loanword from French like actual French language in everydaylife. Not only Japanese (I'm from ROK), every language has loanwords, and their speakers do not always pronounce the same way that it origin from. It's because every language has different phonology. 한국도 마찬가지인데, 만약 당신이 한국어 화자인데도 불구하고 커피를 [kʰʌ.pʰi]가 아니라 [kʌ.fiː]로 발음하면 그들은 당신이 잘난 척 한다고 생각할 것입니다. Sorry for my poor English.
@@DefaultFlame When a teacher has a mental breakdown and literally disappears, they either replace them with new teacher or wipe it completely if that's impossible. it's what happened to one of my teachers. We students lost all our work because they outright refused to even step foot in the school ever again. This was when all work was still done on paper and books, no computerisation or internet.
As a Canadian in western Canada, I've been exposed to french frequently through school and get some exposure to it through signage in national parks and nutritional information on food, but otherwise have basically no interaction with the language. This is in a country that is technically bilingual and has (theoretical) funding for it. This is a very difficult problem to solve and I have no idea if mandatory classes would help if you have no real world exposure to it in daily life. Two Anglophones aren't going to have conversations en francais, even if they both have an understanding of it.
@@Jay_Johnson Absolutely! Not to mention the sheer amount of content on TH-cam alone. It really boils down to individual motivation at the end of the day.
You hear someone speaking French out here once or twice a year and it always feels like a Sasquatch sighting. Way more Tagalog, Indian language, east African language and even eastern European language speakers out and about here.
I think I know why. As an American my sister really wanted to learn Italian, and when she went to study in Italy for a semester she was so excited to practice with real Italian speakers. When she got there she never actually ended up practicing her Italian because the entire family wanted to practice their English. Sad to say with English being the international language there just really isn’t much of a need for Americans to learn foreign languages, and if there isn’t a need motivation becomes an issue, not so much for lack of desire but for lack of commitment.
True! I do recommend going to more rural areas to practice. I traveled throughout Italy and in many parts outside the big cities, you definitely need your Italian! Also, it's fun just jogging and saying "Ciao!" to people and waving at them as you pass them by!
You sister was clearly not assertive enough, in her place I would have simply pretended to not speak english. Motivation is indeed the main issue, I would love to speak many languages from russijan to german, to classical latin, but I dont want to spend time and effort learning any of them because I can get by just fine speaking latviski and english.
yeah i'm an anglophone and i'm living in france atm, you just gotta have a base level of the language that is better than their english - people will default to whatever is easier for them, and after speaking to someone in french they tend to be shy about switching english! this is a pain though, because it means you usually have to study a couple years before travelling to get to this point. although my french is pretty good, my spanish is intermediate, and if i'm speaking to a spanish person who knows english, we will speak in english 😅 rural areas are better for practice! or, even if they're speaking english, reply in their language instead. even if they don't switch, you're practicing anyway 😁
Reason 1: Media and literature is inundated with English content, so it's hard to pick up another language. Reason 2: Native English nations are isolated; Canada and the USA are between two oceans, and the UK, Australia, and New Zealand are islands. Reason 3: People generally learn languages they're exposed to; it all boils down to lack of exposure. (Edit) Reason 4: EDUCATION
In that order. I had formal French lessons from 7-16 and got an A in French GCSE and still can't speak French due to the the lack of the prior 3. (although I think reason 2 is far less important than the UK. I can get to Paris Gare du Nord faster than York where I go to uni)
@@Jay_Johnson French classes were introduced to me in 3rd grade (9 y/o) and it still didn't help. I have a burning hate for French, and I'm not the only one. All Romanian kids hate French. It's the most useless language to learn as well because Romanians go to work in other countries like Italy, Germany, England and Spain, barely anyone goes to work in France or Belgium. I would have rather had German or Italian, which also sound much better, than French. English was introduced in 5th grade (11 y/o) and I picked English fast because I already had a burning interest in it and flirted with basic sentences and words, so I only needed the basic grammar to help me fly on my own.
The question of "why" we should learn languages that you mentioned at the end is very important. I grew up in Sweden and I speak 5 languages, 3 fluently, including English and Swedish. Is this because of some extraordinary schooling or some unusual effort that I put in? Not really. The languages that I am fluent in came to me naturally, from my family, surroundings and media. English is the language of popular media AND the internet. As a child growing up in a country with easily accessible, fast internet, it would be hard not to immerse oneself in the English language. That's how most people learn the language and I would also posit the hypothesis that most bilingual people only really learned English as their second language in this manner. With little incentive. I had many years of schooling in Spanish, starting from 6th grade and continuing into high school, yet I'm not fluent in the language. I'm simply not exposed to it on a daily basis. Can we really fault the English for not learning other languages when they arent exposed to them in any really useful setting? Can we fault them for watching the same popular English language shows that we do, here in Sweden, and not, say, French shows that we dont watch here either? Something that I've learned growing up juggling so many languages is that languages need to be useful for them to be learned. You need to use them almost daily; read and hear them around you or have an interest in media that involves that language. While I understand a lot of Spanish, I dont find much use for it in my life. I dont read Spanish literature, nor do I watch Spanish shows. But I have recently started reading manga and watching anime, which led to me learning Japanese, because I am immersed in the language regularly and have a use for it. That's how languages are learned and how they are maintained. You need a use for the language in order to keep it. Learning a language just because it is "good for you" or because you want to break out of some kind of language "chauvinism" are weak reasons to allocate the tremendous amount of cognitive resources required to learn and retain an entire language.
Agree! To be honest, if I wasn't immersed in Spanish speaking videos or commenting on them, I would still suck in Spanish because there really isn't much use for it in my place
Completely agree. I'm an English guy and have lived in two other countries: China, and then Denmark. I learned quite a lot of Chinese, I'm by no means conversational and wasn't able to Read or write, but was very able to navigate through life after a year without the aid of a formal language teacher. I then moved to Denmark and learned... Almost nothing, even though I went to a local language school, which is funny- Danish should have been the much easier language to learn for an English person. The main difference was in china I had to speak chinese because nobody would speak English, whereas in Denmark people would switch to English the moment I walked into a room or opened my mouth. It has been 4 years since I returned to the UK and I remember a lot of Chinese, but don't remember any Danish at all
@@jackogrady3118 As a Dane, I know all too well what you're talking about. We simply can't help speaking English, when we hear it. Most of us, even older people, are so constantly exposed to it through media, talking it comes naturally. English/US films have almost never been dubbed in Danish, except cartoons for children, and this goes WAY back, even to pre-WW2.
@@MrAstrojensen I'm from England. I did 3 years of French in school. I wasn't goot at it. And it was essentially just regurgitating things for a test and recognising words. The only kids who were good at it were the ones who already spoke French or actually spent time learning outside if they picked to do the subject. At that point the only time I was eexpose to or need to speak French was in class. I didn't watch or consume and French media or materials. When I took a holiday to France, their English was better than my French and they just resorted to speaking English to me.
It also helps that for Americans there’s barely more incentive to learn a foreign language than to learn to play a musical instrument. It might be considered a plus in a handful of jobs, but mostly it would be for personal enjoyment and some sort of bragging rights. Most Americans would have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get to a non-English-speaking country, even farther to get to one without a travel advisory (possibly unless you count Quebec).
not starting to learn a language at a young enough age seems to be much more of a problem in the US than the UK: it's typical, at least in my experience, for most Americans not to start learning until they're 12 or older, and some people aren't exposed to any primary school education of language and have to wait until the university level to take introductory language courses.
@@rickpgriffin Latin’s rare to find being taught in my experience though even among Catholics sometimes. I worked pretty hard to learn it through middle school when I was forced to learn Spanish instead :/
when I was in school in England (I left at 18 in 2012), many of my classmates only started a language at 11 in year 7, and whilst languages were compulsory at my school for GCSE, people at other schools in the area may have only ever received three years of foreign language education between the ages of 11-14 it is now compulsory in England to start a foreign language at 7 in year 3 (which was when I started being taught French) of course, there are major problems with how languages are taught. I was taught French for three years, then started Spanish, and still ended up speaking much better Spanish and choosing to continue that to GCSE because the French teaching was so bad. Also, whilst all kids at my secondary school learnt French, it was randomly decided when you joined the school if you'd learn Spanish or German
In America it’s a very normal thing to take Spanish in high school but most people take it because it looks good on their diploma like it will give you extra points to get into college if he took a foreign language so most of the people who take Spanish are doing it for the credit there’s not a lot of people in those classrooms are actually intend on speaking Spanish outside school, and actually becoming fluent
@@bealu9459 I would say that is true for some places in the world, but for other places like Sweden, like was used as an example in this video is not always true
In California a foreign language is required, but it doesn't make most people fluent unless they already live in a majority-Hispanophone or Sinophone municipality.
@@linaelhabashy4608 yea im from south america and sadly most dont practice english outside their job or school and then they complain that they arent getting better at english, like bruh summerge yoself
@@bealu9459 it’s kind of the same in Egypt. Which I am from but I live in America it’s like people will take English sense like fifth grade and they all walked out of three years of high school not really having a good grasp of the English. They’ve learned in school.
Speaking as a Brit, whether Languages are a mandatory subject at GCSE is by-the-by IMO. Most schools here make it mandatory anyway, and most students will study just enough to pass their exams without any interest in actually learning the language. The reason is simple, if you live in the UK and have no intention to ever live anywhere else (except maybe the US), and never go anywhere else except on brief holidays, there is truly no pressing, urgent reason for you to ever learn another language. It's the same reason most students will never take a greater interest in maths than what they need to know to pass the GCSE exam. It's the path of least resistance, and no amount of schooling, no matter how brilliant or passionate, can change that.
This is very true. I would like for everyone to take college level calculus and take a course in linear algebra. And I think it could be very beneficial to everyone even though few people would have any application or reason to learn it for their day-to-day life. The truth is that most people aren't going to precisely because there is little reason to learn it besides from your own motivation, which is simply not something most people have. Every Swede has to learn English because its essentially become mandatory in order to do the things every Swede does, but no English speaker will ever be left out or loose part of their culture for not knowing some other language than English. I think if compared how many Swedes know three languages with how many Brits know two languages, the British wouldn't be that far of. At the end of the day, there is little forcing you to know anything besides your mother tongue and English.
Spot on. Language use around the world is primarily based on utility. English speakers don't need to learn a language to travel, so they don't do it. A better comparison would be how many Europeans know a second language that isn't either English or another national language of the country (for example, Swedish in Finland). It'll be around the same.
@@villeporttila5161 In Hungary, most People can't even speak English. Let alone anything else. They're stuck with Hungarian. This fact, becomes surprising once you realize that Hungary... Doesn't have a lot of Rich People. Or People in general. Hungarians don't know English, and most Media Companies won't bother to Translate anything in Hungarian.
One weird thing about bilingualism in the US is that the rate is also impacted by which area of the US you live in. Generally, the further southwest you are the higher the rates are due to the prevalence of Spanish due to immigration from Latin America and from historical borders. In the southwest of the US it’s not that rare to hear Spanish in day to day life so more people are encouraged to learn it to be able to communicate with others.
the thing os that people that speak Spanish in the US usually don't learn it. it is their first language and the language they use at home. English is the language they use at school and work. That's why they don't know how to speak academic Spanish and many don't even know how to read and write
@@maximinus5151 Many Americans will learn Spanish to speak with other people. I had a friend who lived in near Corpus Christi TX and picked up Spanish so he could communicate.
I agree...I was raised in the 90s in New England, and as it shares a border with Quebec...French was the more common language to see and it was the only language they offered in elementary school. It makes sense because of geographical proximity. There's even a French-American private school in Providence that teaches you bilingually with some classes being only French. Makes sense to learn it there not just because of that, but because the French Canadians often vacation in New England too.
To this video my only hold back is Japan. They try so hard in schooling to teach English, yet the country still doesn’t really speak it. Because of this I believe it’s more than schooling, it’s also about motivation, we need both good foreign language education and things that motivate students to learn another language.
It's not motivation it is purely exposure. Culturally Japanese people don't need English they speak with everyone in Japanese watch everything in Japanese and use the internet in Japanese.
@@impyrobot English is still used in pop-culture. It’s not completely absent, I believe that they’re exposed, but just not motivated enough to deal with the massive differences between the two languages.
@@andreimircea2254 In an average school class, the vast majority of students will never run a big international company. Even bosses of companies won't have much problems if they have translators below them who do the communication. The problem is that for Japanese it is hard to practice English because travelling to the US or England takes a lot of time and costs much. So it would be more intelligent to learn Chinese
I think there's some sort of distinction to be made between learning a foreign language to talk to your own countrymen where you both have it as a second language, and learning it to talk to native speakers in that language. One big, obvious downside to English as a "lingua franca" is that as an English-speaker, other people are far more likely to switch to English when you're trying to start learning! With less natural incentive to learn, we're likely to be at a lower level, and the lower level, the more people are going to give up trying to interact with our scratchy French/German/whatever and just switch to English. Which means it's even harder to improve naturally, and forming a self-fulfilling cycle! Now, native speakers in other languages have a bit of a get-out clause from this feedback loop which is that it's more natural for, say, a Swede to learn English to interact with other non-native English speakers, even others Swedes perhaps in some circumstances. Which means a lot of those awkward dynamics are avoided. For English people however, this is just not on the radar. If we learn Spanish, we imagine it's to speak to native Spanish-speakers, if we learn French, it's to speak to native French-speakers. We don't usually conceive of French as being a means to, say, communicate with a Spaniard in something that's a second language to both of us. And we certainly would never consider the idea of speaking to a fellow English-speaker in something that's a second language to us both. Not for any practical purpose anyway. Not that I'm sure there's really any particular solution, but I wonder if it's a reason there'll always be a bit of a difference that we can't really do much about! (at least for as long as English is seen as a go-to "neutral" language for speakers of many different languages)
Exactly, a german and an italian aren't going to be able to speak to each other in french for example, at least 9 times out of 10. The vast majority of the time, they will use english, over any other 3rd, or even either of their native languages, in most cases.
@@Hession0Drasha you are perfectly right, both of you. I don't know if anyone expected it, but the Great East Enlargement of the EU actually strengthened the position of English as our primary lingua franca. Before, French, German, Italian and Spanish all were of value for communication with foreigners. But now, English dominates.
Teaching a language at school - even when done well - doesn't necessarily fix the problem. I'm Finnish and the two official languages of the country are Finnish and Swedish. Learning Swedish is mandatory and students use a lot of time learning it. I couldn't find good statistics but it's pretty common for people to learn Swedish in school, possibly with very good grades, then never actually use the language, and then just forgetting it. Meanwhile English is so commonly used, especially among young people, that not knowing it is essentially unheard of. I've spent less time studying French in school than Swedish and I'm still more confident with using French than Swedish. Exposure is vital but also motivation. There's a lot of resentment against mandatory Swedish so many just learn the bare minimum to pass and then forget everything.
It's not unusual to find people here in German-speaking Switzerland who did/must have studied French at school for up to nine years, sometimes even on a fairly high level, who simply don't list French as one of the native languages they speak. They will list their English which they studied for two years less, or their Spanish or Italian which they studied for about half as long, but not their French.
Yes, knowledge of the Swedish language in Finland is appalling, as I could check during my travels, and many Finnish-speaking Finns even resent being addressed in Swedish. So sad...
@@camelopardalis84 About 5% of Finland’s population are native Swedish speakers, due to the several centuries Finland spent being a Swedish territory. In fact, it was only in 1892 that Finnish achieved the same legal status as Swedish… in Finland itself. Famous Swedish-speaking Finns include Tove Jansson of Moomins fame, famed military leader and statesman Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, Linus Torvalds of Linux fame, and Finland’s most famous composer Jean Sibelius.
@@camelopardalis84German-Swiss are expected to all have studied French and be more or less ok with speaking it so they do not probably feel the need to specify their level in French since it is taken for granted by other Swiss. The other way round is less true. You see Roger Federer speaks some very good French for instance.
The thing about Ireland is that three languages are required for third level education (English, Irish, and one of your choice), but Irish is taught so horribly that it's often the most difficult part of the Leaving Cert exam.
Playing devil's advocate here so don't get angry, but might it be true that people merely use the excuse that Irish is taught badly to mask their insecurities that they just didn't try hard enough in the language. I teach Welsh in an English-medium school and I think our course is decent enough (but certainly not without its flaws, for sure), but some students just don't apply themselves as well as they could. Just asking.
@@DoctorCymraeg im not irish but actually american but i think i can say that kids usually dont have the motivation when they dont think its necessary. Like the majority of kids in my school speak english, so why learn another language? Kids dont usually have motivation unless they particularly love a subject, so they might grow up and regret not applying themselves in spanish or french or smth. So no offense since ik u were just playing devils advocate but expecting kids to be motivated on their own is dumb, especially if the class sucks.
@@DoctorCymraeg they don’t do well with Irish because it is a pointless language. There is only one nation on earth that speaks Irish and it is Ireland but Ireland’s main language is English. It is like learning latin. You only ever need it to read historical documents.
Irish is booming outside of the main Irish speaking areas (Gaeltacht), especially amongst the urban youth. This is mainly due to the relative proliferation of Irish speaking schools (gaelscoileanna). Pop-up Irish speaking get togethers are everywhere now and Irish language media has improved. Oscar nominations for a film made in Irish is exceptional but all the same symptomatic of the growth of urban Gaeilge.
In the Australian primary school curriculum, foreign language classes are held for 45 minutes a week. In my case, most of those classes focused on Japanese culture rather than the language itself. We didn’t even begin to learn any characters until grade 6, 6 years after we began “learning japanese”
In my school primary had english and French for every year then in year 6 you chose to either do japanese or french then in high school there is only japanese but it isn't compulsory so nobody does it
I'd maintain that my English education as a youngster in Sweden (starting around 10-11 years old at that time) has had almost no impact on my English profeciancy beyond helping to set the stage so to speak. It helped build some fundamentals, but the rest was an individual journey of exposure to the language via film (and later internet). Being such a small country (population wise) really was a big benefit here. There really isn't a budget to dub shows fulltime, so SVT resorted to subtitling etc. This is of course a massive boon when learning a language, you get to her the words, and see their translation (more or less accurate) in real time.
It's the same over in the Netherlands. Movies and shows are subbed but almost never dubbed and games especially only rarely have Dutch translations, though it seems like more games are getting them (They often sound unnatural and weird, though). It's a real incentive to learn English, because just about every game is available in it or has it as the standard language
and helping build fundamentals is extremely important you can't get to an advanced level without getting past the beginner stage (duh) the point is English speaking countries don't even have the fundamentals when it comes to foreign languages, and that's a part of the problem
Japan is also a highly monolingual country. they put a good bit of money on the education, provide programmes encouraging english teachers to work in Japan (in fact it's the easiest way to land a job in Japan if you are a native english speaker), english classes are mandatory. Unfortunately it's a very half-assed measure to encourage english proficiency, and countries like South Korea despite also being equally different from english has a MUCH higher rate of english speakers. Japan is a very culturally insular country, almost all media they consume is in Japanese, they are more focused on domestic trade, and even with all of the accommodation for tourists it does not reflect in the population regarding language acquisition. It only matters that they have ENOUGH english speakers (and due to the aforementioned programme there are plenty of native english speakers to fill that role!)
I think it is bad to just focus on the English-Proficiency of a country. It is just a language. There are more important aspects like the GDP per Capita or human development. With putting English and the anglophone countries into the center of a globalised society, other parts of the world think "Since our native tongue is worthless, we should learn English in order to advance economically". Proviciency of other languages (like French, Russian or Spanish) should be valued too.
I think it's worth mentioning that the massive bilingualism in Scandinavia is partially facilitated by the simple fact that English and the Scandinavian languages (not Finnish) are closely related. English is one of the easiest languages to learn for Scandinavians, as we get most of the grammar and large chunks of the vocabulary almost for free. Ultimately I don't think being related makes or breaks bilingualism (see again, Finland), but it doesn't hurt, either.
Are English shows and films on Swedish t.v. dubbed or subbed? If it's the latter, that at least must have been a huge factor for people who aren't digital natives.
@@francisdec1615 I didn't say it can't help a lot. Studies have just shown that it doesn't help with what people think it helps with, and that as a result, people overestimate the effect.
In Singapore, we do take the GSCE and every student does take their mother tongue, with the most prominent languages being Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil. However, due to the dying nature of these cultures and languages in a modern and fast-paced city like Singapore, more and more students (like myself) feel a disdain to our mother languages. What makes this worse is that even if you want to learn another language, you have to be proficient in your mother tongue before being able to take a third language. I'm one of many special cases where I grew up in an environment speaking 3 languages, with Mandarin Chinese being my second mother tongue and Japanese being my third. Unfortunately, for some reason my Japanese was stronger, and because my Mandarin Chinese wasn't as strong as my Japanese, the Ministry of Education rejected my application for entering the Japanese course all because my Mandarin Chinese wasn't proficient enough (; - ;). There's also the whole problem on how language is taught in Singapore's education system, and how students who don't even take Mandarin Chinese are not permitted into taking Japanese as a third language (like what???). So basically, while it is a good idea to implement languages in the education system, there are a whole lot of other factors that could affect the quality of the system itself (plus, it's not even the teachers' fault, they are all qualified teachers to teach said language...)
Same situation here (Singaporean Chinese who can't speak Chinese well either)! I've heard from classmates and personally do think myself too that the main problem is that the education system presents these languages only as subjects to be examined on rather than genuinely interesting and defining parts of our culture, which is a great shame as it (in my opinion) ironically makes students dislike the language more than they would have without the pressure to learn it for examinations otherwise. It's quite demotivating to get in your exam results that you're just not good enough at your own "mother tongue", and frankly puts off the attitude of wanting to actively learn it.
@@purifiedwaterrr Also technically 'mandarin' wasn't ever the mother tongue for 90+% of Chinese Singaporeans since they're all from the south and speak/spoke Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese etc instead (or even Peranakan Malay). Mandarin was just picked and passed off as the 'mother tongue' because it's the prestige dialect, which is fine imo but it kinda emphasises that it's 'forced' and/or 'irrelevant'/'boring'.
Some teachers are indeed unqualified to teach, like the English teacher I had in 8th grade who didn't really know how to teach (or explain) and struggled to keep up with me as I was challenging her knowledge of English, while I was a 90+% self-taught. And there were other teachers of other subjects unrelated to languages, one which didn't know the subject she was teaching and quit teaching our class after just 1 year with us.
Singapore fucked up on the "mother language" front. Singaporean Chinese often have Hokkien as their mother tongues, and Singaporean Indians could have Hindustani as their mother tongue rather than Tamil.
