{"id":7997,"date":"2018-08-08T11:24:38","date_gmt":"2018-08-08T09:24:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=7997"},"modified":"2018-08-08T11:28:43","modified_gmt":"2018-08-08T09:28:43","slug":"learn-english-anything-else-is-a-hobby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/7997\/","title":{"rendered":"Learn English: anything else is a hobby"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve probably written about this before, but this tweet reminded me of one of my pet peeves.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">% of students learning a foreign language (<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pewresearch?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@pewresearch<\/a>):<br \/>\nNorway: 100%<br \/>\nAustria: 100%<br \/>\nFrance: 100%<br \/>\nCroatia: 99%<br \/>\nPoland: 96%<br \/>\nBulgaria: 93%<br \/>\nSweden: 92%<br \/>\n(European Average: 92%)<br \/>\nFinland: 84%<br \/>\nDenmark: 82%<br \/>\nGermany: 82%<br \/>\nNetherlands: 70%<br \/>\nBelgium: 64%<\/p>\n<p>US: 20%<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Christian Christensen (@ChrChristensen) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ChrChristensen\/status\/1026813740040237056?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 7, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>My first response was, well, yes: all those non-English speakers are learning English. To which the author&#8217;s response was:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-conversation=\"none\