5:22 Want to point out that in Swedish schools we also add a third language to our curriculum where we, like you, pick between French, German and Spanish. Not sure at what age it is, when I went to school it was around 11-12 years old, but I think it's at younger levels now. There's also the fact that we don't do a lot of dubbing over of foreign media, only dubbing movies and shows that are aimed at young children, and instead use subtitling. This also comes into news reportage, where interviews in foreign languages are subtitled instead of being dubbed. There's also the importance that English plays in education. To advance beyond elementary education, you need a passing grade in Math, Swedish and English. Our equivalence to the American SAT, Högskoleprovet (literally the College Test) has an entire section for English reading comprehension. (Engelsk LäsFörståelse = ELF) A lot of college courses and course literature is also in English. And of course English and Swedish are relatively close, both being members of the Germanic family of languages. English even has a lot of old Norse words, which makes it easier for Scandinavians to understand.
My mum (a native Chinese speaker) used to teach Mandarin in the South West. What she found was that even though she got good comments from students, teacher peer reviews etc. the school would often prioritise the already established languages (and teachers) when budget cuts, scheduling and general promotion of the subject were an issue. Introducing a new subject is always hard, and with so many language options it gets really hard for students to choose. Often the school would start by proudly announcing the introduction of Mandarin lessons, then when uptake was below expectations they would start cutting corners (what do you mean scheduling all of year 10's weekly lessons in one day is a bad idea?). Other langage teachers would get worried that their students were being taken from them to learn Mandarin instead, and ultimately Mandarin was the one that got phased out due to budget cuts (it's only one class per year group and we did fine without it?) It may be that my mum's approach to school politics just wasn't up to snuff or she shoud have promoted Mandarin more or whatever, but often she was only in a couple of days a week, no allocated desk/room as she was part-time, her allocated budget for equipment/activities kept shrinking, and she disliked the cliquey nature of the different departments. She's now quit teaching (loves the students and job, hates the bureaucracy). It's such a shame, because the students she taught seemed to really enjoy the lessons (some even asked for tutoring after they found out Mandarin was being stopped and went on to do really well)
World politics also has an effect. If the only exposure most people have to another culture is negative, they will assume more negativity. It's a huge problem that we tar every person with the same brush coming from another culture with stereotypes and fear of the unknown. Ironically a lack of exposure only increases this, a perpetual cycle of ignorance.
It's kinda funny that you mentioned the idea of a defined percentage of foreign programming. In terms of radio stations in Canada, it requires that at least 50% of the music that's played is by a Canadian artist. That rule is only in place because if it wasn't, the music would be predominantly American music (which isn't a bad thing, but Canadians artists need recognition as well)
That's just dumb and corpratist. Canadian artists would get recognition if they were good. The government shouldn't force you to listen to bad music that can't stand on its own merits just because the person that made it is Canadian.
Canada is a great example of what happens when multilingualism is mandated rather than arising organically. Canada as a country is officially bilingual, and vocally so. But really, the only people in any great number who are actually bilingual are people who work in the public sector (there are language requirements for these jobs) and people with French as a first language, because it would be very limiting for them if they didn't speak English.
The problem with the Canadian content quotas is that when a Canadian song comes along that’s genuinely popular, the radio stations play it constantly. When the Tragically Hip released Bobcaygeon it got played about every 15 minutes across every station in Toronto. That year was a nightmare
@Erik Eriksson Because I think many people see monolinguism as a sickness of the mind, when we are referring to humans in wealthy, industrialized countries. If one has the capacity and opportunity to learn another language and one refuses to do so, it shows a disinterest in dealing with the human world on anything but ones own rather self-absorbed, arrogant (or maybe insecure) terms.
@@lisaahmari7199 Not necessarily, there's many other reasons someone may have the ability to learn another language and they don't. Most of those reasons aren't out of malice, but out of a lack of a reason to learn. Other countries learn multiple languages because they have to to communicate, but if you live in an country where everyone communicates in one language and you don't feel like you miss anything by only knowing the one language, then there's no reason for them to bother learning the other language. This is pointless however because at the end of the day we're both dumbasses on the internet. Nobodies going to change their opinion because told them to.
As others have said, there's just no practical need to be bilingual as a native English speaker. Making it mandatory doesn't really change that. Still, I agree that we should have more resources dedicated towards languages and introduce them earlier on to give opportunities to kids who are interested.
That's really not true though, if it was then no one else would bother to learn anything other than English, but German or French is still mandatory in Denmark. The vast majority of everything hasn't been translated into English and that includes important things such as news and technical documents and a lot of things suffer through being translated. When you read a translated work you're essentially putting your trust in the skill and objectivity of the translator and sometimes it might just not be possible to provide a proper translation. Learning a language gives you a window into a whole new culture and lets you understand it properly, that's an invaluable skill, especially if it's one you might not interact with much anyways. Not to mention that by learning languages you become better at the skill of learning languages so the next one you pick up will become easier, at some point learning a new language stops being a daunting task and becomes something you can just do.
@@hedgehog3180 I did say 'practical need' - there are certainly a lot of reasons that learning a language other than English is worthwhile. Often it is for appreciating art or other text with the author's original intent, as you suggest, which is not going to motivate the wider population. Hell, I'm not rushing to read literature in other languages when I've barely read any in English. Other media can generally be translated with enough accuracy to be worth consuming. Again, not saying that it isn't worthwhile or that people don't do it, it just isn't a cultural expectation because you can get by fine without. You point out that learning a second language makes it easier to learn further languages. Perhaps that is why German and French being also mandatory is practical - because there is already some expectation?
And then people travel to other countries and they're surprised when people actually can't speak English there. I've been a "freelancer" interpreter couple times in my life already even tho I'm a person who doesn't really like going outside For example in Poland older people are more likely to speak Russian or even French than English. As for younger generations - it's hit or miss. You can't really expect a random person you meet to be proficient enough to understand you, let alone speak with you You would think then that tourists visiting Poland speak English at least. Well, again, it depends. Germans don't. Polish seaside is frequently visited by our Western neighbours. Almost everything is written in two languages there. Is it Polish and English? Nope. It's Polish and German I've been working with couple younger German dudes. About 30 or something. I thought I could speak with them in English because I know it better. Lol, nope. They would rather try to decode my subpar German than try using English Tl;dr English language is not as widely spoken as people assume
We Germans are in a bit of an odd position when it comes to learning foreign languages. On one side we are like other, smaller countries because English is basically always our second language and most Germans can speak it to some degree. (and our own language sphere is not as big as the french or spanish one for example). However on the other side, we also suffer from the "bigger language syndrome" like the native English speakers, because our smaller neighbours often learn German but we mostly don't learn their languages, so we are on a bit of a disadvantage. So it could be said that the german language is too small to rival English, French or Spanish but too big to fit in with other european languages. (Which can also be said about Germany's historical political position - too big for Europe, too small for the world...)
Es ist ein wahnsinniger Vorteil, eine Sprache als Muttersprache zu sprechen, die woanders gelernt wird. Besonders wenn man ins östliche Mitteleuropa reist, kann man froh sein, dass man mit Deutsch durch kommt. Es hat dort halt jedes Land seine eigene Sprache. Wenn man z.B. Tschechisch lernt, dann ist das zwar schön und gut, aber in Polen, Ungarn oder Kroatien hilft einem halt Deutsch trotzdem mehr weiter. Ich zum Beispiel wohne im Südosten von Österreich, in der Nähe von Slowenien und Ungarn. Ungarisch ist halt sau schwer (da keine Indogermanische Sprache) und Slowenisch hat nur 1/50 der Sprecheranzahl verglichen mit meiner Muttersprache. Da erscheint es eben wenig attraktiv wenn man Slowenisch oder Ungarisch lernt
Ich bin lernen Deutsch als mein dreitten sprache. Ich, liebe dein länden und dein kulture. Meiner meine nach lernen sprache bezogen auf anzahl auf sprecher ist überwertet.
@@solmoman Same could have happened with French too with Napoleon. Imagine if Roman empire never fell and Europe all spoke Italian! Spain and Portugal did it with South America.
As a Finn, I'm used to having to learn two mandatory foreign languages since elementary school and when I learned for the first time it's not that common elsewhere I was actually quite shocked. I also think that it is easier to learn new languages if you have already because you've developed a way to learn them so the more you learn, the easier it gets. And also... people should learn languages that are not very similar to their own, it's eye opening. But at the same time while in Finland people are good in English, it can be seen that in some ways English is taking over. For example in many universities it's nowadays difficult to get education in Finnish because English is so prominent. And it really sucks. It's hard to balance having a common language and preserving the other languages as well...
"people should learn languages that are not very similar to their own, it's eye opening." I totally agree. As a Swede, I have loved studying Finnish and Japanese because learning a language from a completely different family really changes how you think about languages and communication. It's so much fun! I've gotten some glimpses of that from learning French, because there are some grammatical concepts and words that exist in French and not in Swedish, but in the end the grammar is pretty similar. With Finnish and Japanese for me, every day of learning is a wow-experience :D Also, same in Sweden with university education. Especially within the natural sciences, it seems hard to find uni programs in Swedish. I know many who can't really talk about their school or job in 100% Swedish, because they don't have vocabulary for it. In ends up being like 50/50 Swedish/English or just English.
As a native English speaker who went through schooling in the non-England part of the UK, I think the 3 biggest reasons why anglophones are rubbish at learning languages are the exposure to foreign languages, as you said, but also English as a language itself and the abilities of non-natives in English. Because we get little exposure to foreign languages, we don't have things to encourage us to learn those languages. I know many people from Scandinavia learn English as a consequence of playing video games, since translations into their languages don't really exist. There's also the fact we're heavily catered to internationally, either when travelling or on international shows lile Eurovision, which is heavily geared towards the English-speaking world through the languages of the songs and the language it's presented in. This all comes together to make the view that the effort of learning another language is meaningless when our native language is used everywhere already. On the other hand, what makes English easy to learn makes it hard to learn from. Concepts like gender, conjugation and declension barely exist in English, but are important starting points for languages like French and German, so create a steep learning curve at the beginning for an anglophone learner and put a lot of people off. A final note is that it's hard to practise a foreign language as a native English speaker. I have roughly B2 level French and have lived in France, and found I would sometimes have to fight to speak French as most people would speak English to me, even when I started the conversation in French. This is made worse by how much better their English would be compared to my French, making it almost stupid for us to speak in French. I've had so many experiences like that that have made me want to stop learning since "why bother if they'll just speak to me in English?" so I understand why many get discouraged.
Well put, the gender conjugation and declension etc. is a difficulty. Why is a chair feminine but a wall masculine in French? I love French, learnt at night school 40+ yrs ago. Can read it, not always in right tense but can't fathom the rapid strung together replies. A friend who was from Belgium said I had a very good Parisian accent! Age 83
Tbh, this comment makes me think that english speakers just need to learn a language which they can use in a country that doesn't speak much english. I guess that means I'm learning North Korean lol
Huh, that's funny, I had the chance to live as an exchange student in France, and I never felt like I had to force the issue with anyone that I wanted the conversation to be spoken in French. It never bothered me that they wanted to practice their English with me because it would only last like 10 minutes before they broke down and the conversation continued on in French again. Usually, they just want to ask me a question and understand if their pronunciation of a phrase was good or not. It was always a great party trick for me though to speak English with a French accent for them so they could hear the difference.
Yeah, that creates a vicious cycle: they won’t speak to you in French so you can’t improve your listening skills, which causes them to not want you to speak French to them which worsens the problem of not being able to speak french.
I have also recognized that if people have not learned other languages (and also often if they have learned only language pretty similar to their own) they find it really difficult to understand how different languages can be and how varying ways they use to talk about the world. For example I had a weird conversation with an English speaking person who could not comprehend that althoug the word "rich" can be used for land (rich soil = soil has good minerals etc), it does not automatically mean that the translation for rich can be used similarly in Finnish, because in Finnish the most common translation for rich only includes the neaning of "having a lot of money or posessions". It was so difficult to explain it because they just did not understand that rich could not have the secondary meaning for soil.
If you're a native English speaker, we may very well have problems learning a new language abroad, because so many people learn English and want to speak English with us. I've been learning Vietnamese and was there for a month; even people who spoke less English than I did Vietnamese, often tried to use English with me, either out of a desire to be helpful, or because they wanted to practice. And if you want to learn Swedish for example, how easy is it to immerse yourself in that language when almost everyone speaks English, and well?
It is so annoying to be honest, i am mexican, my english is not that good but in china many people wanted to practice their english with me like for real and they even asked me if their grammar was good i was like "I dont know neither" but since i am white passing they thougth i was being rude because they think white=native english speaker , all i wanted was to practice my mandarin since i was living there
@@rodrigoe.gordillo2617 in Vietnam everybody wanted to practice their English with me; fair enough, I wanted to practice Vietnamese with Vietnamese speakers in the states. :-) But there were times where I almost felt like pretending I didn't speak English, to force their hand. Many times they also were just trying to help, but really, just slowing down a little bit would be as helpful.
@@azwan4710 I've lived in Bosnia my whole life. The best English you'll see here comes with awful Grammar and accents so thick that you can't even understand what they're saying.
My mom speaks Tagalog, and my dad speaks Thai, and sadly, they didn't want to teach me their languages. Now that I'm older, I'm thinking that maybe they wanted me to be fluent in English since when they immigrated to America, it might have been difficult for them with limited English proficiency. One day I would like to speak Tagalog, but for now, I'm learning Spanish.
It honestly is both sad and frustrating why my mother didnt want me to learn her mother tongue since itd be a "hinderance" and useless abroad. Now she makes fun of my effort when I try, I struggle to communicate eith my family who are in our native country
@Kiboma420 So true! I did try speaking some Tagalog phrases that I learned, but my family would make fun of my accent and kept asking me to repeat what I said so they could laugh some more. It really is frustrating, sad, and demoralizing. What's funny is that I can understand a lot of what's being said in Tagalog, I just can't speak it. So, if a family member asks me in Tagalog about something, I respond in English.
That’s alright hun here in America we speak English, way too many Spanish speakers preform poorly in the public schools since they can’t understand the teachers and they sink the test scores. You’ll pick another language up probably if you try rlly hard 🤷♂️.
If so, that was a poor choice on their part. Studies show that children of non-native English speakers in English-majority communities tend to have better English if they're raised to be multilingual.
As an American I think another reason many of us do not know another foreign language is because we don’t have the incentive to do so, not necessarily because we speak an already important language but because many of us don’t really see going to college or working abroad as a very good option or even feasible compared to working or going to school here is the US which I think is a major reason why some choosing to learn a new language I hope though that more people in the US become bi lingual I think it would help our country and everyone in it
Yes, Europe is so small, yet has so many languages and people tend to move here and there for work, especially from east to west, and for us Europeans it's helpful to know a second language or even a third. Like, Germany wants for workers to learn German and not fully depend on English, so if you are from some other country and already know English, German might be your 3rd language.
Definitely true. I also just wanna say that people on this topic like to site Americans having some kind of linguistic "arrogance" about our language, which true sometimes, but in my experience really isn't much of a thing. It's linguistic cluelessness, not arrogance. We don't think about people speaking other languages not because we BELIEVE they should speak English, but because there's no reason for us to be thinking about those people at all. We live in a ginormous, nearly 100% English-speaking country. We don't have to think about "what if they don't speak English" because literally everyone we meet for 99% of our lives already speaks it here in the country. Americans rarely travel internationally because our country is so f***ing big, and when we do, those people ALREADY speak English, so it's again, not a problem. So we don't really feel others should speak English, we just don't think about them in the first place, because there isn't much of a need to.
It’s due to practical use as a major reason, there’s literally no native speakers of other languages nearby unless you count Spanish and French. Though in those cases they generally know English already or if they don’t you wouldn’t be speaking to them at all.
@@goldenhourss I'm not from Germany nor do I intend to work in Germany, but that's what I heard, that's encouraged that people should speak German if they reside there for longer periods of time. My aunt had a friend who was working hard to learn German while she worked there.
Whenever you go somewhere and someone hears your accent, they often jump at the chance to practice their English. And it happens all the time, making practicing another language harder for English speakers. Something not many people consider
This is why I'm learning Russian. I like the Cyrillic alphabet too, but I'm mostly using it to escape sounding English. I shouldn't have to keep saying "Wie bitte?" or "Ich lerne Deutsch, wir sind in Deutschland nicht die USA" just to keep everything in German. But if I sound Russian enough, they won't have a choice.
I grew up with German, but in the UK, so it's not perfect - maybe about 90%. I realise people want to practice their English, but it always hurts my pride a little when Germans switch over because they've noticed something.
This is what I find, especially in France. It used to annoy me because I was there to study their language. But these days if they want to practice English, then fair enough. On the other hand in Spain people don't speak English back to me which may mean (i) my Spanish is better than my French or (ii) people in Spain are less likely to do that.
To be honest, for other countries it's easy to make mandatory to learn one second language at school. We just pick English and call it a day. And then we half learn a third language like French or Spanish. But when you are in an English speaking country you have to either pick one language and make it mandatory (accidentally making others "less important") or equally represent at least 4 to 5, witch means at least 3-4 extra teachers in every school of every level of education of the entire country.
Seems to me the beat solution in the UK would be to pick the local one and make that mandatory. Which leaves England behind, but means we can revive Irish, Welsh, and Gaelic a bit. But at that point, it is just a matter of teaching/learning languages for the sake of teaching/learning them, since the only practical use for each of those is local. Though I admit I'd love for all three languages to make a proper comeback, and I wish I'd properly learned some Gaelic growing up in Scotland.
I'd say for Canada and the US the choice is obvious (french and Spanish). The issue is the UK (french, german, spanish?) and Australia (which asian language?)
@@klop4228 That's already what they do for Welsh. If you go to an English language school in Wales, Welsh is a mandatory subject. There are also schools where students are taught in Welsh across all subjects. Irish is a compulsory subject in the republic of Ireland. But I've heard that most people come out of school only able to say a few phrases. Making it compulsory in Northern Ireland would be extremely controversial, to the point it could lead to violence. So that's a non-starter.
@@Psyk60 Now I think about it, I do know a Welsh guy who did tell me he learned Welsh in school. As for Irish - I suppose the curriculum would need work, and, yeah, I hadn't considered how controversial it would be. Having grown up in Scotland, though, I genuinely don't see why Gaelic isn't taught as standard. I mean, at this point, introducing it might be a bit of a project, but I've never met anyone who'd be opposed to the idea of it (though some people might be opposed to spending money on that rather than fixing the NHS etc.)
@@klop4228 I suppose the thing with Gaelic in Scotland is that it was never the native language of much of the low lands. They went from speaking a Brittonic language, to speaking Anglo-Saxon which evolved into Scots. So it's not a native language of the country as a whole in the same way Welsh or Irish are. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be taught across Scotland.
i live in america, and my area has a lot of spanish speakers and a very high brazilian population; so almost every sign in my school has spanish & portuguese translations on them, and i hear a lot of my classmates talking in both languages. i’m by no means fluent in either of them, but i can understand quite a few words and phrases because of that (albeit most of the phrases i have learnt probably aren’t very appropriate for normal conversations lmao)
I'm from Singapore and 2nd language education is required. 70% of the population is Chinese so it is a common 2nd language but many of us "return what we learn" to our teachers after high school. I think part of the problem is that the teaching approach is flawed; many of us no longer speak Chinese (or any other dialect) at home so a focus on daily communication and expression would be really helpful. Unfortunately, teachers during my time spent too much effort on trying to expand a non-existent foundation by piling on lots of non-essential vocabulary without any drawing any comparisons to English. Meanwhile, in foreign language classes, the teachers always explain or draw comparisons to English so you didn't have to figure out how to use a particular word in a sentence. Also, the teaching materials were boring to the core. Overall, a significant number of Chinese Singaporeans don't see the language as anything more than a chore to get over with. I picked up most of my Chinese as an adult and still have childhood memories of my mum fretting about not being able to face our ancestors because I nearly failed Chinese.🤣
Even if you speak Mandarin well, you still can't face your ancestors if your heritage language is actually other Chinese languages like Hokkien, Cantonese, etc😂
Media exposure is a huge factor. In the US, foreign-language programming is almost exclusively featured on channels dedicated to those languages (Télemundo, KBS, etc.). A lot of Americans learn their second language from their parents, but since non-English languages were pretty heavily suppressed in World War I, there's not as much of that anymore. And though this is changing, we don't start learning foreign languages at school until 7th grade or so. So you'd better hope to simply grow up in a part of the country where a language other than English is widely spoken for you to pick up- which again is less common than it was 100 years ago- because opportunities for fluency are quite limited. Two spots of hope I see in the US are for immersion programs in public schools (which exist in California, where kids will learn multiple subjects in multiple languages throughout the day), and the end of dominance by commercial TV networks, where programmers are extremely skittish about the commercial viability of non-English media. However, even traveling abroad can be difficult for language acquisition, because people in other countries _want_ to speak to you in English. I live in Israel, and my one roommate who does speak some English always wants to use it when talking to me because he needs to learn English, but I need to learn Hebrew. American tourists have consistently demonstrated a disproportionate willingness to learn new languages when compared to British tourists, yet there's very little willingness to engage with them in the local language when it's desired.
I’m so blessed to have grown up in SoCal. I grew up in a predominantly Mexican area and just by having mostly Mexican friends most of my life I have a grasp of Spanish even though I only took 2 years of it in high school and never practiced it afterwards. I’m learning French now as an adult and it’s hadd
So true- having lived and worked in Europe in the 90’s I could really spot the difference in language abilities vs tv content (and also what a massive difference it made to my language ability- I always struggled with learning in the classroom, just not enough input). It’s so sad to see how many schools have dropped German as a language now, despite it being a very sought after language for employers (I strongly suspect because it is seen as difficult and could bring their grade averages down in the league tables).
I don't know why schools in Romania still insist on French when no one goes to work in France or French speaking countries, they're all going to Italy, Germany, UK and Spain. I hate French so much and would have rather have been taught Italian or German, since they sound better and there is some interest I have for them compared to my utter hate of French.
@@BananLord Same in UK - why we persist in offering French as the first '2nd language' is beyond me. Youngsters are more likes to go to a Spanish resort on holiday - so maybe Spanish would be a better 'starter' language. [I have IT colleagues in Iași, Ro. and mostly their English is good down to colloquial level. ]
And the Americans especially. Maybe it is because we have no need to, which is super sad as I am genuinely interested in languages and I skipped every language class in school somehow. I am jealous of language learners but I don't have the gusto to learn it myself.
@@TheGreatBackUpVIDEOS for me, band counted as the arts credit. No language required. It would have been Spanish anyways, but still. I am highly convinced I will go through college without one as well, but I hope that is not true.
americans ought to have a higher bilingual rate than brits - because there are enough spanish speakers in the US to be a valid reason for other americans to learn spanish. plus almoat all neighbouring countries of the US, other than mostly english speaking canada, speak spanish. the UK has no second language that is that dominant. I suppose they would normally learn french as the second language, but they'd need to cross the english channel to find french speakers.
I've become fluent in German over the last 8 years, after learning in secondary school and then going to live in Austria, and I still struggle to engage with german-language media, not bc I don't understand it but bc I simply prefer english stuff most of the time - being able to read German academic papers is my greatest incentive most of the time
I think the role of public education is a bit overrated here. East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia etc had roughly 40 years of Russian as the primary foreign language in schools and none of it stuck. Similarly, almost 90% of children in Poland learn German as a second foreign language, which results in less then 10% of them being able to hold a conversation in German (I may be exaggerating the figures a little). Most people that successfully learn foreign languages (other than English) in Poland don't do so in public education, but on their own, using online resources, or through tutors and language courses (which some of the time are subsidized or organized by the company they work for).
I partially agree. I left secondary (Dutch) education with high grades in both English and German. Nevertheless I only got more or less fluent in English when exposed to it at university through foreign PhD students and later on through colleagues. Te get my German at a conversational level I needed to practise myself. Nowadays I nowadays ~40% non Dutch colleagues, and English is used a lot in the professional settings. This is possible because of the high level of proficiency in English in the Netherlands, and the open culture that makes foreign students and professionals to want to live in the Netherlands.. So education and culture work together here. If Dutch culture were not as open as it is, I would not have encountered so many non Dutch speaking colleagues and would have been stuck at the not that great level of English I had when leaving school. That being said, my children get much better English education than I ever had.
The crux of the issue is it being forced. Western Canada, in the city I live, French was mandatory to take until high school, and the class would have maybe 7 or 8 people compared to Spanish which would be full of kids wanting to learn it, Mandarin was also offered but most people in it already had fluent speaking of it because well... They grew up speaking Mandarin. I know for a god damn fact that I was happy to never have to take Quebec French again, I absolutely abhorred having to learn it, knowing full well that I would not once ever have to use it in my life.
How much of that is down to Canada being a geographically huge country whose francophone population is almost entirely concentrated in one specific region?
Foreign language courses only became available to me in highschool. I remember reading somewhere that it gets harder to learn a language once you pass a certain age, so I can't fathom why it wouldn't be mandatory to have these classes as soon as you begin elementary school. I wish I could have begun learning any language at an earlier age lol
I used to think so too, but the good news is that's a myth. Adults have more tools, resources, and ways of approaching their object of learning, plus a brain already equipped with linguistic concepts. The difficulty and time it took to absorb your first language only looks tiny because it is lost in the immemorial fog of infancy. Genuine enthusiasm and curiosity make discomfort melt away. German in school was always a chore even though it's related, while after getting into anime as a teen Japanese was easy breezy. It's a silly cliche situation but it illustrates the truth of these mental mechanics.
"I remember reading somewhere that it gets harder to learn a language once you pass a certain age" As a linguist I tell you that age is 2. Weather you are a teenager or grownup makes no difference. Teenagers have more free time, adults have more willpower.
Thanks for the corrections! Though I still find it ridiculous that language classes aren't mandatory before highschool nationwide I can understand why it might not make a difference. I think just the exposure to a foreign language would be helpful for a lot of children (but evidently I'm not a linguist).
@@ZammyZammyZammy Being a nationalist I would Id argue you shouldnt force anyone to study foreign languages. Despite being able to read it I have on countless occasions ranted to my coligues at university that this anchient italian language from Latinum should be done away with for everyone not studdying romance filology or history and the university moto should be changed form "Scientiae et Patriae" to "Zinātnei un Tēvzemei" Those like Klein will likely tell you that being multilingual reduces skitsofrenia, while I pointing to the youngsters arround me who dont know how to speak properly will tell you that if learning a foreign language comes at the cost of your native language you shouldnt learn it. Better be a master of one language than a master of none.
Nah, if you throw an adult in a foreign country, they'll pick up the language as they go, how fast depends on how much they practice, socialize and expose themselves to that language. My aunt has a midle-aged neighbor that has been in Italy as an adult for maybe 10+ years and learned the language well. My dad who was sh*t at English, picked some while in Malta, and while not good and with a terrible case of mispronouncing and heavy accent, could hold simple conversations after just a year. I've also seen some adult foreigners on Romanian TV speak Romanian fine, some that have been here for even under 3 years. Why adults think it's hard to learn a new language is because they think it is and because of this myth.
In Wales, Welsh is a mandatory GCSE and also introduced at the age of 5. To be honest, for many people, they resent this and arguably dislike Welsh more because of this. I think people would end up resenting foreign languages if it wasn't their choice. I think with the variety of subjects that schools can offer, it is important to keep only a few mandatory. People are more inclined to study well if they are enthusiastic about the subject. However, I do think that your point around teaching at a younger age is important.
Oddly enough i have young Welsh cousins who are thoroughly patriotic. Went to Welsh language high schools willingly. Although considering that despite the huge efforts most Welsh people barely know the language at all, and the fluency is tiny at best, it seems as though its stuck as a minority language confined to culturally traditional parts of Wales
I am a Brit that grew up in Asia, so I took international GCSE's, which forces us to take a core language, In my school, one of three (Mandarin, Spanish, French). I chose Spanish and still continue to learn it afterwards.
The biggest challenge schools would have is getting kids to "buy into" the importance of learning a second language. I'm a science teacher and a worrying chunk don't care about umderstanding the world around them. Plus we've got more and more children who leave school functionally illiterate in English - how the hell are they supposed to cope with a foreign language?but I think that's a problem due to the resource and social crisis in schools, rather than teaching languages.
The 'lack of caring about the world around them' is basically a 'cultural problem'. Some can break through it tho thankfully, others are just too immersed in commonplace US culture that they don't want to leave such a bubble since it's easy for them. US culture doesn't 'really' put importance or focus on education unless it's trying to get into a good university.
I feel like a lot of the low literacy in English could be helped by multilingualism. Being multilingual makes you more sensitive to structural facets of language, especially if you've learned a language as a non-native. For example, stuff like what pronouns are, what tense a statement is in, etc. If you're learning a language non-natively, you have to consciously think about stuff like that, and it transfers over to your understanding of your native language. Also, multilingual education *definitely* helps kids who speak a minority language natively. In USA there's a bunch of studies showing that bilingual Spanish-English education is better for native Spanish speaking children than monolingual English education.
@@ettinakitten5047 Yeah man I'm monolingual but I've started dabbling with Esperanto and conlanging and I've learned so much about English despite having no focus on that because I'm just learning about language in general. It's great.
When it comes to how schools teach language, I think the U.S. is failing on that front massively. I am a highschool senior in Spanish 2, the class feels quite abysmal, I quite literally go into that class not saying a single Spanish words, it's just writing Grammer and vocabulary, we aren't INTERACTING with it in any more meaningful way, we aren't making associations beyond simple memory for tests and assingments
Although not part of the GCSE core, it was required by our school to try and learn 2 languages and you were required to do a GCSE in one. I assumed it was manually required by all schools.
Schools vary, when I was in school you were required to do 1 language in year 7, and a 2nd language years 8-9 based if you scored high enough on your first in year 7. GCSE of any language was optional, however we were a 'maths and computing' specialist school and for us at he time ICT was mandatory. Another school in our town was a 'language' specialist school and for them 1 language was mandatory. I don't know if things are different now, I finished my GCSEs 14 years ago, but at the time there seemed to be some freedom in what schools wanted to enforce.
I can remember my year 9 when I was able to drop Spanish and that's purely because most didn't like it. No one really had any passion for it (myself included) and so we never put any work in and when we were able to not do it we didn't and went from the year doing it to about one class for gsce's
french was compulsory y3-y7 and spanish was compulsory alongside french in y7, in y8 you had to choose either french or spanish to do that year and then i chose to keep doing spanish into y11 anyway as a gcse. five years each in two languages and i doubt i could hold a conversation in either 😭 exposure to media definitely helped me learn the languages i do know instead of standard schooling
@@FullMetalFeline I do have to say I think I would rather have been learning Java and Python than French. My formal IT education ended in Y7, the school didn't offer it. Mainly because I have lost almost all the French I learned at school due to lack of exposure whereas use of Python is included within my Uni degree.
i'm swedish and to be honest i think a big reason we learn english is movies and shows, when i was little i was always far ahead of my classmates all throughout school because i liked watching american shows and movies and learned more english that way.
A friend of mine studied German in college and eventually got a job where he was posted near Frankfurt a couple of times a year for about two weeks at a time. He figured he had a golden chance to polish his language skills, but when he got there basically from the first sentence in every conversation it was all really good English! He did make a point of talking to the Taxi Drivers to and from the hotel every day. They were mostly Turkish, had German proficiency pretty compatible with his, and were much more comfortable speaking German than English.
I think you missed the mark mate. I am English, learning Portuguese in Portugal at 23. I like learning Portuguese and it feels much more rewarding as I actually have a worthwhile application for my efforts. I started to learn French in school but didn't continue with it because: I have no particular desire to live in France, consume their media above other foreign languages which I have equal exposure to nor is it spoken frequently by my family or friends which doesn't help me learn. Say I do learn another language, there is very little application for my time spent learning a second language and alternatively I would rather spend my time learning something else if i didn't live abroad. The difference between UK and other countries is that if we learn a language we can interact with maybe a minority of Europe, which we maybe have some interest in to make it worth while. Whereas continental Europeans have their native language and English which is much more wide spread and present in their culture. Saying oh we need more teachers to teach isn't really the solution I think. If you intend on living in England and not moving to a foreign county or don't love their culture enough to have the motivation, then it's a bit of a shot in the dark to pick a language as a youth and hope you happen to interact with that culture later in life. Basically if I spent years learning French I could watch their films without subtitles and use it if I happen to go on holiday to France or happen to meet a French person in UK. If a French person learns English, there is a huge amount of English language media to consume (which I didn't appreciate how prevalent it is abroad until moving to Portugal) , also you can interact with a large percentage of Europeans too. I think it simply comes down to the lack of exposure and opportunity to use a foreign language in UK, leads to little motivation. I think to properly encourage more English people to learn another language there needs to be a wide spread cultural influence by another language in media to provide the motivation. I am not saying English people learning a second language is useless but it is far less useful compared to other citizens of European countries due to lack of prevalence in our media and the reverse of English language films, music, TV often dominating over their native language media. I have often asked German or Portuguese people if they listen to much music in their native language and they frequently say no they don't like it and they prefer English language music. the films showing in Portugal are 90% in English, so if their media often can't convince a native speaker to consume or there is a lack of it frequently, the attraction for a foreigner is likely gonna low.
I'm English, and I remember sitting in French class chanting: parle, parles, parle, parlons, parlez, parlent. The teacher helpfully wrote the conjugation down in a table with columns for number and rows for person. We spent a good deal of time going through multiple verbs that way. Needless to say I've forgotten them all. German lessons were a little better, as the teacher didn't make us do the chanting. She just ignored the fact that conjugations were something we needed to learn. At no time, however, did either teacher bother to say what conjugation, person, and number actually were. We were mostly ignorant of the fact that verbs conjugate, there being not much evidence for it in English. Sure, we understood plural, but that applied to nouns, so we never made the connection between it and number for verbs. We also took an "English language" lesson, which aimed to teach us standard English (as opposed to whatever Northern variety we were dragging into the classroom). But again, the teacher thought it better to explain when we should sign letters "Yours sincerely" rather than "Yours faithfully". Needless to say, I've not used that in quite a while. What was missing wasn't a focus on a single language like in other countries. English as a lingua franca makes it easy for them to choose what language to teach children: only one is extremely useful to everybody. For us, English as a lingua franca makes it that decision hard: all are equally useless to a random group of children. What we needed was a focus on language as a whole. Lessons in linguistics, I suppose. Knowledge we could apply both to our own language and to any that we later chose to learn. Once we found our own reasons for why a language is worthwhile, we could climb that ladder to proficiency much quicker. In short, teach linguistics in high school rather than individual languages.
Here in the Philippines, it's mandatory to learn English, Filipino, and your local language (though in my case, I never reached the time where learning the local language was mandatory). English was my first language so I had to learn the local language (Bisaya in my region) and Filipino. I was able learn my local language through exposure while Filipino took a while because even if I had 13 years of schooling, exposure is hard to get when people around you normally don't speak it
Well at least you learned somehow. Some English-speaking Filipinos I've seen stayed monolingual, kinda isolating them from the rest. They never had true connection with their surroundings.
An important part about learning languages is actually remembering it. I spent years from primary through secondary learning french, and many years of not saying or reading a single french words means ive forgotten all of it. Is it worth people learning an additional language if theres a possibility that the vast majority will completely forget it all?
In The Netherlands, English is part of the CSE (GCSE). Also we get German and French for 3 years in highschool before we can choose to stop learning it or keep it and have it at the CSE.
So speaking of swedish and education, Swedish is a mandatory language that everyone in every school must take in Finland. It kind of works, most Finns can speak very basic swedish. But while English isn't a mandatory class, practically every finn can speak English. I think a big factor in why people learn languages or not is if foreign languages seem attractive. This may be because there are better paying jobs in other languages, if there's a lot of migration to or between a nearby country with a different language, or because a different language has a strong cultural influence. English tends to always meet all three of these criteria, especially the money and cultural presence ones (thanks TV, Hollywood, and the internet for that). Countries that are more insular are less likely to speak foreign languages, but people also don't want to put time into learning a foreign language they don't like or that isn't useful in a concrete way.
Language education in England can also be really disjointed which doesn't help. When I was in Year 2 (7 years old), I had Spanish lessons. In Year 3 (8 Y.O.), I stopped having Spanish lessons and I have no recollection of why that was. In Year 5 (10 Y.O.), I had French lessons. In Year 7 (12 Y.O.), I had German and Latin lessons and stopped learning French. In Year 8 (13 Y.O.), I had German and French lessons and stopped learning Latin. In Year 10 (15 Y.O.), I had German lessons only and stopped learning French. In Year 12 (17 Y.O.), I had no language lessons at all as I finished my German GCSEs and didn't do any languages for A Level. Like how was I meant to learn anything if I am constantly dropping languages and restarting them from scratch? :I
@@Trolligarch That sounds simply disorganised. (What you wrote in your original comment.) I also had Latin lessons only briefly, but this was because I dropped an elective in eight grade. It's the norm here in Switzerland to start with a mandatory or "semi-mandatory" language and to keep having lessons in it until you're done with school. (Yes, my Latin lessons would have stopped after two years, at the end of mandatory school, but this was because I attended a type of school afterwards that didn't offer Latin, which was normal for that type of school.)
It still seems to me like it's down to English being the trade language. Most countries that have higher rates of bilingualism, the two languages are local+English, because you need to learn English. English specifically. That's why it's taught from grade school, it's a necessary life skill, probably, putting aside the value of education for the sake of education, English is one of the most important skills you'll learn in school. (The exceptions to this seem to mostly be the places that have another colonial language present, like the Francophone world). Where I grew up, the largest minority language is spoken by a fifth of the population, is on all the signs and basically anything official, and the other 80% still put more effort, and retain more, studying English. What is the equivalent to that in England? To properly mirror what happens elsewhere, they will need to pick one language that everyone learns, and everyone studies together and practices together. I can thing of a few languages that might make sense, but that's exactly the point, there's no obvious go-to language like English is in many other places...
As an American, ever since I was very young I've had an interest in foreign languages, but I never ended up really learning any other language besides English, which I happen to be very proficient in. My high school had a Spanish teaching class but I never took it, and that was the extent of language learning resources in my school. Sometimes I study Latin but that's only really as a hobby. I never travel and have never traveled outside of the US (and likely never will) so the chances I will ever need to learn a foreign language are slim to none.
A story from the UK in the very early 1970s. I was at Middle School in the 1960s. There were a few periods when we received French lessons but there didn't seem to be any structure to it. Anyway, I wasn't very interested because I really wanted to study German. I knew that French, German and another language (I forget which) were offered at High School. When I reached High School as what was then called a 3rd form pupil, they said "You do French in 3rd form, German is available in 4th form". French and German were still taught at that point but the other language had gone. I reached the end of 3rd form and it was time to choose subjects for what was called GCE in those days, so I asked about German. I was told "We have just phased out German". I asked why and was told "It is because the UK is joining the EEC". I pointed out that Germany was part of the EEC and I was told "They speak French in the EEC so we are not teaching German". Go on, I challenge you to find any sense in that! We had a very good teacher for French but it wasn't what I wanted. I had to do a modern language, they said that universities like students to have a GCE in a modern language. Only French was available, so I studied French. It went well, I achieved a top grade in the GCE O level exam. But I hated it. I did not take it any further. I studied a bit of German as an adult. The result is that I forgot most of the French I had learnt and ended up with quite basic German. If it had been the other way around, I think I would have studied German at A level at least.
I feel like I could have agreed with you when I'd only lived in English-speaking countries. Now, having lived in Finland for some time, and seen the level of Swedish proficiency here, I think there's more to it. I've done better in a school Swedish test, purely based on guessing based on English and a little German, than some Finns who'd been studying it for years.
Finn here. I have seen a student, in upper secondary school, being thrown out of class from loudly arguing with swedish language teacher 'what do I need Swedish for?!?!'. The catch? The dude had swedish first name and swedish family name. He also lived in village which had name only in... Swedish😂. And he lived 'stone-throws away from majority swedish-speaking municipality. So yeah....😅 EDIT: teacher --> swedish language teacher
I'm Finnish and learned to speak English by the time I was 10 or 11. People might credit the Finnish education system, etc. But the truth is that I and my friends learned English as kids that fast because every game we played was in English and there was no Finnish translation available. You kind of have to pick up English so you won't constantly get stuck in every game you play. This was back around 2006 and there were some guides online but that doesn't really help as all of them are in English. Runescape was a prime example of this, the quests were really tricky without guides to begin with. Another reason is that we hear English on TV and in movies all the time, we don't dub movies that much except for some kid's shows and animations. Lastly to those who doubt this for some reason. I was always leaps and bounds ahead of my sister in English. She would have almost perfect grades while mine were average except for math and English but still, she couldn't really speak English until she was 15, and even then she was below the level of 12-year-old me. So thank you Pokemon, Runescape, dragon ball, Halo, etc. for making my life a little bit easier and teaching me English.
There's a bit of an elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about - an individual or a society learns another language specifically because of its utility. Media is a huge one, and I am guessing that the surge in popularity of Korean media is driving an uptick in that. When I was a teenager, anime was all the rage and there was a significant thirst for learning Japanese. Today, English language media dominates in much of the world. Business is another one. English is hugely useful for this, so a lot of people are driven to learn it. Similarly, there's been an uptick in Mandarin at least in the U.S. explicitly for business purposes, and the languages are about as far from each other in mechanics as you can get (almost). Hell, English is the primary language for air travel traffic control, another point of utility. Go to the former countries inside the Soviet sphere of influence and among the older generations, it's not English that was learned, but Russian. Distance, both literal in km or figurative in terms of language similarity also plays a purpose. People sometimes make hay of the fact that the U.S. is starkly monolingual by a lot of measures compared to Europe, but that's just it - I can travel from New York to L.A. and literally can't tell the difference linguistically speaking (other than the SoCal penchant for labeling freeways as "the 101" or "the 5", of course). That's almost 4000 km. Travel 4000 km in Europe and you're looking at something like Lisbon, Portugal, to Riga, Latvia and you're going to cross something like seven or eight languages, and that's being charitable. If crossing from California to Nevada means crossing into a different language group, it'd vastly increase the incentive to learn another language. Or look at Switzerland, which has no less than FOUR languages (never giving up on you, Romansh! You can rebound! Do it! DO IT!) and is smaller than the U.S. state of Iowa. Similarly, it's much easier when your language has close kin. A Portuguese learning Spanish or Italian has a significantly easier time than even someone from England learning German, its (okay, second, sorry Frisian) closest relative. Norwegian and Swedish are so similar I've seen it argued that they might be more properly characterized as dialects than separate languages. Because English is the de facto lingua franca (and yes, I find it enormously funny to say that, though I suspect the French find it far less amusing) among large swathes of the world, if you're going to learn one extra language, for most people that makes utilitarian sense. Just promoting education won't help; I learned French from the second grade, and the moment I got to France, nobody would speak French to me because their English was better. Now, if learning French specifically helped me get a job in my field, that'd change things dramatically (though for me, the closest that'd be would be Quebecois French, so again, probably wouldn't make anyone from France happy to hear that. ;-) )
Your point about just which language to learn is really important. If you have a group of business people in a meeting and one is from Portugal, one is from Japan, one from the UK, one from Italy and one from the Netherlands which language will they all communicate in? English. Because that's the language they ALL learn in school. The person from the UK will be thought the poor linguist as they're the only ones not speaking in a foreign language. But what are they meant to do? Learn Portuguese, Japanese, Italian and Dutch? If that UK person had been me, I would also be speaking to them in English and they'd probably think I was a rubbish linguist too. In fact, I speak Romanian, French, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Polish, German and Finnish. So even if kids all left high school speaking one foreign language really well I think that would be fantastic for them just for broadening their minds and personal development and for if they actually had contact with the particular country of the language they'd learned but in terms of international communications it wouldn't change much. Quite often we end up using English whether we really want to or not. By the way, the last time I heard a guy complain loudly in a tourist resort about the fact the locals just didn't speak English very well, he was actually Swedish. Also BBC1 and 2 are useless when it comes to foreign language stuff. Most of the foreign language stuff on British TV is on Channel 4 (All4) and BBC 4 and the predominant language is Danish. A new series of 'Den som dræber' started on BBC 4 last night. Maybe we should just get all our kids to learn Danish.
Yes, they showed a double bill of Those Who Kill so it was on for two hours in Danish with English subtitles. I'm pretty sure it was on BBC4 on Friday night. Not much but it's something.
Let's face it.Learnig a foreign language is time-consuming, sometimes boring and at times-frustrating.The reward comes if you go to a place, you've never been before and understand every word people say in their native tougne.And then their is a switch from your world to theirs.You dream in the foreign language, you read books in it and you're proud of yourself.It's a reward, money can't buy.And it's keeping your brain young and flexible.
I’m a high school sophmore from the United States and I can relate. At my school, everyone has to take at least two years of a foreign language. However, the only option is Spanish. My Spanish teacher is a native speaker from Colombia and also describes learning Spanish as very easy. Though if you’re like me, you’ll realize that learning any language is never easy, especially when you get older. I’m also trying to learn Mandarin Chinese for family reasons, and that’s considered a great leap forward in difficulty compared to Spanish. I do see it as more useful than Spanish to me as I said before, family reasons, and I also get more exposure to Chinese than I do Spanish. Anyways, back to learning Spanish, almost everyone lacks motivation to do so, as they’re all 15+ and not 7 or 9. I have known people at my school who are conversationally fluent in the language, either because they’re native speakers or they passed all 4 years with flying colors. But if you tried to hold a conversation with me in Spanish, I wouldn’t know half the things you’re saying and my vocabulary is as big as the average four-year-old’s.
When I was a kid being forced to learn Spanish, I hated it because I was being FORCED to do it. In the later years I tried Swedish and French, neither stuck. 2 years prior I tried Latin which didn’t stick either. However one day I just decided “Hey let’s start learning Russian”, and I have been doing so for nearly a year now! In conclusion, I am not sure forcing people to learn a language in school will make them bilingual, at least in my own experience.
My first language is English BUT I live in south africa and it was COMPULSORY to learn Afrikaans starting in grade R, (which for those of you who dont know is a language derived from dutch) so when I am trying to learn other languages it makes it much easier because of how many similarities afrikaans has to dutch and german and even swedish.
The majority of people at my school are taking Mandarin as a Gcse at Like 60% then Spanish at like 30% French at around 15% and German at Around 5% Japanese at 2.5% and if you’re wondering why it adds up to 112.5% some people take multiple Languages
My school mandates every student to take either french or spanish at gcse and. Mandatory GCSEs won't be enough. Most of our teachers are native speakers, and even those who aren't are very well acquainted with their languages (many having at least lives in france or spain). And yet, most people i know are barely competent in french and Spanish. So really, primary schools should be prioritised to ensure that students go into secondary school with a solid foundation, primary and secondary schools should communicate to ensure students continue with the same language across all stages of education, and the whole GCSE model for languages at least is in dire need of reform (and these definitely aren't easy things to implement, but they're what we need to improve bilingualism in the uk)
Vladimir Peniakoff, a Russian born in Belgium, grew up speaking English, among several other languages, because his educated family insisted on it. He became an engineer in the Middle East and in World War Two he organised a special forces unit in the British Army called "Popski's Private Army" (radio operators had trouble transmitting Peniakoff so he adopted "Popski" as a code name). After service in North Africa his unit took part in the Italian campaign and often worked with Italian partisans. Peniakoff wrote later that he did not understand where the English reputation for not being able to learn foreign languages came from. According to him, members of his unit quite quickly learned Italian. Their grammar was no doubt sometimes bad but he wrote that after a year in Italy he could pick any member of his unit at random, give him a complex message and tell him to visit the Italian partisans and give them the message. They would do it, return and explain what the partisans had said in response. Perhaps members of his unit were unusually resourceful and intelligent - they were carefully selected by Peniakoff.
Indian here, we have a lot of regional languages and not just Hindi, but because of all these different languages we need a language to bridge the gap and for us those languages are Hindi and English. I suck at Hindi but my English is good thanks to spending half of my childhood in America, but there are definitely times it would’ve been really nice to know Hindi. And of course I use my regional language, Telugu, the most aside from English.
Sometime ago I remember reading that following independence English was considered the common language for all Indians because it was practically nobody's native language. I understand there has been a push to make Hindi the common language and that has upset southern Indians because it unfairly favours northern Indians who either have Hindi as their native language or speak a closely related language such as Gujarati. What is the situation? Are most Indians now on board with making Hindi the national language?
In my anecdotal experience, foreign language teaching in Elementary and High School in the US has been given a lot of criticism for forcing students to learn with little to no real encouragement with a classroom setting with word lists of the week and students being at various and inconsistent levels of knowledge of the target language. Many people will say a classroom environment with textbooks is bad a way to encourage students to learn a foreign language. I had 5 years of Spanish and I don't even remember 5 words from those classes. When I did German for just 2 years, I enjoyed it and remembered a lot of information simply because I was motivated to learn, yet even then the course felt it was focused on getting you credits rather than making you fluent. This of course can be a criticism for education focusing on grades rather than knowledge or perhaps not. It does seem like in Europe, even with a classroom setting, there is a lot more success, obviously because there is more of a incentive to learn but my European friends all say that they learned English mostly from American media on their own starting at a young age.
Loool, definitely do the next video on the politics of language learning! BTW, back in 2019, I was hosting a workshop for primary school kids in East Ham, London. It was just a regular inner city London school, but they still took Mandarin classes (with an actual Mandarin teacher ;)). It's important to remember that the statistics aren't absolute, either!
as a canadian, about 40% of our population can hold a convo in another language but i predict that that number will go up. Personally i live in a decently large city and we get a lot of immigrants, what’s more, there is a lot of immersion schools. So some kids will grow up with english and the languages their parents grew up speaking and then if their parents put them in french immersion, arabic, german, mandarin, or spanish bilangual in elementary/middle school, they end up trilingual. tbh most of my friends speak 3 languages but the older generation speaks one, two if they’re immigrants
Here in Australia, there's less than 1000 non-native speakers of Mandarin, despite Mandarin classes being consistantly taken in High School and in the final exams, all because it's 'heritage speakers' taking it themselves. I was actually in one of those classes, but I had practically zero knowledge of Chinese culture besides 'Great Wall' and 'Tiananmen Square'. The characters looked so difficult to do my brain just shut off and didn't want to even bother. I am a 中文学习者 now, but only because of friends and living in a highly Chinese-speaking area of my city. I would probably have zero interest otherwise.
In Finland, besides Finnish, everyone also learns some Swedish (or vice versa for Swedish speakers), plus another foreign language (almost always English). Many also take a few lessons of a second foreign language. This doesn't mean everyone speaks four languages or even two, but all have at least some exposure and a change to learn them.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the linguistic similarity between the national languages of Northern European countries and English. Even if we factors like schooling and exposure, it's a lot easier to pick up a language that's similar to your native tongue than a very distinct language. If for some reason Xhosa were the international language of commerce, I doubt that Swedish people would have the same proficiency in Xhosa as they currently do in English.
As a French, I love how English people make fun of our accent while we can have complex conversations in English but all they know in frrench is "croissant" and "omelette du fromage".
I'm 53, had to have language lessons from age 12 to 16. Had the choice of French or German. I can honestly say that I learned very little, despite our teachers being fluent (or native in one case). And I'm pretty sure that 90% of the rest of the classes learnt very little. And that's because a lack of interest. Few of us are exposed to other languages, so there's nothing to relate what we learn in our lessons to outside of class. Even when we go abroad, try speaking a few words in the local language and in a lot of places people hear a non-local accent and respond in English (have you tried speaking a few words of Swedish in an English accent in Sweden?). There's also the situation you mentioned about which language to learn. Yes there's chauvinism and arrogance, but the main key factor that makes a language easy to learn - exposure - is not there. Although that doesn't explain why so many people in Wales can't speak Welsh...
Is monolingualism really something we should strive to “cure”? I don’t think It’s necessarily rooted in chauvinism, just in a lack of motive. As you said, many Anglophones just don’t need any other language to communicate or consume media, and most people only learn as many languages as they absolutely have to. To be clear I started learning English at 7 years old so you know I’m not biased.
One big cultural difference I've noticed is how people talk about languages, in Denmark you talk about how many foreign languages you speak, not whether you're bilingual or monolingual. It actually took me a really long time to realize that anglophones meant speaking two languages in total when they talked about being bilingual because I just didn't count Danish since speaking your native language obviously isn't impressive. I thought that they meant speaking two foreign languages, which I didn't at the time though I now speak German and very little Chinese.
as someone in england i don't think think making people learn will work bc the curriculum is so bad, for my GCSE's the teachers are basically telling me to learn the 'key words' so if i find them in a sentence i can say it was about whatever and that isn't helping me speak the language
I think part of the problem is genuinely that attitude that you spoke about at the start. Nobody I went to school with wanted to do language learning except for the few students who's first language wasn't english and those who were academically inclined outwith school, and as such had already broken the monolingual barrier. Hell even I, a now neck deep linguistics nerd, didn't gave a single shit about learning any language other than my native language (Scottish Gàidhlig), which annoyingly enough I was only given a single chance to learn in school, which ultimately failed since I was one of like 3 students who actually signed up for it. The only language education We got in primary education (aged 5-12) was a literal handful of lessons in french which we weren't even really taught for, we were just given ipads and made to do duolingo lessons. While we did have to learn a language during the first two years of secondary school (french by default), I think being forced to do it made a lot of people resent it. If there was more Linguistic education in those primary years then I think more people would be inclined to care about it going through their school years, but with the way things are at the moment people just seem to see it as another massive waste of their time for a skill that the majority of them will never need. There's a real culture here in the UK (though I'm sure it's applicable in other English speaking nations) wherein there's seen as little need to learn foreign languages because well why should we? English is already the Lingua franca of the modern age and unless one has family still deeply rooted in other languages or cultures then it's a pointless task. I especially find that sometimes there's an almost class based attitude to bilinguality, as though being able to speak many languages is seen as a merit of only those who have the free time and money to entertain such frivolous pursuits and that people of the lower classes who are whole bloodedly British are seen as oddities for their being bilingual. I've been learning the Japanese language for about 3-4 years now on and off, often times not really studying terribly hard as it is more of a hobby than anything else to me. It shocks me how many times I've spoken to friends, family and acquaintances and mentioned that I speak/study the language and they always act as though I'm some kind of mad scientist dabbling in some eccentric and near occult vocation. One of my friends said "why would you even bother" or something to that effect which left me dumbfounded. How as a culture have we gotten to the point that learning languages is seen with such a skewed perspective as opposed to just seeing it as the means of communication with our fellow peoples of the world that it is. It truly saddens me. I've tried to encourage a few friends now to take up learning new languages even if it's just doing a duolingo lesson a day (Largely motivated by the fact that I just want someone to practice Japanese with) but each and every single one of them gave it up within days. I guess the concept of studying something for years is too daunting for some people. Anyway that's my essay, I've got a lot of feelings about this topic (which is probably evident) but nobody I know cares about linguistics at all so TH-cam comment sections are gonna have to bear the brunt my arm chair intellectualism.
In my high school the only language classes we had were for Spanish and French, about 90% choose Spanish so that class was always full. I choose French and in my class were 3 people… it was a little sad but it really made for great one on one learning. The classes themselves were only 2 years and only taught basic conversational skills. Most people opted out in the second year in order to take easier electives like Physical Education or Health and Nutrition. Culture definitely plays a part, I live South Texas so Spanish has a real use down here with so many bilingual people near the border with Mexico but really the proximity to the border is why they can fill seats. There would have to be a real culture change to get people across the nation to care.
In Austria we learn in English for at least 8 years and 12 if you want to complete high school and its mandatory to write like the last big test in it. A lot of Austrians speak english and quite a lot of them probably because of school but general usefulness, internet, vacation etc. deffo play a big part aswell
Most people who learn a language at school because they have to will end up forgetting it. There just isn't enough time that children spend at school to actually retain all that they learn and so it's essential for them to integrate it into their lives in some form or another. I played video games on EU servers during my school years and beyond and it provided ample opportunities to actually use the English language, thus I am still fluent even years after graduation. I also studied Italian at school and basically forgot all of it because I practically never used it outside of the classroom. School is not enough. Without it being necessary, most people will simply not be able to speak a second language and this necessity has just never come along for most English natives.
I live in America and have an antenna for TV shows, and I can say that with like, 30 something channels, only one of them was in a foreign language, that being Español
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If you haven't already, look at Irish proficiency in Ireland. :]
Sorry to be pedantic but it's what I do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Pretty sure the greater than sign next to Yiddish at 3:49 should be a less than sign
What about the phonetic, grammatical, or lexical "distance" (similarity or dissimilarity) between two languages? For example, could it be that Swedish is in some sense (phonetic, grammatical, or lexical) "close" to English, and therefore the de facto international language, English, is easier for Swedes to learn than it is for, say, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Russian people? Or is English at least closer to Swedish than alternatives? - Like, is Swedish closer to English than it is to Chinese? (I would think so, since English and Swedish are Germanic languages, whereas Chinese is not.)
@@robertjenkins6132
Actually Chinese is much closer in structure to English than Japanese and Korean, or let's say Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, which are not Indo-European.
I'm Japanese and can't utter a word in Chinese, but I was able to get by as an independent traveller in mainland China simply by handwriting Chinese ideograms in the exact order of the English language, which is completely different from my mother tongue.
As an example, I realised I didn't have enough cash of Renmin Yuan when I got on a taxi, so I handwrote to the driver: "我要行銀行ATM。"
我 for "I",
要 for "need [to]",
行 for "go [to]",
銀行ATM for "[a] bank ATM".
It's as simple as that.
On the other hand, if this happened to be Japanese, it should have been: "私は銀行のATMへ行く必要があります。"
私 for "I-my-me",
は for a topic post-position word No.1,
銀行 for "[a] bank",
の for "---'s",
ATM for "[an] ATM",
へ for "to" but as a post-position instead of preposition,
行く for "go",
必要 for "need or necessity",
が for a topic post-position word No.2,
あります for "there is something, or there exists something".
The Japanese structure is completely different from English or Chinese.
The main problem is exposure. At school I had the choice of French or German. I chose German. Other than the fact my German Teacher suffered a nervous breakdown at the beginning of my final year and was not replaced, the main problem is exposure. Who do you practice with ? In my entire lifetime I have briefly met 1 or 2 and Germans probably the same French. They say practice makes perfect so if you are thinking of learning a language consider Hindi, Gujerati or Polish......otherwise what is point.....its a bit like learning Latin, know any Roman's ? 😂😂😂
I am Swedish and I think what’s important to consider is that if you want to take part in Swedish culture as a Swede, English has become mandatory. Majority of classic films are in English, a lot of the series people watch are in English, the fandoms the youth are part of use English, a lot of books people read are in English and going abroad like a lot of Swedes do requires English. It’s a feedback loop where each generation becomes even more entrenched in the English language and even more influenced by mostly American and British culture.
Learning English in Sweden isn’t easy though, it’s literally free. We do not have to try since we naturally pick it up sometime in childhood and continually improve it.
This has resulted in the Swedish youth often struggling to say things without randomly throwing in English words mid sentence since that’s become so common.
Yeah I don't know so many words for certain ideas in my native language that I just end up using the English equivalent for it. And most people understand the English equivalents so i don't bother learning the actual word for it in my language
all of this has happened here in denmark as well!
It’s also worth noting that Swedish and English grammar are quite similar, which makes it a lot easier. A lot of people watch English movies, tv shows, and listen to English language music in Japan, too, but the extent of the English knowledge there is mostly limited to learned borrowings. As always, everything is more complicated than any of us have time to discuss
considering how its increasingly becoming more prominent and the youth seem to depend on it more and more, would you say that Swedish proficiency and relevance could start to decline in Sweden?
Man I don’t know if that is bad or good, as someone who has spent a lot of their life working on learning Spanish and French in order to break from English it just feels like English taking over as the definitive lingua franca is inevitable at this point.
As an American I think part of it is our culture is incredibly insular. I think we just consume a lot less international media and news than ppl in other countries. You rarely encounter foreign language music or movies.
Yeah, usually the only foreign stuff that we get is the stuff thats already become a worldwide sensation or otherwise.
We’re only about 5% of the Earth’s population and yet the Dollar is the Reserve Currency of the World.
The United States really is the most important country, that’s why we still don’t use the Metric System and we ultimately only speak English.
Yeah and people from the USA seem to think America is a country and not a continent. Maybe another facet of the same problem?
American here, too. From.Brazil, in America.
It's called chauvinism
Americans are worse for this than other English speaking countries too. It might be getting better, but while other English speaking countries consume English speaking media, Americans usually only consume American media, so they aren't even exposed to other English speaking media as much.
I'm not american, but I think this has slowly been changing since the 2000's so you actually do get some other non-american english media?
It's definitely not as simple as making it part of the education system. In Japan, English is a required and consistent part of school, and yet it's pretty rare for a Japanese person to know English beyond a very surface level.
Well then I shall say your grammar is impressive.
@@danielchan1668 certainly not because of schooling
In Romania, we take 2 foreign languages in school, usually English and French, but no one learns French, we hate it and because we hate it we have no motivation to learn it. English has the exposure factor to it, yet there were always just a few classmates that could speak at the current levels I was in in each year. In a short time, I got so good at English, I passed my 8th grade English teacher in vocabulary and fluency. Also, the teachers' knowledge didn't evolve with the language, so the language they teach is polite and sterile. The best anyone can do is get the basic grammar right and then jump in to a language by yourself. Once I got a hang of the grammar, I improved much faster. It's not necessary to understand grammar, I sucked at Romanian grammar as well (especially at naming and explaining why things are the way they are), it's enough to be able to apply it well through practice.
@@danielchan1668 I'm not Japanese lol, I'm an american that learned japanese through media exposure
There is, though, a widespread belief that though it's true that the Japanese aren't great at English that that's actually caused by a lack of confidence in speaking, rather than actually being worse at the language at any given stage (obviously, this does hinder development). People aren't confident in their ability to speak and that undermines their actual speaking, and I've found that the Japanese aren't actually that bad at the other facets of English. They also don't get as much practice in everyday life, because they're rather insular. Also, a lot of the statistics are self-reported, so I'd be surprised if there weren't countries where people are over-confident and others where people are under-confident. And, of course, it might just be that the teaching system in Japan isn't fully-geared towards English learning and that it just needs to be updated.
You cannot force someone to learn a language and become fluent in it no matter how much you improve the education system. I live in Finland where all students are required to take compulsory Swedish courses in school. The language has extremely limited practical applications here and as a result, not many students progress past the basics (myself included) in spite of having to take Swedish courses for years. On the flip side, not being able to speak any English is almost unheard of. I essentially consider myself to be a native speaker because I almost exclusively use English and prefer it to Finnish unless I'm speaking to my family or in class. Additionally, nobody who I've spoken to online has ever managed to correctly tell my nationality from my accent, guessing British or sometimes Australian instead of Finnish. I feel like exposure outside school has contributed more than formal education. In the case of Swedish, I'm not willing to deliberately get exposure to the language as I see it as being useless in comparison to English.
That goes to show that in order to really become fluent in a language, it must be useful enough for you to be willing to immerse yourself in the language like I have done with English, resulting in high proficiency.
And I always thought that the Scandinavian languages were similar to each other. Obviously they're not.
@@stuartbeacham Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are similar but Finish is a completely different language tree, Finnish is not a Scandinavian language it's a Uralic language. You could argue that Finland isn't Scandinavian but merely Nordic.
@@impyrobot Okay. Thanks for the information.
@@stuartbeacham Suomi is quite different from Norwegian/Swedish.
@@DavidPaulMorgan The only European language which is similar to Finnish IIRC is Estonian.
My first exposure to English was Lego Star Wars II at age 6 or 7. At first I was bummed out that Swedish wasn't an optional language, but when I started playing it didn't matter since there weren't any dialog anyway, and the game mechanics and menus were easy enough to understand through trial and error. The game lit the interest for the Star Wars films, as did many of the following Lego games. Those franchises helped to develop my English skills tremendously in the first 5 or so years of school
I had very little exposure to english as child, but didnt start to learn it, unitil I was nearly nine years old, because I first needed to go through the basics. Nowdays I know nearly 7000 english words and im only nineteen, so it could be said that im nearly fluent in english. I played many lego games also as kid, but didnt always understand what was said in there, unitil I grew older and easily got what was said in there.
@@jout738 You only need to know ~3000 words to be fully fluent in a language. English might have a larger vocabulary than most languages due to its widespread use in various places and disciplines, but a 7000 word vocabulary is definitely more than enough. Judging from the way you wrote your comment, I'd say you're probably fluent already.
Games are a pretty common way unschoolers learn to read.
I'm learning Russian and although it's tough, I do the same exact thing when I play video games. When playing Minecraft, Overwatch, etc. I usually switch it to Russian and I feel as though it does help a great deal.
I don't believe that solely making learning a foreign language a required education subject would be enough to "cure" monolingualism. I live in the US and my school district (or maybe just my state) requires that students take a foreign language class, yet the vast majority of the students are still subpar in their languages including myself. I would agree that the curricula for foreign languages in the US are still pretty faulty, but at least for Spanish, in my opinion, my teachers provided an engaging and effective learning environment.
At the end of the day, you can study a language all you want, but you're not going to be able to actually use it well unless you get a lot of exposure to it and actually use it a lot. I wish it were as simple as making it a core part of education, even with all that's required to do even that.
I'd also like to add that, in recent-ish years, my state began offering dual language immersion programs in elementary schools to all kids and I've seen really positive results from them; I hope this will be a huge step towards the rise of bilingualism in the states.
what age does the required language education start in the usa if you dont mind me asking? google results say most people start in fifth grade, or around the time they turn 18, which is pretty late for both cases in my opinion (in my country you start learning a second language as soon as you start your education, so when you're 6-7, and maybe even earlier since its common for preschools to include some basic language introduction as an option)
Good point.Having a language class in school doesn't necessarily mean you are actually learning that language.I had two mandatory foreign languages in middle to high school: English and French.Although I "learned" French in school for 7 years, I still can't speak any French.😂
I think that although people might not become fluent in a language, learning languages still increases your capability to understand different languages/cultures and makes it easier to pick up new languages later on. In Finland we need to learn Swedish but many people do not really speak it after studying it for 6+ years. It's probably a combination of lack of motivation and exposure, and could be thought as waste of time, but it think that it still provides the learner with wider perspective and help for later language learning, was it Swedish or anything else.
I agree, in order to properly learn a language, one needs to actually practice it properly. I know some people who have been learning French for years in school & even forget what être is likely due to lack of good resources or immersion, which seems like a pretty major issue. Also hey Hayden, idk if you recognize me but I sure do recognize you
I think no matter how well taught foreign languages are, if there's no reason or much oppurtunity to use them outside of the classroom it's still going to be futile.
This my case with Arabic unfortunately, I just can’t be bothered with it because most of my country’s population aren’t even natives.
I only really use arabic when I feel like I’m forced to, otherwise I stick to English.
Very much so.
Pretty much. Though even if Spanish isn't usable for any sort of communication in my place, listening and commenting on Spanish speaking videos keeps my memory up
@@litinup Although Arabic has the special difficulty in that it isn't really one language: what Arabs actually speak has roughly the same relationship to the standard written language (right down to the loss of declension in the spoken dialects), as the Romance languages do to Latin.
@@GCarty80not true at all lol, people who speak romance languages don't speak lating, I understand basically all arabic dialects, without out any issues and I never learned any of them so no they are not a different languages and I don't remember learning 22+ languages.
The whole language schooling discussion makes me want to share this
In Indonesia, we learn English for 12 years iirc, from year 1 of primary school to the third year of high school. And guess what? Almost all of my friends who are at least somewhat fluent in English actually learn it from games and the internet (so through exposure, not schooling). Maybe only one or two people I know that actually getting better at English through schooling
And this is probably heavily related to exposureness (if that's even a word). Almost all of my friends don't have anything to do with English in their daily lives so there's really no point in learning it, right? Almost anything is available in Indonesian anyway (except in-depth articles about niche subjects or something)
So yeah, I think what really drives people to be multilingual is exposure and necessity, schooling just helping a little bit
i think schooling gives you a base to start from, but yes exposure to media in other language does the most work i think
Can confirm, the life hack to learn english is to consume western entertainment from young age
if I could go back in time I would put on cartoons in a different language for myself. I'm not especially confident in any of the languages I've tried to learn. The only thing that would help me is immersion and it takes a lot to move countries.
Adding to your point: in Poland we also learn English for 12 years (13 if you go to college) and most people speak English either because of exposure, necessity or both. We also have compulsory third language, mostly German but that depends on school (in one of the highschools which I could go to, option was between French and Japanese). Still most people speak English at best. Also changing third language between middle school and high school, when middle schools were still a thing, was quite popular. So a lot of people learned one language for 3 years then second one for other 3 years (like me) which gave proficiency in none.
I'm french and it's the same. I learned english with youtube and discord, school only helped me get the basics
Growing up as a Dane, at least half the songs I heard on the radio were in languages I didn't understand, English being a large majority of it. I struggled with the language in school until I started using it all of the time online. At some point when I was getting the hang of the language and realized that I understood some of the lyrics of those songs on the radio, and it felt like a super power.
...or you can understand native English people in a bar talking to each other. Which is actually one of the "endgames" to learn a foreign language, because in bars the people do not care about speaking slowly and clearly at all. :)
I think you should also take into consideration how easy it is for people to learn a languge based on how closely that language is related to their native language. It may be a big reason why countries like Japan and Sweden, despite both putting aside a lot of time in school towards learning english, differ so much in the percentage of people that can speak english. English and japanese are very different languages, not even coming from the same language tree, while english and swedish are both germanic languages from the same tree.
Growing up learning english as a native sweidsh speaker myself, the process of learning english was made a lot easier by that language just making a lot of sense to me, in everything from how sentences are constructed to individual words. For example, in english you would say "A red car", and in swedish you would say "En röd bil", "red" and "röd" in this case both being adjectives, "car" and "bil" both being nouns. In french, it would become "une voiture rouge", the noun and the adjective switching places as opposed to the english and swedish version. Just looking at the words "red" and "röd" you can tell the languages are similar, and that trend continues, using colours as an example: "green" and "grön", "blue" and "blå" and "grey" and "grå".
While other factors such as the percieved usefulness of the language and ones exposure to it play a large role, you should not forget that us scandinavians in particular have it pretty easy learning english in contrast to a japanese person.
Personally, the word order isn't what made French difficult for me in högstadiet, it was all the bloody silent letters. Which is why I dropped French and switched to Spanish. It makes so much more sense.
On that note, for some reason about halfway through our Spanish lessons just sort of stopped. One day we, the students, came to class with our supplies and the classroom door was locked and the teacher didn't show up. Same thing next lesson, with no word from the school about what was going on. Eventually we just stopped going. Even to this day I have no idea what happened, and the class didn't show up in my grades when I graduated.
I picked up Spanish once more in gymnasiet, had a great teacher that came from Peru originally, and graduated with a pretty good grade. Then I never used it again and forgot most of it.
Exactly this. I’m American and fluent in English and Japanese.
Japan is culturally different from America (the style of English they primarily learn) and Japanese is linguistically different in almost every way.
People who speak Romance or Germanic language are going to find it much easier to learn English overall.
Well, as a child in japan if you try to speak english in a more or less correct way, you'll be laughed at or even bullied. Yes, they prefer the katakana "version" of english. I don't think they really want to learn english.
@@tcbbddddBecause they are using loanword from English instead of English language in everyday life. It is same that English speakers are not trying to pronounce loanword from French like actual French language in everydaylife.
Not only Japanese (I'm from ROK), every language has loanwords, and their speakers do not always pronounce the same way that it origin from. It's because every language has different phonology.
한국도 마찬가지인데, 만약 당신이 한국어 화자인데도 불구하고 커피를 [kʰʌ.pʰi]가 아니라 [kʌ.fiː]로 발음하면 그들은 당신이 잘난 척 한다고 생각할 것입니다.
Sorry for my poor English.
@@DefaultFlame When a teacher has a mental breakdown and literally disappears, they either replace them with new teacher or wipe it completely if that's impossible. it's what happened to one of my teachers. We students lost all our work because they outright refused to even step foot in the school ever again. This was when all work was still done on paper and books, no computerisation or internet.
As a Canadian in western Canada, I've been exposed to french frequently through school and get some exposure to it through signage in national parks and nutritional information on food, but otherwise have basically no interaction with the language. This is in a country that is technically bilingual and has (theoretical) funding for it. This is a very difficult problem to solve and I have no idea if mandatory classes would help if you have no real world exposure to it in daily life. Two Anglophones aren't going to have conversations en francais, even if they both have an understanding of it.
In Ontario, you get mandatory French classes from grade 4 all the way to high school.
Mandatory classes would likely increase hatred of the french. Why must canadian be forced to learn any language other than english!?!
I have found there is a hell of a lot of French media out there if you really want to commit to the language especially TV and film.
@@Jay_Johnson Absolutely! Not to mention the sheer amount of content on TH-cam alone. It really boils down to individual motivation at the end of the day.
You hear someone speaking French out here once or twice a year and it always feels like a Sasquatch sighting. Way more Tagalog, Indian language, east African language and even eastern European language speakers out and about here.
I think I know why. As an American my sister really wanted to learn Italian, and when she went to study in Italy for a semester she was so excited to practice with real Italian speakers. When she got there she never actually ended up practicing her Italian because the entire family wanted to practice their English.
Sad to say with English being the international language there just really isn’t much of a need for Americans to learn foreign languages, and if there isn’t a need motivation becomes an issue, not so much for lack of desire but for lack of commitment.
True! I do recommend going to more rural areas to practice. I traveled throughout Italy and in many parts outside the big cities, you definitely need your Italian!
Also, it's fun just jogging and saying "Ciao!" to people and waving at them as you pass them by!
You sister was clearly not assertive enough, in her place I would have simply pretended to not speak english.
Motivation is indeed the main issue, I would love to speak many languages from russijan to german, to classical latin, but I dont want to spend time and effort learning any of them because I can get by just fine speaking latviski and english.
yeah i'm an anglophone and i'm living in france atm, you just gotta have a base level of the language that is better than their english - people will default to whatever is easier for them, and after speaking to someone in french they tend to be shy about switching english!
this is a pain though, because it means you usually have to study a couple years before travelling to get to this point. although my french is pretty good, my spanish is intermediate, and if i'm speaking to a spanish person who knows english, we will speak in english 😅
rural areas are better for practice! or, even if they're speaking english, reply in their language instead. even if they don't switch, you're practicing anyway 😁
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 coming from America and pretending not to speak English probably wouldn't fly for very long!
@@nathansavage8692 Why?
Reason 1: Media and literature is inundated with English content, so it's hard to pick up another language.
Reason 2: Native English nations are isolated; Canada and the USA are between two oceans, and the UK, Australia, and New Zealand are islands.
Reason 3: People generally learn languages they're exposed to; it all boils down to lack of exposure.
(Edit) Reason 4: EDUCATION
In that order. I had formal French lessons from 7-16 and got an A in French GCSE and still can't speak French due to the the lack of the prior 3. (although I think reason 2 is far less important than the UK. I can get to Paris Gare du Nord faster than York where I go to uni)
@@Jay_Johnson French classes were introduced to me in 3rd grade (9 y/o) and it still didn't help. I have a burning hate for French, and I'm not the only one. All Romanian kids hate French. It's the most useless language to learn as well because Romanians go to work in other countries like Italy, Germany, England and Spain, barely anyone goes to work in France or Belgium. I would have rather had German or Italian, which also sound much better, than French.
English was introduced in 5th grade (11 y/o) and I picked English fast because I already had a burning interest in it and flirted with basic sentences and words, so I only needed the basic grammar to help me fly on my own.
Don't forget South Africa I think
We got the Mexicans though
Idk the US borders Mexico and Canada has Quebec.
The question of "why" we should learn languages that you mentioned at the end is very important. I grew up in Sweden and I speak 5 languages, 3 fluently, including English and Swedish. Is this because of some extraordinary schooling or some unusual effort that I put in? Not really. The languages that I am fluent in came to me naturally, from my family, surroundings and media. English is the language of popular media AND the internet. As a child growing up in a country with easily accessible, fast internet, it would be hard not to immerse oneself in the English language. That's how most people learn the language and I would also posit the hypothesis that most bilingual people only really learned English as their second language in this manner. With little incentive.
I had many years of schooling in Spanish, starting from 6th grade and continuing into high school, yet I'm not fluent in the language. I'm simply not exposed to it on a daily basis.
Can we really fault the English for not learning other languages when they arent exposed to them in any really useful setting? Can we fault them for watching the same popular English language shows that we do, here in Sweden, and not, say, French shows that we dont watch here either?
Something that I've learned growing up juggling so many languages is that languages need to be useful for them to be learned. You need to use them almost daily; read and hear them around you or have an interest in media that involves that language. While I understand a lot of Spanish, I dont find much use for it in my life. I dont read Spanish literature, nor do I watch Spanish shows. But I have recently started reading manga and watching anime, which led to me learning Japanese, because I am immersed in the language regularly and have a use for it.
That's how languages are learned and how they are maintained. You need a use for the language in order to keep it. Learning a language just because it is "good for you" or because you want to break out of some kind of language "chauvinism" are weak reasons to allocate the tremendous amount of cognitive resources required to learn and retain an entire language.
Completely agree! Thank you
Agree! To be honest, if I wasn't immersed in Spanish speaking videos or commenting on them, I would still suck in Spanish because there really isn't much use for it in my place
Completely agree.
I'm an English guy and have lived in two other countries: China, and then Denmark.
I learned quite a lot of Chinese, I'm by no means conversational and wasn't able to Read or write, but was very able to navigate through life after a year without the aid of a formal language teacher.
I then moved to Denmark and learned... Almost nothing, even though I went to a local language school, which is funny- Danish should have been the much easier language to learn for an English person.
The main difference was in china I had to speak chinese because nobody would speak English, whereas in Denmark people would switch to English the moment I walked into a room or opened my mouth.
It has been 4 years since I returned to the UK and I remember a lot of Chinese, but don't remember any Danish at all
@@jackogrady3118 As a Dane, I know all too well what you're talking about. We simply can't help speaking English, when we hear it. Most of us, even older people, are so constantly exposed to it through media, talking it comes naturally. English/US films have almost never been dubbed in Danish, except cartoons for children, and this goes WAY back, even to pre-WW2.
@@MrAstrojensen I'm from England. I did 3 years of French in school. I wasn't goot at it. And it was essentially just regurgitating things for a test and recognising words. The only kids who were good at it were the ones who already spoke French or actually spent time learning outside if they picked to do the subject. At that point the only time I was eexpose to or need to speak French was in class. I didn't watch or consume and French media or materials. When I took a holiday to France, their English was better than my French and they just resorted to speaking English to me.
It also helps that for Americans there’s barely more incentive to learn a foreign language than to learn to play a musical instrument. It might be considered a plus in a handful of jobs, but mostly it would be for personal enjoyment and some sort of bragging rights. Most Americans would have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get to a non-English-speaking country, even farther to get to one without a travel advisory (possibly unless you count Quebec).
Why would Mexico be subject to a travel advisory: drug cartels?
There's also Mexico.
not starting to learn a language at a young enough age seems to be much more of a problem in the US than the UK: it's typical, at least in my experience, for most Americans not to start learning until they're 12 or older, and some people aren't exposed to any primary school education of language and have to wait until the university level to take introductory language courses.
im in uk that was forced to take french no option other and i learnt no french in whole of secondary school xD
My high school had required foreign language classes... but I only needed to take ~4 semesters and most of them were Latin
@@rickpgriffin Latin’s rare to find being taught in my experience though even among Catholics sometimes. I worked pretty hard to learn it through middle school when I was forced to learn Spanish instead :/
in the us i didnt even have an option to take another language until 7th grade when i was around 12 and the only language offered was spanish
when I was in school in England (I left at 18 in 2012), many of my classmates only started a language at 11 in year 7, and whilst languages were compulsory at my school for GCSE, people at other schools in the area may have only ever received three years of foreign language education between the ages of 11-14
it is now compulsory in England to start a foreign language at 7 in year 3 (which was when I started being taught French)
of course, there are major problems with how languages are taught. I was taught French for three years, then started Spanish, and still ended up speaking much better Spanish and choosing to continue that to GCSE because the French teaching was so bad. Also, whilst all kids at my secondary school learnt French, it was randomly decided when you joined the school if you'd learn Spanish or German
In America it’s a very normal thing to take Spanish in high school but most people take it because it looks good on their diploma like it will give you extra points to get into college if he took a foreign language so most of the people who take Spanish are doing it for the credit there’s not a lot of people in those classrooms are actually intend on speaking Spanish outside school, and actually becoming fluent
same in other parts of the world but for english
@@bealu9459 I would say that is true for some places in the world, but for other places like Sweden, like was used as an example in this video is not always true
In California a foreign language is required, but it doesn't make most people fluent unless they already live in a majority-Hispanophone or Sinophone municipality.
@@linaelhabashy4608 yea im from south america and sadly most dont practice english outside their job or school and then they complain that they arent getting better at english, like bruh summerge yoself
@@bealu9459 it’s kind of the same in Egypt. Which I am from but I live in America it’s like people will take English sense like fifth grade and they all walked out of three years of high school not really having a good grasp of the English. They’ve learned in school.
Speaking as a Brit, whether Languages are a mandatory subject at GCSE is by-the-by IMO. Most schools here make it mandatory anyway, and most students will study just enough to pass their exams without any interest in actually learning the language. The reason is simple, if you live in the UK and have no intention to ever live anywhere else (except maybe the US), and never go anywhere else except on brief holidays, there is truly no pressing, urgent reason for you to ever learn another language. It's the same reason most students will never take a greater interest in maths than what they need to know to pass the GCSE exam. It's the path of least resistance, and no amount of schooling, no matter how brilliant or passionate, can change that.
This is very true. I would like for everyone to take college level calculus and take a course in linear algebra. And I think it could be very beneficial to everyone even though few people would have any application or reason to learn it for their day-to-day life. The truth is that most people aren't going to precisely because there is little reason to learn it besides from your own motivation, which is simply not something most people have.
Every Swede has to learn English because its essentially become mandatory in order to do the things every Swede does, but no English speaker will ever be left out or loose part of their culture for not knowing some other language than English. I think if compared how many Swedes know three languages with how many Brits know two languages, the British wouldn't be that far of.
At the end of the day, there is little forcing you to know anything besides your mother tongue and English.
Spot on. Language use around the world is primarily based on utility. English speakers don't need to learn a language to travel, so they don't do it. A better comparison would be how many Europeans know a second language that isn't either English or another national language of the country (for example, Swedish in Finland). It'll be around the same.
@@villeporttila5161 In Hungary, most People can't even speak English.
Let alone anything else.
They're stuck with Hungarian.
This fact, becomes surprising once you realize that Hungary... Doesn't have a lot of Rich People. Or People in general.
Hungarians don't know English, and most Media Companies won't bother to Translate anything in Hungarian.
@@spaghettiisyummy.3623 Is it true that German is more commonly spoken in Hungary than English?
@@Ch-xk5tv I've never heard of that Claim before.
Is there like, a Source, or?
One weird thing about bilingualism in the US is that the rate is also impacted by which area of the US you live in. Generally, the further southwest you are the higher the rates are due to the prevalence of Spanish due to immigration from Latin America and from historical borders. In the southwest of the US it’s not that rare to hear Spanish in day to day life so more people are encouraged to learn it to be able to communicate with others.
the thing os that people that speak Spanish in the US usually don't learn it. it is their first language and the language they use at home. English is the language they use at school and work. That's why they don't know how to speak academic Spanish and many don't even know how to read and write
Yeah but that isn't the native population being bilingual. It's a forced artificial bilingualism due to legal/illegal immigration to the area.
@@maximinus5151 Many Americans will learn Spanish to speak with other people. I had a friend who lived in near Corpus Christi TX and picked up Spanish so he could communicate.
I agree...I was raised in the 90s in New England, and as it shares a border with Quebec...French was the more common language to see and it was the only language they offered in elementary school. It makes sense because of geographical proximity. There's even a French-American private school in Providence that teaches you bilingually with some classes being only French. Makes sense to learn it there not just because of that, but because the French Canadians often vacation in New England too.
In Louisiana, there are 7 levels of French class from 6th grade to 12th grade with French 3 and up being only in French only.
To this video my only hold back is Japan. They try so hard in schooling to teach English, yet the country still doesn’t really speak it.
Because of this I believe it’s more than schooling, it’s also about motivation, we need both good foreign language education and things that motivate students to learn another language.
It's not motivation it is purely exposure. Culturally Japanese people don't need English they speak with everyone in Japanese watch everything in Japanese and use the internet in Japanese.
@@impyrobot
English is still used in pop-culture. It’s not completely absent, I believe that they’re exposed, but just not motivated enough to deal with the massive differences between the two languages.
The next anglophone country is thousands of miles away from Japan. They barely need to know it
@@Ch-xk5tv
Say that on the gobal trading market, even in places where Anglophone countries are far from signt.
@@andreimircea2254 In an average school class, the vast majority of students will never run a big international company. Even bosses of companies won't have much problems if they have translators below them who do the communication.
The problem is that for Japanese it is hard to practice English because travelling to the US or England takes a lot of time and costs much.
So it would be more intelligent to learn Chinese
I think there's some sort of distinction to be made between learning a foreign language to talk to your own countrymen where you both have it as a second language, and learning it to talk to native speakers in that language.
One big, obvious downside to English as a "lingua franca" is that as an English-speaker, other people are far more likely to switch to English when you're trying to start learning! With less natural incentive to learn, we're likely to be at a lower level, and the lower level, the more people are going to give up trying to interact with our scratchy French/German/whatever and just switch to English. Which means it's even harder to improve naturally, and forming a self-fulfilling cycle!
Now, native speakers in other languages have a bit of a get-out clause from this feedback loop which is that it's more natural for, say, a Swede to learn English to interact with other non-native English speakers, even others Swedes perhaps in some circumstances. Which means a lot of those awkward dynamics are avoided.
For English people however, this is just not on the radar. If we learn Spanish, we imagine it's to speak to native Spanish-speakers, if we learn French, it's to speak to native French-speakers. We don't usually conceive of French as being a means to, say, communicate with a Spaniard in something that's a second language to both of us. And we certainly would never consider the idea of speaking to a fellow English-speaker in something that's a second language to us both. Not for any practical purpose anyway.
Not that I'm sure there's really any particular solution, but I wonder if it's a reason there'll always be a bit of a difference that we can't really do much about!
(at least for as long as English is seen as a go-to "neutral" language for speakers of many different languages)
Exactly, a german and an italian aren't going to be able to speak to each other in french for example, at least 9 times out of 10. The vast majority of the time, they will use english, over any other 3rd, or even either of their native languages, in most cases.
@@Hession0Drasha you are perfectly right, both of you.
I don't know if anyone expected it, but the Great East Enlargement of the EU actually strengthened the position of English as our primary lingua franca.
Before, French, German, Italian and Spanish all were of value for communication with foreigners. But now, English dominates.
Teaching a language at school - even when done well - doesn't necessarily fix the problem. I'm Finnish and the two official languages of the country are Finnish and Swedish. Learning Swedish is mandatory and students use a lot of time learning it. I couldn't find good statistics but it's pretty common for people to learn Swedish in school, possibly with very good grades, then never actually use the language, and then just forgetting it. Meanwhile English is so commonly used, especially among young people, that not knowing it is essentially unheard of.
I've spent less time studying French in school than Swedish and I'm still more confident with using French than Swedish. Exposure is vital but also motivation. There's a lot of resentment against mandatory Swedish so many just learn the bare minimum to pass and then forget everything.
It's not unusual to find people here in German-speaking Switzerland who did/must have studied French at school for up to nine years, sometimes even on a fairly high level, who simply don't list French as one of the native languages they speak. They will list their English which they studied for two years less, or their Spanish or Italian which they studied for about half as long, but not their French.
Yes, knowledge of the Swedish language in Finland is appalling, as I could check during my travels, and many Finnish-speaking Finns even resent being addressed in Swedish. So sad...
@@majy1735 Did you mean to write "Finnish-speaking Finns"? Or "Swedish-speaking Finns"? In either case: Can you explain why that is?
@@camelopardalis84 About 5% of Finland’s population are native Swedish speakers, due to the several centuries Finland spent being a Swedish territory. In fact, it was only in 1892 that Finnish achieved the same legal status as Swedish… in Finland itself. Famous Swedish-speaking Finns include Tove Jansson of Moomins fame, famed military leader and statesman Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, Linus Torvalds of Linux fame, and Finland’s most famous composer Jean Sibelius.
@@camelopardalis84German-Swiss are expected to all have studied French and be more or less ok with speaking it so they do not probably feel the need to specify their level in French since it is taken for granted by other Swiss. The other way round is less true. You see Roger Federer speaks some very good French for instance.
The thing about Ireland is that three languages are required for third level education (English, Irish, and one of your choice), but Irish is taught so horribly that it's often the most difficult part of the Leaving Cert exam.
Playing devil's advocate here so don't get angry, but might it be true that people merely use the excuse that Irish is taught badly to mask their insecurities that they just didn't try hard enough in the language. I teach Welsh in an English-medium school and I think our course is decent enough (but certainly not without its flaws, for sure), but some students just don't apply themselves as well as they could. Just asking.
@@DoctorCymraeg im not irish but actually american but i think i can say that kids usually dont have the motivation when they dont think its necessary. Like the majority of kids in my school speak english, so why learn another language? Kids dont usually have motivation unless they particularly love a subject, so they might grow up and regret not applying themselves in spanish or french or smth. So no offense since ik u were just playing devils advocate but expecting kids to be motivated on their own is dumb, especially if the class sucks.
Why should you learn it?
No one under the age of 60 cares about it. This isn't like Bengali. Where its spoken by a lot of people.
@@DoctorCymraeg they don’t do well with Irish because it is a pointless language. There is only one nation on earth that speaks Irish and it is Ireland but Ireland’s main language is English. It is like learning latin. You only ever need it to read historical documents.
Irish is booming outside of the main Irish speaking areas (Gaeltacht), especially amongst the urban youth. This is mainly due to the relative proliferation of Irish speaking schools (gaelscoileanna). Pop-up Irish speaking get togethers are everywhere now and Irish language media has improved. Oscar nominations for a film made in Irish is exceptional but all the same symptomatic of the growth of urban Gaeilge.
In the Australian primary school curriculum, foreign language classes are held for 45 minutes a week. In my case, most of those classes focused on Japanese culture rather than the language itself. We didn’t even begin to learn any characters until grade 6, 6 years after we began “learning japanese”
In my school primary had english and French for every year then in year 6 you chose to either do japanese or french then in high school there is only japanese but it isn't compulsory so nobody does it
I'd maintain that my English education as a youngster in Sweden (starting around 10-11 years old at that time) has had almost no impact on my English profeciancy beyond helping to set the stage so to speak. It helped build some fundamentals, but the rest was an individual journey of exposure to the language via film (and later internet). Being such a small country (population wise) really was a big benefit here. There really isn't a budget to dub shows fulltime, so SVT resorted to subtitling etc. This is of course a massive boon when learning a language, you get to her the words, and see their translation (more or less accurate) in real time.
It's the same over in the Netherlands. Movies and shows are subbed but almost never dubbed and games especially only rarely have Dutch translations, though it seems like more games are getting them (They often sound unnatural and weird, though). It's a real incentive to learn English, because just about every game is available in it or has it as the standard language
and helping build fundamentals is extremely important
you can't get to an advanced level without getting past the beginner stage (duh)
the point is English speaking countries don't even have the fundamentals when it comes to foreign languages, and that's a part of the problem
Japan is also a highly monolingual country. they put a good bit of money on the education, provide programmes encouraging english teachers to work in Japan (in fact it's the easiest way to land a job in Japan if you are a native english speaker), english classes are mandatory. Unfortunately it's a very half-assed measure to encourage english proficiency, and countries like South Korea despite also being equally different from english has a MUCH higher rate of english speakers.
Japan is a very culturally insular country, almost all media they consume is in Japanese, they are more focused on domestic trade, and even with all of the accommodation for tourists it does not reflect in the population regarding language acquisition. It only matters that they have ENOUGH english speakers (and due to the aforementioned programme there are plenty of native english speakers to fill that role!)
I think it is bad to just focus on the English-Proficiency of a country. It is just a language. There are more important aspects like the GDP per Capita or human development. With putting English and the anglophone countries into the center of a globalised society, other parts of the world think "Since our native tongue is worthless, we should learn English in order to advance economically".
Proviciency of other languages (like French, Russian or Spanish) should be valued too.
I think it's worth mentioning that the massive bilingualism in Scandinavia is partially facilitated by the simple fact that English and the Scandinavian languages (not Finnish) are closely related. English is one of the easiest languages to learn for Scandinavians, as we get most of the grammar and large chunks of the vocabulary almost for free.
Ultimately I don't think being related makes or breaks bilingualism (see again, Finland), but it doesn't hurt, either.
Are English shows and films on Swedish t.v. dubbed or subbed? If it's the latter, that at least must have been a huge factor for people who aren't digital natives.
@@camelopardalis84 They're subbed.
@@francisdec1615 Well, that helps. Not as much as people think, and not as with what they think it helps with, but it helps.
@@camelopardalis84 Yes. I was born in Sweden in 1971. I learned a lot English by watching subbed movies, although I also studied English from 9 to 19.
@@francisdec1615 I didn't say it can't help a lot. Studies have just shown that it doesn't help with what people think it helps with, and that as a result, people overestimate the effect.
In Singapore, we do take the GSCE and every student does take their mother tongue, with the most prominent languages being Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil. However, due to the dying nature of these cultures and languages in a modern and fast-paced city like Singapore, more and more students (like myself) feel a disdain to our mother languages. What makes this worse is that even if you want to learn another language, you have to be proficient in your mother tongue before being able to take a third language. I'm one of many special cases where I grew up in an environment speaking 3 languages, with Mandarin Chinese being my second mother tongue and Japanese being my third. Unfortunately, for some reason my Japanese was stronger, and because my Mandarin Chinese wasn't as strong as my Japanese, the Ministry of Education rejected my application for entering the Japanese course all because my Mandarin Chinese wasn't proficient enough (; - ;). There's also the whole problem on how language is taught in Singapore's education system, and how students who don't even take Mandarin Chinese are not permitted into taking Japanese as a third language (like what???). So basically, while it is a good idea to implement languages in the education system, there are a whole lot of other factors that could affect the quality of the system itself (plus, it's not even the teachers' fault, they are all qualified teachers to teach said language...)
Same situation here (Singaporean Chinese who can't speak Chinese well either)! I've heard from classmates and personally do think myself too that the main problem is that the education system presents these languages only as subjects to be examined on rather than genuinely interesting and defining parts of our culture, which is a great shame as it (in my opinion) ironically makes students dislike the language more than they would have without the pressure to learn it for examinations otherwise. It's quite demotivating to get in your exam results that you're just not good enough at your own "mother tongue", and frankly puts off the attitude of wanting to actively learn it.
Distain, or resentment? 💀
@@purifiedwaterrr Also technically 'mandarin' wasn't ever the mother tongue for 90+% of Chinese Singaporeans since they're all from the south and speak/spoke Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese etc instead (or even Peranakan Malay). Mandarin was just picked and passed off as the 'mother tongue' because it's the prestige dialect, which is fine imo but it kinda emphasises that it's 'forced' and/or 'irrelevant'/'boring'.
Some teachers are indeed unqualified to teach, like the English teacher I had in 8th grade who didn't really know how to teach (or explain) and struggled to keep up with me as I was challenging her knowledge of English, while I was a 90+% self-taught. And there were other teachers of other subjects unrelated to languages, one which didn't know the subject she was teaching and quit teaching our class after just 1 year with us.
Singapore fucked up on the "mother language" front. Singaporean Chinese often have Hokkien as their mother tongues, and Singaporean Indians could have Hindustani as their mother tongue rather than Tamil.
5:22 Want to point out that in Swedish schools we also add a third language to our curriculum where we, like you, pick between French, German and Spanish. Not sure at what age it is, when I went to school it was around 11-12 years old, but I think it's at younger levels now. There's also the fact that we don't do a lot of dubbing over of foreign media, only dubbing movies and shows that are aimed at young children, and instead use subtitling. This also comes into news reportage, where interviews in foreign languages are subtitled instead of being dubbed.
There's also the importance that English plays in education. To advance beyond elementary education, you need a passing grade in Math, Swedish and English. Our equivalence to the American SAT, Högskoleprovet (literally the College Test) has an entire section for English reading comprehension. (Engelsk LäsFörståelse = ELF) A lot of college courses and course literature is also in English.
And of course English and Swedish are relatively close, both being members of the Germanic family of languages. English even has a lot of old Norse words, which makes it easier for Scandinavians to understand.
My mum (a native Chinese speaker) used to teach Mandarin in the South West. What she found was that even though she got good comments from students, teacher peer reviews etc. the school would often prioritise the already established languages (and teachers) when budget cuts, scheduling and general promotion of the subject were an issue. Introducing a new subject is always hard, and with so many language options it gets really hard for students to choose.
Often the school would start by proudly announcing the introduction of Mandarin lessons, then when uptake was below expectations they would start cutting corners (what do you mean scheduling all of year 10's weekly lessons in one day is a bad idea?). Other langage teachers would get worried that their students were being taken from them to learn Mandarin instead, and ultimately Mandarin was the one that got phased out due to budget cuts (it's only one class per year group and we did fine without it?)
It may be that my mum's approach to school politics just wasn't up to snuff or she shoud have promoted Mandarin more or whatever, but often she was only in a couple of days a week, no allocated desk/room as she was part-time, her allocated budget for equipment/activities kept shrinking, and she disliked the cliquey nature of the different departments. She's now quit teaching (loves the students and job, hates the bureaucracy). It's such a shame, because the students she taught seemed to really enjoy the lessons (some even asked for tutoring after they found out Mandarin was being stopped and went on to do really well)
south west of what
@@mabumarnauen7318probs US
@@mabumarnauen7318the USA 🤦♂️
@@awellculturedmanofanime1246 you didnt understand why i asked that didnt you
World politics also has an effect. If the only exposure most people have to another culture is negative, they will assume more negativity. It's a huge problem that we tar every person with the same brush coming from another culture with stereotypes and fear of the unknown. Ironically a lack of exposure only increases this, a perpetual cycle of ignorance.
It's kinda funny that you mentioned the idea of a defined percentage of foreign programming. In terms of radio stations in Canada, it requires that at least 50% of the music that's played is by a Canadian artist. That rule is only in place because if it wasn't, the music would be predominantly American music (which isn't a bad thing, but Canadians artists need recognition as well)
That's just dumb and corpratist. Canadian artists would get recognition if they were good. The government shouldn't force you to listen to bad music that can't stand on its own merits just because the person that made it is Canadian.
Similarly, some percent of TV programming must be Canadian (something like 30%)
Canada is a great example of what happens when multilingualism is mandated rather than arising organically. Canada as a country is officially bilingual, and vocally so. But really, the only people in any great number who are actually bilingual are people who work in the public sector (there are language requirements for these jobs) and people with French as a first language, because it would be very limiting for them if they didn't speak English.
@@jhonbus yeah, about nobody cares about french lol
The problem with the Canadian content quotas is that when a Canadian song comes along that’s genuinely popular, the radio stations play it constantly. When the Tragically Hip released Bobcaygeon it got played about every 15 minutes across every station in Toronto. That year was a nightmare
"monolingualism can be cured in anyone" this is the funniest quote I've ever heard
I laughed out loud when he said that! 😅
@@lisaahmari7199 Why?
@Erik Eriksson Because I think many people see monolinguism as a sickness of the mind, when we are referring to humans in wealthy, industrialized countries. If one has the capacity and opportunity to learn another language and one refuses to do so, it shows a disinterest in dealing with the human world on anything but ones own rather self-absorbed, arrogant (or maybe insecure) terms.
@@lisaahmari7199 Not necessarily, there's many other reasons someone may have the ability to learn another language and they don't. Most of those reasons aren't out of malice, but out of a lack of a reason to learn. Other countries learn multiple languages because they have to to communicate, but if you live in an country where everyone communicates in one language and you don't feel like you miss anything by only knowing the one language, then there's no reason for them to bother learning the other language.
This is pointless however because at the end of the day we're both dumbasses on the internet. Nobodies going to change their opinion because told them to.
i see that somebody was watching the Language Simp
As others have said, there's just no practical need to be bilingual as a native English speaker. Making it mandatory doesn't really change that. Still, I agree that we should have more resources dedicated towards languages and introduce them earlier on to give opportunities to kids who are interested.
That's really not true though, if it was then no one else would bother to learn anything other than English, but German or French is still mandatory in Denmark. The vast majority of everything hasn't been translated into English and that includes important things such as news and technical documents and a lot of things suffer through being translated. When you read a translated work you're essentially putting your trust in the skill and objectivity of the translator and sometimes it might just not be possible to provide a proper translation. Learning a language gives you a window into a whole new culture and lets you understand it properly, that's an invaluable skill, especially if it's one you might not interact with much anyways. Not to mention that by learning languages you become better at the skill of learning languages so the next one you pick up will become easier, at some point learning a new language stops being a daunting task and becomes something you can just do.
@@hedgehog3180 I did say 'practical need' - there are certainly a lot of reasons that learning a language other than English is worthwhile. Often it is for appreciating art or other text with the author's original intent, as you suggest, which is not going to motivate the wider population. Hell, I'm not rushing to read literature in other languages when I've barely read any in English. Other media can generally be translated with enough accuracy to be worth consuming. Again, not saying that it isn't worthwhile or that people don't do it, it just isn't a cultural expectation because you can get by fine without.
You point out that learning a second language makes it easier to learn further languages. Perhaps that is why German and French being also mandatory is practical - because there is already some expectation?
@@hedgehog3180 Germany and France are far closer to Denmark than any country with a foreign language is to most Americans.
@@TheRenegade...
To be fair a lot of Americans live near the mexican border, and Montreal is a day trip away for millions in the north east.
And then people travel to other countries and they're surprised when people actually can't speak English there. I've been a "freelancer" interpreter couple times in my life already even tho I'm a person who doesn't really like going outside
For example in Poland older people are more likely to speak Russian or even French than English. As for younger generations - it's hit or miss. You can't really expect a random person you meet to be proficient enough to understand you, let alone speak with you
You would think then that tourists visiting Poland speak English at least. Well, again, it depends. Germans don't. Polish seaside is frequently visited by our Western neighbours. Almost everything is written in two languages there. Is it Polish and English? Nope. It's Polish and German
I've been working with couple younger German dudes. About 30 or something. I thought I could speak with them in English because I know it better. Lol, nope. They would rather try to decode my subpar German than try using English
Tl;dr English language is not as widely spoken as people assume
3:32 HOLY HELL!! the way you pronounce SVT1 and SVT2 is spot on!! i thought for a second that you were swedish.
He said he is. He just has a really good British accent. I’m American and I’m shocked that he’s not a native British person. I can’t hear any Swedish
We Germans are in a bit of an odd position when it comes to learning foreign languages. On one side we are like other, smaller countries because English is basically always our second language and most Germans can speak it to some degree. (and our own language sphere is not as big as the french or spanish one for example). However on the other side, we also suffer from the "bigger language syndrome" like the native English speakers, because our smaller neighbours often learn German but we mostly don't learn their languages, so we are on a bit of a disadvantage. So it could be said that the german language is too small to rival English, French or Spanish but too big to fit in with other european languages.
(Which can also be said about Germany's historical political position - too big for Europe, too small for the world...)
Es ist ein wahnsinniger Vorteil, eine Sprache als Muttersprache zu sprechen, die woanders gelernt wird. Besonders wenn man ins östliche Mitteleuropa reist, kann man froh sein, dass man mit Deutsch durch kommt. Es hat dort halt jedes Land seine eigene Sprache. Wenn man z.B. Tschechisch lernt, dann ist das zwar schön und gut, aber in Polen, Ungarn oder Kroatien hilft einem halt Deutsch trotzdem mehr weiter.
Ich zum Beispiel wohne im Südosten von Österreich, in der Nähe von Slowenien und Ungarn. Ungarisch ist halt sau schwer (da keine Indogermanische Sprache) und Slowenisch hat nur 1/50 der Sprecheranzahl verglichen mit meiner Muttersprache. Da erscheint es eben wenig attraktiv wenn man Slowenisch oder Ungarisch lernt
Hmm yeah maybe you could try to conquer Europe and-
Never mind, scratch that..
Ich bin lernen Deutsch als mein dreitten sprache. Ich, liebe dein länden und dein kulture. Meiner meine nach lernen sprache bezogen auf anzahl auf sprecher ist überwertet.
ich bin da engrish
@@solmoman Same could have happened with French too with Napoleon. Imagine if Roman empire never fell and Europe all spoke Italian! Spain and Portugal did it with South America.
As a Finn, I'm used to having to learn two mandatory foreign languages since elementary school and when I learned for the first time it's not that common elsewhere I was actually quite shocked. I also think that it is easier to learn new languages if you have already because you've developed a way to learn them so the more you learn, the easier it gets. And also... people should learn languages that are not very similar to their own, it's eye opening.
But at the same time while in Finland people are good in English, it can be seen that in some ways English is taking over. For example in many universities it's nowadays difficult to get education in Finnish because English is so prominent. And it really sucks. It's hard to balance having a common language and preserving the other languages as well...
"people should learn languages that are not very similar to their own, it's eye opening."
I totally agree. As a Swede, I have loved studying Finnish and Japanese because learning a language from a completely different family really changes how you think about languages and communication. It's so much fun! I've gotten some glimpses of that from learning French, because there are some grammatical concepts and words that exist in French and not in Swedish, but in the end the grammar is pretty similar. With Finnish and Japanese for me, every day of learning is a wow-experience :D
Also, same in Sweden with university education. Especially within the natural sciences, it seems hard to find uni programs in Swedish. I know many who can't really talk about their school or job in 100% Swedish, because they don't have vocabulary for it. In ends up being like 50/50 Swedish/English or just English.
Finns are very very bad in english get a reality check please !
As a native English speaker who went through schooling in the non-England part of the UK, I think the 3 biggest reasons why anglophones are rubbish at learning languages are the exposure to foreign languages, as you said, but also English as a language itself and the abilities of non-natives in English.
Because we get little exposure to foreign languages, we don't have things to encourage us to learn those languages. I know many people from Scandinavia learn English as a consequence of playing video games, since translations into their languages don't really exist. There's also the fact we're heavily catered to internationally, either when travelling or on international shows lile Eurovision, which is heavily geared towards the English-speaking world through the languages of the songs and the language it's presented in. This all comes together to make the view that the effort of learning another language is meaningless when our native language is used everywhere already.
On the other hand, what makes English easy to learn makes it hard to learn from. Concepts like gender, conjugation and declension barely exist in English, but are important starting points for languages like French and German, so create a steep learning curve at the beginning for an anglophone learner and put a lot of people off.
A final note is that it's hard to practise a foreign language as a native English speaker. I have roughly B2 level French and have lived in France, and found I would sometimes have to fight to speak French as most people would speak English to me, even when I started the conversation in French. This is made worse by how much better their English would be compared to my French, making it almost stupid for us to speak in French. I've had so many experiences like that that have made me want to stop learning since "why bother if they'll just speak to me in English?" so I understand why many get discouraged.
Well put, the gender conjugation and declension etc. is a difficulty. Why is a chair feminine but a wall masculine in French? I love French, learnt at night school 40+ yrs ago. Can read it, not always in right tense but can't fathom the rapid strung together replies. A friend who was from Belgium said I had a very good Parisian accent! Age 83
about the latter, I want to say that they do this even if you are not a native speaker of English. And yes, it's very disappointing.
Tbh, this comment makes me think that english speakers just need to learn a language which they can use in a country that doesn't speak much english. I guess that means I'm learning North Korean lol
Huh, that's funny, I had the chance to live as an exchange student in France, and I never felt like I had to force the issue with anyone that I wanted the conversation to be spoken in French. It never bothered me that they wanted to practice their English with me because it would only last like 10 minutes before they broke down and the conversation continued on in French again. Usually, they just want to ask me a question and understand if their pronunciation of a phrase was good or not. It was always a great party trick for me though to speak English with a French accent for them so they could hear the difference.
Yeah, that creates a vicious cycle: they won’t speak to you in French so you can’t improve your listening skills, which causes them to not want you to speak French to them which worsens the problem of not being able to speak french.
I have also recognized that if people have not learned other languages (and also often if they have learned only language pretty similar to their own) they find it really difficult to understand how different languages can be and how varying ways they use to talk about the world. For example I had a weird conversation with an English speaking person who could not comprehend that althoug the word "rich" can be used for land (rich soil = soil has good minerals etc), it does not automatically mean that the translation for rich can be used similarly in Finnish, because in Finnish the most common translation for rich only includes the neaning of "having a lot of money or posessions". It was so difficult to explain it because they just did not understand that rich could not have the secondary meaning for soil.
If they learned swedish in school as they should they would have known. But are often....not so smart or nice im sorry to say!
If you're a native English speaker, we may very well have problems learning a new language abroad, because so many people learn English and want to speak English with us. I've been learning Vietnamese and was there for a month; even people who spoke less English than I did Vietnamese, often tried to use English with me, either out of a desire to be helpful, or because they wanted to practice. And if you want to learn Swedish for example, how easy is it to immerse yourself in that language when almost everyone speaks English, and well?
It is so annoying to be honest, i am mexican, my english is not that good but in china many people wanted to practice their english with me like for real and they even asked me if their grammar was good i was like "I dont know neither" but since i am white passing they thougth i was being rude because they think white=native english speaker , all i wanted was to practice my mandarin since i was living there
@@rodrigoe.gordillo2617 in Vietnam everybody wanted to practice their English with me; fair enough, I wanted to practice Vietnamese with Vietnamese speakers in the states. :-) But there were times where I almost felt like pretending I didn't speak English, to force their hand. Many times they also were just trying to help, but really, just slowing down a little bit would be as helpful.
@@rodrigoe.gordillo2617 Someone should try telling the Chinese that Eastern Europe exists.
@@spaghettiisyummy.3623They speak English too.
@@azwan4710 I've lived in Bosnia my whole life.
The best English you'll see here comes with awful Grammar and accents so thick that you can't even understand what they're saying.
My mom speaks Tagalog, and my dad speaks Thai, and sadly, they didn't want to teach me their languages. Now that I'm older, I'm thinking that maybe they wanted me to be fluent in English since when they immigrated to America, it might have been difficult for them with limited English proficiency.
One day I would like to speak Tagalog, but for now, I'm learning Spanish.
It honestly is both sad and frustrating why my mother didnt want me to learn her mother tongue since itd be a "hinderance" and useless abroad.
Now she makes fun of my effort when I try, I struggle to communicate eith my family who are in our native country
@Kiboma420 So true! I did try speaking some Tagalog phrases that I learned, but my family would make fun of my accent and kept asking me to repeat what I said so they could laugh some more. It really is frustrating, sad, and demoralizing.
What's funny is that I can understand a lot of what's being said in Tagalog, I just can't speak it. So, if a family member asks me in Tagalog about something, I respond in English.
That’s alright hun here in America we speak English, way too many Spanish speakers preform poorly in the public schools since they can’t understand the teachers and they sink the test scores. You’ll pick another language up probably if you try rlly hard 🤷♂️.
If so, that was a poor choice on their part. Studies show that children of non-native English speakers in English-majority communities tend to have better English if they're raised to be multilingual.
As an American I think another reason many of us do not know another foreign language is because we don’t have the incentive to do so, not necessarily because we speak an already important language but because many of us don’t really see going to college or working abroad as a very good option or even feasible compared to working or going to school here is the US which I think is a major reason why some choosing to learn a new language I hope though that more people in the US become bi lingual I think it would help our country and everyone in it
Yes, Europe is so small, yet has so many languages and people tend to move here and there for work, especially from east to west, and for us Europeans it's helpful to know a second language or even a third. Like, Germany wants for workers to learn German and not fully depend on English, so if you are from some other country and already know English, German might be your 3rd language.
Definitely true.
I also just wanna say that people on this topic like to site Americans having some kind of linguistic "arrogance" about our language, which true sometimes, but in my experience really isn't much of a thing. It's linguistic cluelessness, not arrogance. We don't think about people speaking other languages not because we BELIEVE they should speak English, but because there's no reason for us to be thinking about those people at all. We live in a ginormous, nearly 100% English-speaking country. We don't have to think about "what if they don't speak English" because literally everyone we meet for 99% of our lives already speaks it here in the country. Americans rarely travel internationally because our country is so f***ing big, and when we do, those people ALREADY speak English, so it's again, not a problem. So we don't really feel others should speak English, we just don't think about them in the first place, because there isn't much of a need to.
It’s due to practical use as a major reason, there’s literally no native speakers of other languages nearby unless you count Spanish and French. Though in those cases they generally know English already or if they don’t you wouldn’t be speaking to them at all.
@@BananLord inreally want to work there as a translator but i’ve heard they are very strict and like they don’t accept foreign uni degrees?
@@goldenhourss I'm not from Germany nor do I intend to work in Germany, but that's what I heard, that's encouraged that people should speak German if they reside there for longer periods of time. My aunt had a friend who was working hard to learn German while she worked there.
Whenever you go somewhere and someone hears your accent, they often jump at the chance to practice their English. And it happens all the time, making practicing another language harder for English speakers. Something not many people consider
This is why I'm learning Russian. I like the Cyrillic alphabet too, but I'm mostly using it to escape sounding English. I shouldn't have to keep saying "Wie bitte?" or "Ich lerne Deutsch, wir sind in Deutschland nicht die USA" just to keep everything in German. But if I sound Russian enough, they won't have a choice.
I grew up with German, but in the UK, so it's not perfect - maybe about 90%. I realise people want to practice their English, but it always hurts my pride a little when Germans switch over because they've noticed something.
To practise, practising. a verb. The Practise a noun. USA can't see the difference. eg. To license. The Licence as in Driving Licence UK
This is what I find, especially in France. It used to annoy me because I was there to study their language. But these days if they want to practice English, then fair enough. On the other hand in Spain people don't speak English back to me which may mean (i) my Spanish is better than my French or (ii) people in Spain are less likely to do that.
Act like your Native Language is French. Or even Italian.
That should fix that!
To be honest, for other countries it's easy to make mandatory to learn one second language at school. We just pick English and call it a day. And then we half learn a third language like French or Spanish. But when you are in an English speaking country you have to either pick one language and make it mandatory (accidentally making others "less important") or equally represent at least 4 to 5, witch means at least 3-4 extra teachers in every school of every level of education of the entire country.
Seems to me the beat solution in the UK would be to pick the local one and make that mandatory. Which leaves England behind, but means we can revive Irish, Welsh, and Gaelic a bit.
But at that point, it is just a matter of teaching/learning languages for the sake of teaching/learning them, since the only practical use for each of those is local. Though I admit I'd love for all three languages to make a proper comeback, and I wish I'd properly learned some Gaelic growing up in Scotland.
I'd say for Canada and the US the choice is obvious (french and Spanish). The issue is the UK (french, german, spanish?) and Australia (which asian language?)
@@klop4228 That's already what they do for Welsh. If you go to an English language school in Wales, Welsh is a mandatory subject. There are also schools where students are taught in Welsh across all subjects.
Irish is a compulsory subject in the republic of Ireland. But I've heard that most people come out of school only able to say a few phrases. Making it compulsory in Northern Ireland would be extremely controversial, to the point it could lead to violence. So that's a non-starter.
@@Psyk60 Now I think about it, I do know a Welsh guy who did tell me he learned Welsh in school.
As for Irish - I suppose the curriculum would need work, and, yeah, I hadn't considered how controversial it would be.
Having grown up in Scotland, though, I genuinely don't see why Gaelic isn't taught as standard. I mean, at this point, introducing it might be a bit of a project, but I've never met anyone who'd be opposed to the idea of it (though some people might be opposed to spending money on that rather than fixing the NHS etc.)
@@klop4228 I suppose the thing with Gaelic in Scotland is that it was never the native language of much of the low lands. They went from speaking a Brittonic language, to speaking Anglo-Saxon which evolved into Scots. So it's not a native language of the country as a whole in the same way Welsh or Irish are. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be taught across Scotland.
i live in america, and my area has a lot of spanish speakers and a very high brazilian population; so almost every sign in my school has spanish & portuguese translations on them, and i hear a lot of my classmates talking in both languages. i’m by no means fluent in either of them, but i can understand quite a few words and phrases because of that (albeit most of the phrases i have learnt probably aren’t very appropriate for normal conversations lmao)
Concuerdo. Saludos.
I'm from Singapore and 2nd language education is required. 70% of the population is Chinese so it is a common 2nd language but many of us "return what we learn" to our teachers after high school. I think part of the problem is that the teaching approach is flawed; many of us no longer speak Chinese (or any other dialect) at home so a focus on daily communication and expression would be really helpful. Unfortunately, teachers during my time spent too much effort on trying to expand a non-existent foundation by piling on lots of non-essential vocabulary without any drawing any comparisons to English. Meanwhile, in foreign language classes, the teachers always explain or draw comparisons to English so you didn't have to figure out how to use a particular word in a sentence. Also, the teaching materials were boring to the core. Overall, a significant number of Chinese Singaporeans don't see the language as anything more than a chore to get over with.
I picked up most of my Chinese as an adult and still have childhood memories of my mum fretting about not being able to face our ancestors because I nearly failed Chinese.🤣
Even if you speak Mandarin well, you still can't face your ancestors if your heritage language is actually other Chinese languages like Hokkien, Cantonese, etc😂
Media exposure is a huge factor. In the US, foreign-language programming is almost exclusively featured on channels dedicated to those languages (Télemundo, KBS, etc.). A lot of Americans learn their second language from their parents, but since non-English languages were pretty heavily suppressed in World War I, there's not as much of that anymore. And though this is changing, we don't start learning foreign languages at school until 7th grade or so. So you'd better hope to simply grow up in a part of the country where a language other than English is widely spoken for you to pick up- which again is less common than it was 100 years ago- because opportunities for fluency are quite limited.
Two spots of hope I see in the US are for immersion programs in public schools (which exist in California, where kids will learn multiple subjects in multiple languages throughout the day), and the end of dominance by commercial TV networks, where programmers are extremely skittish about the commercial viability of non-English media.
However, even traveling abroad can be difficult for language acquisition, because people in other countries _want_ to speak to you in English. I live in Israel, and my one roommate who does speak some English always wants to use it when talking to me because he needs to learn English, but I need to learn Hebrew. American tourists have consistently demonstrated a disproportionate willingness to learn new languages when compared to British tourists, yet there's very little willingness to engage with them in the local language when it's desired.
I’m so blessed to have grown up in SoCal. I grew up in a predominantly Mexican area and just by having mostly Mexican friends most of my life I have a grasp of Spanish even though I only took 2 years of it in high school and never practiced it afterwards. I’m learning French now as an adult and it’s hadd
So true- having lived and worked in Europe in the 90’s I could really spot the difference in language abilities vs tv content (and also what a massive difference it made to my language ability- I always struggled with learning in the classroom, just not enough input). It’s so sad to see how many schools have dropped German as a language now, despite it being a very sought after language for employers (I strongly suspect because it is seen as difficult and could bring their grade averages down in the league tables).
I don't know why schools in Romania still insist on French when no one goes to work in France or French speaking countries, they're all going to Italy, Germany, UK and Spain. I hate French so much and would have rather have been taught Italian or German, since they sound better and there is some interest I have for them compared to my utter hate of French.
@@BananLord Same in UK - why we persist in offering French as the first '2nd language' is beyond me. Youngsters are more likes to go to a Spanish resort on holiday - so maybe Spanish would be a better 'starter' language. [I have IT colleagues in Iași, Ro. and mostly their English is good down to colloquial level. ]
And the Americans especially. Maybe it is because we have no need to, which is super sad as I am genuinely interested in languages and I skipped every language class in school somehow. I am jealous of language learners but I don't have the gusto to learn it myself.
I'm sad because my school thought I was too stupid to learn a 2nd language even though I really wanted to...
@@TheGreatBackUpVIDEOS for me, band counted as the arts credit. No language required. It would have been Spanish anyways, but still. I am highly convinced I will go through college without one as well, but I hope that is not true.
americans ought to have a higher bilingual rate than brits - because there are enough spanish speakers in the US to be a valid reason for other americans to learn spanish. plus almoat all neighbouring countries of the US, other than mostly english speaking canada, speak spanish. the UK has no second language that is that dominant. I suppose they would normally learn french as the second language, but they'd need to cross the english channel to find french speakers.
@@Ass_of_Amalek 40% for brits is massive. Hard to think the US is anywhere close. Do you think 130m americans speak a second language?
@@FOLIPE apparently it's about 21%. damn, that's dire. xD
the credits music is so calming and cozy, at first i was gonna look up who was the artist but since it is you i'd just like to say thx for the music
I've become fluent in German over the last 8 years, after learning in secondary school and then going to live in Austria, and I still struggle to engage with german-language media, not bc I don't understand it but bc I simply prefer english stuff most of the time - being able to read German academic papers is my greatest incentive most of the time
Die beste Motivation eine Sprache zu lernen: Um Vorlesungen zu Topologie, Gruppentheorie und komplexer Analysis zu besuchen.
Klassiker!
I think the role of public education is a bit overrated here. East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia etc had roughly 40 years of Russian as the primary foreign language in schools and none of it stuck. Similarly, almost 90% of children in Poland learn German as a second foreign language, which results in less then 10% of them being able to hold a conversation in German (I may be exaggerating the figures a little). Most people that successfully learn foreign languages (other than English) in Poland don't do so in public education, but on their own, using online resources, or through tutors and language courses (which some of the time are subsidized or organized by the company they work for).
I partially agree. I left secondary (Dutch) education with high grades in both English and German. Nevertheless I only got more or less fluent in English when exposed to it at university through foreign PhD students and later on through colleagues. Te get my German at a conversational level I needed to practise myself.
Nowadays I nowadays ~40% non Dutch colleagues, and English is used a lot in the professional settings. This is possible because of the high level of proficiency in English in the Netherlands, and the open culture that makes foreign students and professionals to want to live in the Netherlands.. So education and culture work together here. If Dutch culture were not as open as it is, I would not have encountered so many non Dutch speaking colleagues and would have been stuck at the not that great level of English I had when leaving school.
That being said, my children get much better English education than I ever had.
In Canada over 30% of the population are francophones and we still have an overwhelming majority of monoligual angolophones
I'm a "cantophone" (and a semi-native "mandophone") in Vancouver having learned French in school. 😀
The crux of the issue is it being forced. Western Canada, in the city I live, French was mandatory to take until high school, and the class would have maybe 7 or 8 people compared to Spanish which would be full of kids wanting to learn it, Mandarin was also offered but most people in it already had fluent speaking of it because well... They grew up speaking Mandarin.
I know for a god damn fact that I was happy to never have to take Quebec French again, I absolutely abhorred having to learn it, knowing full well that I would not once ever have to use it in my life.
How much of that is down to Canada being a geographically huge country whose francophone population is almost entirely concentrated in one specific region?
Foreign language courses only became available to me in highschool. I remember reading somewhere that it gets harder to learn a language once you pass a certain age, so I can't fathom why it wouldn't be mandatory to have these classes as soon as you begin elementary school. I wish I could have begun learning any language at an earlier age lol
I used to think so too, but the good news is that's a myth. Adults have more tools, resources, and ways of approaching their object of learning, plus a brain already equipped with linguistic concepts. The difficulty and time it took to absorb your first language only looks tiny because it is lost in the immemorial fog of infancy. Genuine enthusiasm and curiosity make discomfort melt away. German in school was always a chore even though it's related, while after getting into anime as a teen Japanese was easy breezy. It's a silly cliche situation but it illustrates the truth of these mental mechanics.
"I remember reading somewhere that it gets harder to learn a language once you pass a certain age" As a linguist I tell you that age is 2. Weather you are a teenager or grownup makes no difference. Teenagers have more free time, adults have more willpower.
Thanks for the corrections! Though I still find it ridiculous that language classes aren't mandatory before highschool nationwide I can understand why it might not make a difference. I think just the exposure to a foreign language would be helpful for a lot of children (but evidently I'm not a linguist).
@@ZammyZammyZammy Being a nationalist I would Id argue you shouldnt force anyone to study foreign languages. Despite being able to read it I have on countless occasions ranted to my coligues at university that this anchient italian language from Latinum should be done away with for everyone not studdying romance filology or history and the university moto should be changed form "Scientiae et Patriae" to "Zinātnei un Tēvzemei"
Those like Klein will likely tell you that being multilingual reduces skitsofrenia, while I pointing to the youngsters arround me who dont know how to speak properly will tell you that if learning a foreign language comes at the cost of your native language you shouldnt learn it. Better be a master of one language than a master of none.
Nah, if you throw an adult in a foreign country, they'll pick up the language as they go, how fast depends on how much they practice, socialize and expose themselves to that language. My aunt has a midle-aged neighbor that has been in Italy as an adult for maybe 10+ years and learned the language well. My dad who was sh*t at English, picked some while in Malta, and while not good and with a terrible case of mispronouncing and heavy accent, could hold simple conversations after just a year. I've also seen some adult foreigners on Romanian TV speak Romanian fine, some that have been here for even under 3 years.
Why adults think it's hard to learn a new language is because they think it is and because of this myth.
In Wales, Welsh is a mandatory GCSE and also introduced at the age of 5. To be honest, for many people, they resent this and arguably dislike Welsh more because of this. I think people would end up resenting foreign languages if it wasn't their choice. I think with the variety of subjects that schools can offer, it is important to keep only a few mandatory. People are more inclined to study well if they are enthusiastic about the subject. However, I do think that your point around teaching at a younger age is important.
There is also around 25% taught through the Welsh language in an immersion model.
Oddly enough i have young Welsh cousins who are thoroughly patriotic. Went to Welsh language high schools willingly. Although considering that despite the huge efforts most Welsh people barely know the language at all, and the fluency is tiny at best, it seems as though its stuck as a minority language confined to culturally traditional parts of Wales
I am a Brit that grew up in Asia, so I took international GCSE's, which forces us to take a core language, In my school, one of three (Mandarin, Spanish, French). I chose Spanish and still continue to learn it afterwards.
The biggest challenge schools would have is getting kids to "buy into" the importance of learning a second language. I'm a science teacher and a worrying chunk don't care about umderstanding the world around them. Plus we've got more and more children who leave school functionally illiterate in English - how the hell are they supposed to cope with a foreign language?but I think that's a problem due to the resource and social crisis in schools, rather than teaching languages.
The 'lack of caring about the world around them' is basically a 'cultural problem'. Some can break through it tho thankfully, others are just too immersed in commonplace US culture that they don't want to leave such a bubble since it's easy for them. US culture doesn't 'really' put importance or focus on education unless it's trying to get into a good university.
I feel like a lot of the low literacy in English could be helped by multilingualism. Being multilingual makes you more sensitive to structural facets of language, especially if you've learned a language as a non-native. For example, stuff like what pronouns are, what tense a statement is in, etc. If you're learning a language non-natively, you have to consciously think about stuff like that, and it transfers over to your understanding of your native language.
Also, multilingual education *definitely* helps kids who speak a minority language natively. In USA there's a bunch of studies showing that bilingual Spanish-English education is better for native Spanish speaking children than monolingual English education.
@@ettinakitten5047 Yeah man I'm monolingual but I've started dabbling with Esperanto and conlanging and I've learned so much about English despite having no focus on that because I'm just learning about language in general. It's great.
When it comes to how schools teach language, I think the U.S. is failing on that front massively. I am a highschool senior in Spanish 2, the class feels quite abysmal, I quite literally go into that class not saying a single Spanish words, it's just writing Grammer and vocabulary, we aren't INTERACTING with it in any more meaningful way, we aren't making associations beyond simple memory for tests and assingments
I think motive is the most important thing. Mandatory class can only give rudimentary knowledge if the person doesn't want to learn this language.
Although not part of the GCSE core, it was required by our school to try and learn 2 languages and you were required to do a GCSE in one. I assumed it was manually required by all schools.
in my school you have to do a language until Y9, then you can choose to drop it or not
Schools vary, when I was in school you were required to do 1 language in year 7, and a 2nd language years 8-9 based if you scored high enough on your first in year 7. GCSE of any language was optional, however we were a 'maths and computing' specialist school and for us at he time ICT was mandatory. Another school in our town was a 'language' specialist school and for them 1 language was mandatory. I don't know if things are different now, I finished my GCSEs 14 years ago, but at the time there seemed to be some freedom in what schools wanted to enforce.
I can remember my year 9 when I was able to drop Spanish and that's purely because most didn't like it. No one really had any passion for it (myself included) and so we never put any work in and when we were able to not do it we didn't and went from the year doing it to about one class for gsce's
french was compulsory y3-y7 and spanish was compulsory alongside french in y7, in y8 you had to choose either french or spanish to do that year and then i chose to keep doing spanish into y11 anyway as a gcse. five years each in two languages and i doubt i could hold a conversation in either 😭 exposure to media definitely helped me learn the languages i do know instead of standard schooling
@@FullMetalFeline I do have to say I think I would rather have been learning Java and Python than French. My formal IT education ended in Y7, the school didn't offer it. Mainly because I have lost almost all the French I learned at school due to lack of exposure whereas use of Python is included within my Uni degree.
i'm swedish and to be honest i think a big reason we learn english is movies and shows, when i was little i was always far ahead of my classmates all throughout school because i liked watching american shows and movies and learned more english that way.
A friend of mine studied German in college and eventually got a job where he was posted near Frankfurt a couple of times a year for about two weeks at a time. He figured he had a golden chance to polish his language skills, but when he got there basically from the first sentence in every conversation it was all really good English!
He did make a point of talking to the Taxi Drivers to and from the hotel every day. They were mostly Turkish, had German proficiency pretty compatible with his, and were much more comfortable speaking German than English.
I think you missed the mark mate.
I am English, learning Portuguese in Portugal at 23. I like learning Portuguese and it feels much more rewarding as I actually have a worthwhile application for my efforts.
I started to learn French in school but didn't continue with it because:
I have no particular desire to live in France, consume their media above other foreign languages which I have equal exposure to nor is it spoken frequently by my family or friends which doesn't help me learn.
Say I do learn another language, there is very little application for my time spent learning a second language and alternatively I would rather spend my time learning something else if i didn't live abroad.
The difference between UK and other countries is that if we learn a language we can interact with maybe a minority of Europe, which we maybe have some interest in to make it worth while. Whereas continental Europeans have their native language and English which is much more wide spread and present in their culture.
Saying oh we need more teachers to teach isn't really the solution I think. If you intend on living in England and not moving to a foreign county or don't love their culture enough to have the motivation, then it's a bit of a shot in the dark to pick a language as a youth and hope you happen to interact with that culture later in life.
Basically if I spent years learning French I could watch their films without subtitles and use it if I happen to go on holiday to France or happen to meet a French person in UK.
If a French person learns English, there is a huge amount of English language media to consume (which I didn't appreciate how prevalent it is abroad until moving to Portugal) , also you can interact with a large percentage of Europeans too.
I think it simply comes down to the lack of exposure and opportunity to use a foreign language in UK, leads to little motivation. I think to properly encourage more English people to learn another language there needs to be a wide spread cultural influence by another language in media to provide the motivation.
I am not saying English people learning a second language is useless but it is far less useful compared to other citizens of European countries due to lack of prevalence in our media and the reverse of English language films, music, TV often dominating over their native language media.
I have often asked German or Portuguese people if they listen to much music in their native language and they frequently say no they don't like it and they prefer English language music. the films showing in Portugal are 90% in English, so if their media often can't convince a native speaker to consume or there is a lack of it frequently, the attraction for a foreigner is likely gonna low.
I'm English, and I remember sitting in French class chanting: parle, parles, parle, parlons, parlez, parlent. The teacher helpfully wrote the conjugation down in a table with columns for number and rows for person. We spent a good deal of time going through multiple verbs that way. Needless to say I've forgotten them all. German lessons were a little better, as the teacher didn't make us do the chanting. She just ignored the fact that conjugations were something we needed to learn.
At no time, however, did either teacher bother to say what conjugation, person, and number actually were. We were mostly ignorant of the fact that verbs conjugate, there being not much evidence for it in English. Sure, we understood plural, but that applied to nouns, so we never made the connection between it and number for verbs. We also took an "English language" lesson, which aimed to teach us standard English (as opposed to whatever Northern variety we were dragging into the classroom). But again, the teacher thought it better to explain when we should sign letters "Yours sincerely" rather than "Yours faithfully". Needless to say, I've not used that in quite a while.
What was missing wasn't a focus on a single language like in other countries. English as a lingua franca makes it easy for them to choose what language to teach children: only one is extremely useful to everybody. For us, English as a lingua franca makes it that decision hard: all are equally useless to a random group of children. What we needed was a focus on language as a whole. Lessons in linguistics, I suppose. Knowledge we could apply both to our own language and to any that we later chose to learn. Once we found our own reasons for why a language is worthwhile, we could climb that ladder to proficiency much quicker.
In short, teach linguistics in high school rather than individual languages.
I think this all is a bad development, because English is becoming too dominating
mostly agree. I think I learned more about parts of speech in my German lessons than english. Nom. Acc. Gen. Dat Der Den Des Dem etc.
Here in the Philippines, it's mandatory to learn English, Filipino, and your local language (though in my case, I never reached the time where learning the local language was mandatory). English was my first language so I had to learn the local language (Bisaya in my region) and Filipino.
I was able learn my local language through exposure while Filipino took a while because even if I had 13 years of schooling, exposure is hard to get when people around you normally don't speak it
Well at least you learned somehow. Some English-speaking Filipinos I've seen stayed monolingual, kinda isolating them from the rest. They never had true connection with their surroundings.
An important part about learning languages is actually remembering it. I spent years from primary through secondary learning french, and many years of not saying or reading a single french words means ive forgotten all of it. Is it worth people learning an additional language if theres a possibility that the vast majority will completely forget it all?
In The Netherlands, English is part of the CSE (GCSE). Also we get German and French for 3 years in highschool before we can choose to stop learning it or keep it and have it at the CSE.
So speaking of swedish and education, Swedish is a mandatory language that everyone in every school must take in Finland. It kind of works, most Finns can speak very basic swedish. But while English isn't a mandatory class, practically every finn can speak English.
I think a big factor in why people learn languages or not is if foreign languages seem attractive. This may be because there are better paying jobs in other languages, if there's a lot of migration to or between a nearby country with a different language, or because a different language has a strong cultural influence. English tends to always meet all three of these criteria, especially the money and cultural presence ones (thanks TV, Hollywood, and the internet for that).
Countries that are more insular are less likely to speak foreign languages, but people also don't want to put time into learning a foreign language they don't like or that isn't useful in a concrete way.
Language education in England can also be really disjointed which doesn't help.
When I was in Year 2 (7 years old), I had Spanish lessons.
In Year 3 (8 Y.O.), I stopped having Spanish lessons and I have no recollection of why that was.
In Year 5 (10 Y.O.), I had French lessons.
In Year 7 (12 Y.O.), I had German and Latin lessons and stopped learning French.
In Year 8 (13 Y.O.), I had German and French lessons and stopped learning Latin.
In Year 10 (15 Y.O.), I had German lessons only and stopped learning French.
In Year 12 (17 Y.O.), I had no language lessons at all as I finished my German GCSEs and didn't do any languages for A Level.
Like how was I meant to learn anything if I am constantly dropping languages and restarting them from scratch? :I
Sounds like a big waste of time for you and a big waste of money for whoever paid for your schooling, be it the taxpayer or a family member of yours.
@@camelopardalis84 I was state school educated, so it's the taxpayer :p
@@Trolligarch That sounds simply disorganised. (What you wrote in your original comment.) I also had Latin lessons only briefly, but this was because I dropped an elective in eight grade. It's the norm here in Switzerland to start with a mandatory or "semi-mandatory" language and to keep having lessons in it until you're done with school. (Yes, my Latin lessons would have stopped after two years, at the end of mandatory school, but this was because I attended a type of school afterwards that didn't offer Latin, which was normal for that type of school.)
It still seems to me like it's down to English being the trade language. Most countries that have higher rates of bilingualism, the two languages are local+English, because you need to learn English. English specifically. That's why it's taught from grade school, it's a necessary life skill, probably, putting aside the value of education for the sake of education, English is one of the most important skills you'll learn in school. (The exceptions to this seem to mostly be the places that have another colonial language present, like the Francophone world). Where I grew up, the largest minority language is spoken by a fifth of the population, is on all the signs and basically anything official, and the other 80% still put more effort, and retain more, studying English. What is the equivalent to that in England? To properly mirror what happens elsewhere, they will need to pick one language that everyone learns, and everyone studies together and practices together. I can thing of a few languages that might make sense, but that's exactly the point, there's no obvious go-to language like English is in many other places...
I agree. In the UK it seems like a pretty even split on German French and Spanish.
As an American, ever since I was very young I've had an interest in foreign languages, but I never ended up really learning any other language besides English, which I happen to be very proficient in. My high school had a Spanish teaching class but I never took it, and that was the extent of language learning resources in my school. Sometimes I study Latin but that's only really as a hobby. I never travel and have never traveled outside of the US (and likely never will) so the chances I will ever need to learn a foreign language are slim to none.
A story from the UK in the very early 1970s. I was at Middle School in the 1960s. There were a few periods when we received French lessons but there didn't seem to be any structure to it. Anyway, I wasn't very interested because I really wanted to study German. I knew that French, German and another language (I forget which) were offered at High School. When I reached High School as what was then called a 3rd form pupil, they said "You do French in 3rd form, German is available in 4th form". French and German were still taught at that point but the other language had gone. I reached the end of 3rd form and it was time to choose subjects for what was called GCE in those days, so I asked about German. I was told "We have just phased out German". I asked why and was told "It is because the UK is joining the EEC". I pointed out that Germany was part of the EEC and I was told "They speak French in the EEC so we are not teaching German". Go on, I challenge you to find any sense in that! We had a very good teacher for French but it wasn't what I wanted. I had to do a modern language, they said that universities like students to have a GCE in a modern language. Only French was available, so I studied French. It went well, I achieved a top grade in the GCE O level exam. But I hated it. I did not take it any further. I studied a bit of German as an adult. The result is that I forgot most of the French I had learnt and ended up with quite basic German. If it had been the other way around, I think I would have studied German at A level at least.
I feel like I could have agreed with you when I'd only lived in English-speaking countries. Now, having lived in Finland for some time, and seen the level of Swedish proficiency here, I think there's more to it. I've done better in a school Swedish test, purely based on guessing based on English and a little German, than some Finns who'd been studying it for years.
Finn here. I have seen a student, in upper secondary school, being thrown out of class from loudly arguing with swedish language teacher 'what do I need Swedish for?!?!'. The catch? The dude had swedish first name and swedish family name. He also lived in village which had name only in... Swedish😂. And he lived 'stone-throws away from majority swedish-speaking municipality. So yeah....😅 EDIT: teacher --> swedish language teacher
I'm Finnish and learned to speak English by the time I was 10 or 11. People might credit the Finnish education system, etc. But the truth is that I and my friends learned English as kids that fast because every game we played was in English and there was no Finnish translation available. You kind of have to pick up English so you won't constantly get stuck in every game you play. This was back around 2006 and there were some guides online but that doesn't really help as all of them are in English. Runescape was a prime example of this, the quests were really tricky without guides to begin with. Another reason is that we hear English on TV and in movies all the time, we don't dub movies that much except for some kid's shows and animations. Lastly to those who doubt this for some reason. I was always leaps and bounds ahead of my sister in English. She would have almost perfect grades while mine were average except for math and English but still, she couldn't really speak English until she was 15, and even then she was below the level of 12-year-old me. So thank you Pokemon, Runescape, dragon ball, Halo, etc. for making my life a little bit easier and teaching me English.
There's a bit of an elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about - an individual or a society learns another language specifically because of its utility.
Media is a huge one, and I am guessing that the surge in popularity of Korean media is driving an uptick in that. When I was a teenager, anime was all the rage and there was a significant thirst for learning Japanese. Today, English language media dominates in much of the world.
Business is another one. English is hugely useful for this, so a lot of people are driven to learn it. Similarly, there's been an uptick in Mandarin at least in the U.S. explicitly for business purposes, and the languages are about as far from each other in mechanics as you can get (almost). Hell, English is the primary language for air travel traffic control, another point of utility.
Go to the former countries inside the Soviet sphere of influence and among the older generations, it's not English that was learned, but Russian.
Distance, both literal in km or figurative in terms of language similarity also plays a purpose. People sometimes make hay of the fact that the U.S. is starkly monolingual by a lot of measures compared to Europe, but that's just it - I can travel from New York to L.A. and literally can't tell the difference linguistically speaking (other than the SoCal penchant for labeling freeways as "the 101" or "the 5", of course). That's almost 4000 km. Travel 4000 km in Europe and you're looking at something like Lisbon, Portugal, to Riga, Latvia and you're going to cross something like seven or eight languages, and that's being charitable. If crossing from California to Nevada means crossing into a different language group, it'd vastly increase the incentive to learn another language. Or look at Switzerland, which has no less than FOUR languages (never giving up on you, Romansh! You can rebound! Do it! DO IT!) and is smaller than the U.S. state of Iowa.
Similarly, it's much easier when your language has close kin. A Portuguese learning Spanish or Italian has a significantly easier time than even someone from England learning German, its (okay, second, sorry Frisian) closest relative. Norwegian and Swedish are so similar I've seen it argued that they might be more properly characterized as dialects than separate languages.
Because English is the de facto lingua franca (and yes, I find it enormously funny to say that, though I suspect the French find it far less amusing) among large swathes of the world, if you're going to learn one extra language, for most people that makes utilitarian sense.
Just promoting education won't help; I learned French from the second grade, and the moment I got to France, nobody would speak French to me because their English was better. Now, if learning French specifically helped me get a job in my field, that'd change things dramatically (though for me, the closest that'd be would be Quebecois French, so again, probably wouldn't make anyone from France happy to hear that. ;-) )
Your point about just which language to learn is really important. If you have a group of business people in a meeting and one is from Portugal, one is from Japan, one from the UK, one from Italy and one from the Netherlands which language will they all communicate in? English. Because that's the language they ALL learn in school. The person from the UK will be thought the poor linguist as they're the only ones not speaking in a foreign language. But what are they meant to do? Learn Portuguese, Japanese, Italian and Dutch? If that UK person had been me, I would also be speaking to them in English and they'd probably think I was a rubbish linguist too. In fact, I speak Romanian, French, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Polish, German and Finnish.
So even if kids all left high school speaking one foreign language really well I think that would be fantastic for them just for broadening their minds and personal development and for if they actually had contact with the particular country of the language they'd learned but in terms of international communications it wouldn't change much. Quite often we end up using English whether we really want to or not.
By the way, the last time I heard a guy complain loudly in a tourist resort about the fact the locals just didn't speak English very well, he was actually Swedish.
Also BBC1 and 2 are useless when it comes to foreign language stuff. Most of the foreign language stuff on British TV is on Channel 4 (All4) and BBC 4 and the predominant language is Danish. A new series of 'Den som dræber' started on BBC 4 last night. Maybe we should just get all our kids to learn Danish.
Yes, they showed a double bill of Those Who Kill so it was on for two hours in Danish with English subtitles. I'm pretty sure it was on BBC4 on Friday night. Not much but it's something.
Let's face it.Learnig a foreign language is time-consuming, sometimes boring and at times-frustrating.The reward comes if you go to a place, you've never been before and understand every word people say in their native tougne.And then their is a switch from your world to theirs.You dream in the foreign language, you read books in it and you're proud of yourself.It's a reward, money can't buy.And it's keeping your brain young and flexible.
I’m a high school sophmore from the United States and I can relate. At my school, everyone has to take at least two years of a foreign language. However, the only option is Spanish. My Spanish teacher is a native speaker from Colombia and also describes learning Spanish as very easy. Though if you’re like me, you’ll realize that learning any language is never easy, especially when you get older. I’m also trying to learn Mandarin Chinese for family reasons, and that’s considered a great leap forward in difficulty compared to Spanish. I do see it as more useful than Spanish to me as I said before, family reasons, and I also get more exposure to Chinese than I do Spanish. Anyways, back to learning Spanish, almost everyone lacks motivation to do so, as they’re all 15+ and not 7 or 9. I have known people at my school who are conversationally fluent in the language, either because they’re native speakers or they passed all 4 years with flying colors. But if you tried to hold a conversation with me in Spanish, I wouldn’t know half the things you’re saying and my vocabulary is as big as the average four-year-old’s.
When I was a kid being forced to learn Spanish, I hated it because I was being FORCED to do it. In the later years I tried Swedish and French, neither stuck. 2 years prior I tried Latin which didn’t stick either. However one day I just decided “Hey let’s start learning Russian”, and I have been doing so for nearly a year now! In conclusion, I am not sure forcing people to learn a language in school will make them bilingual, at least in my own experience.
Cringe Russian.
@@huguesdepayens807 I myself am not Russian, just an avid learner of anything I can. Once I am fluent in Russian, I might try Danish or mandarin.
@@Asterism_Desmos Why are you so worried about what the yellow people are doing? Learn the languages of your white brothers and sisters.
@@huguesdepayens807 Xenophobe
@@huguesdepayens807 You mad bro?
My first language is English BUT I live in south africa and it was COMPULSORY to learn Afrikaans starting in grade R, (which for those of you who dont know is a language derived from dutch) so when I am trying to learn other languages it makes it much easier because of how many similarities afrikaans has to dutch and german and even swedish.
The majority of people at my school are taking Mandarin as a Gcse at Like 60% then Spanish at like 30% French at around 15% and German at Around 5% Japanese at 2.5% and if you’re wondering why it adds up to 112.5% some people take multiple Languages
My school mandates every student to take either french or spanish at gcse and. Mandatory GCSEs won't be enough. Most of our teachers are native speakers, and even those who aren't are very well acquainted with their languages (many having at least lives in france or spain). And yet, most people i know are barely competent in french and Spanish. So really, primary schools should be prioritised to ensure that students go into secondary school with a solid foundation, primary and secondary schools should communicate to ensure students continue with the same language across all stages of education, and the whole GCSE model for languages at least is in dire need of reform (and these definitely aren't easy things to implement, but they're what we need to improve bilingualism in the uk)
Vladimir Peniakoff, a Russian born in Belgium, grew up speaking English, among several other languages, because his educated family insisted on it. He became an engineer in the Middle East and in World War Two he organised a special forces unit in the British Army called "Popski's Private Army" (radio operators had trouble transmitting Peniakoff so he adopted "Popski" as a code name). After service in North Africa his unit took part in the Italian campaign and often worked with Italian partisans. Peniakoff wrote later that he did not understand where the English reputation for not being able to learn foreign languages came from. According to him, members of his unit quite quickly learned Italian. Their grammar was no doubt sometimes bad but he wrote that after a year in Italy he could pick any member of his unit at random, give him a complex message and tell him to visit the Italian partisans and give them the message. They would do it, return and explain what the partisans had said in response. Perhaps members of his unit were unusually resourceful and intelligent - they were carefully selected by Peniakoff.
Indian here, we have a lot of regional languages and not just Hindi, but because of all these different languages we need a language to bridge the gap and for us those languages are Hindi and English. I suck at Hindi but my English is good thanks to spending half of my childhood in America, but there are definitely times it would’ve been really nice to know Hindi. And of course I use my regional language, Telugu, the most aside from English.
Sometime ago I remember reading that following independence English was considered the common language for all Indians because it was practically nobody's native language. I understand there has been a push to make Hindi the common language and that has upset southern Indians because it unfairly favours northern Indians who either have Hindi as their native language or speak a closely related language such as Gujarati. What is the situation? Are most Indians now on board with making Hindi the national language?
In my anecdotal experience, foreign language teaching in Elementary and High School in the US has been given a lot of criticism for forcing students to learn with little to no real encouragement with a classroom setting with word lists of the week and students being at various and inconsistent levels of knowledge of the target language. Many people will say a classroom environment with textbooks is bad a way to encourage students to learn a foreign language. I had 5 years of Spanish and I don't even remember 5 words from those classes. When I did German for just 2 years, I enjoyed it and remembered a lot of information simply because I was motivated to learn, yet even then the course felt it was focused on getting you credits rather than making you fluent. This of course can be a criticism for education focusing on grades rather than knowledge or perhaps not. It does seem like in Europe, even with a classroom setting, there is a lot more success, obviously because there is more of a incentive to learn but my European friends all say that they learned English mostly from American media on their own starting at a young age.
Loool, definitely do the next video on the politics of language learning!
BTW, back in 2019, I was hosting a workshop for primary school kids in East Ham, London. It was just a regular inner city London school, but they still took Mandarin classes (with an actual Mandarin teacher ;)). It's important to remember that the statistics aren't absolute, either!
to quote sovietwomble ¨we didn't invade half the world to speak THEIR language¨
as a canadian, about 40% of our population can hold a convo in another language but i predict that that number will go up. Personally i live in a decently large city and we get a lot of immigrants, what’s more, there is a lot of immersion schools. So some kids will grow up with english and the languages their parents grew up speaking and then if their parents put them in french immersion, arabic, german, mandarin, or spanish bilangual in elementary/middle school, they end up trilingual. tbh most of my friends speak 3 languages but the older generation speaks one, two if they’re immigrants
I feel lucky as an American to have had regular exposure to multiple languages early on, so language learning became sort of a fascination for me.😊
Here in Australia, there's less than 1000 non-native speakers of Mandarin, despite Mandarin classes being consistantly taken in High School and in the final exams, all because it's 'heritage speakers' taking it themselves.
I was actually in one of those classes, but I had practically zero knowledge of Chinese culture besides 'Great Wall' and 'Tiananmen Square'. The characters looked so difficult to do my brain just shut off and didn't want to even bother.
I am a 中文学习者 now, but only because of friends and living in a highly Chinese-speaking area of my city. I would probably have zero interest otherwise.
In Finland, besides Finnish, everyone also learns some Swedish (or vice versa for Swedish speakers), plus another foreign language (almost always English). Many also take a few lessons of a second foreign language. This doesn't mean everyone speaks four languages or even two, but all have at least some exposure and a change to learn them.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the linguistic similarity between the national languages of Northern European countries and English. Even if we factors like schooling and exposure, it's a lot easier to pick up a language that's similar to your native tongue than a very distinct language. If for some reason Xhosa were the international language of commerce, I doubt that Swedish people would have the same proficiency in Xhosa as they currently do in English.
As a French, I love how English people make fun of our accent while we can have complex conversations in English but all they know in frrench is "croissant" and "omelette du fromage".
Nonsense. We also know baget.
And Tour Eiffel ! 😂
@@josephwodarczyk977But don't know how to write it.
I'm 53, had to have language lessons from age 12 to 16. Had the choice of French or German. I can honestly say that I learned very little, despite our teachers being fluent (or native in one case). And I'm pretty sure that 90% of the rest of the classes learnt very little. And that's because a lack of interest. Few of us are exposed to other languages, so there's nothing to relate what we learn in our lessons to outside of class. Even when we go abroad, try speaking a few words in the local language and in a lot of places people hear a non-local accent and respond in English (have you tried speaking a few words of Swedish in an English accent in Sweden?). There's also the situation you mentioned about which language to learn. Yes there's chauvinism and arrogance, but the main key factor that makes a language easy to learn - exposure - is not there.
Although that doesn't explain why so many people in Wales can't speak Welsh...
Is monolingualism really something we should strive to “cure”? I don’t think It’s necessarily rooted in chauvinism, just in a lack of motive.
As you said, many Anglophones just don’t need any other language to communicate or consume media, and most people only learn as many languages as they absolutely have to.
To be clear I started learning English at 7 years old so you know I’m not biased.
One big cultural difference I've noticed is how people talk about languages, in Denmark you talk about how many foreign languages you speak, not whether you're bilingual or monolingual. It actually took me a really long time to realize that anglophones meant speaking two languages in total when they talked about being bilingual because I just didn't count Danish since speaking your native language obviously isn't impressive. I thought that they meant speaking two foreign languages, which I didn't at the time though I now speak German and very little Chinese.
as someone in england i don't think think making people learn will work bc the curriculum is so bad, for my GCSE's the teachers are basically telling me to learn the 'key words' so if i find them in a sentence i can say it was about whatever and that isn't helping me speak the language
I think part of the problem is genuinely that attitude that you spoke about at the start. Nobody I went to school with wanted to do language learning except for the few students who's first language wasn't english and those who were academically inclined outwith school, and as such had already broken the monolingual barrier. Hell even I, a now neck deep linguistics nerd, didn't gave a single shit about learning any language other than my native language (Scottish Gàidhlig), which annoyingly enough I was only given a single chance to learn in school, which ultimately failed since I was one of like 3 students who actually signed up for it.
The only language education We got in primary education (aged 5-12) was a literal handful of lessons in french which we weren't even really taught for, we were just given ipads and made to do duolingo lessons. While we did have to learn a language during the first two years of secondary school (french by default), I think being forced to do it made a lot of people resent it. If there was more Linguistic education in those primary years then I think more people would be inclined to care about it going through their school years, but with the way things are at the moment people just seem to see it as another massive waste of their time for a skill that the majority of them will never need.
There's a real culture here in the UK (though I'm sure it's applicable in other English speaking nations) wherein there's seen as little need to learn foreign languages because well why should we? English is already the Lingua franca of the modern age and unless one has family still deeply rooted in other languages or cultures then it's a pointless task. I especially find that sometimes there's an almost class based attitude to bilinguality, as though being able to speak many languages is seen as a merit of only those who have the free time and money to entertain such frivolous pursuits and that people of the lower classes who are whole bloodedly British are seen as oddities for their being bilingual.
I've been learning the Japanese language for about 3-4 years now on and off, often times not really studying terribly hard as it is more of a hobby than anything else to me. It shocks me how many times I've spoken to friends, family and acquaintances and mentioned that I speak/study the language and they always act as though I'm some kind of mad scientist dabbling in some eccentric and near occult vocation. One of my friends said "why would you even bother" or something to that effect which left me dumbfounded. How as a culture have we gotten to the point that learning languages is seen with such a skewed perspective as opposed to just seeing it as the means of communication with our fellow peoples of the world that it is. It truly saddens me.
I've tried to encourage a few friends now to take up learning new languages even if it's just doing a duolingo lesson a day (Largely motivated by the fact that I just want someone to practice Japanese with) but each and every single one of them gave it up within days. I guess the concept of studying something for years is too daunting for some people.
Anyway that's my essay, I've got a lot of feelings about this topic (which is probably evident) but nobody I know cares about linguistics at all so TH-cam comment sections are gonna have to bear the brunt my arm chair intellectualism.
In my high school the only language classes we had were for Spanish and French, about 90% choose Spanish so that class was always full. I choose French and in my class were 3 people… it was a little sad but it really made for great one on one learning. The classes themselves were only 2 years and only taught basic conversational skills. Most people opted out in the second year in order to take easier electives like Physical Education or Health and Nutrition. Culture definitely plays a part, I live South Texas so Spanish has a real use down here with so many bilingual people near the border with Mexico but really the proximity to the border is why they can fill seats. There would have to be a real culture change to get people across the nation to care.
In Austria we learn in English for at least 8 years and 12 if you want to complete high school and its mandatory to write like the last big test in it. A lot of Austrians speak english and quite a lot of them probably because of school but general usefulness, internet, vacation etc. deffo play a big part aswell
Most people who learn a language at school because they have to will end up forgetting it. There just isn't enough time that children spend at school to actually retain all that they learn and so it's essential for them to integrate it into their lives in some form or another.
I played video games on EU servers during my school years and beyond and it provided ample opportunities to actually use the English language, thus I am still fluent even years after graduation. I also studied Italian at school and basically forgot all of it because I practically never used it outside of the classroom.
School is not enough. Without it being necessary, most people will simply not be able to speak a second language and this necessity has just never come along for most English natives.
I live in America and have an antenna for TV shows, and I can say that with like, 30 something channels, only one of them was in a foreign language, that being Español
¡Hola! 🤗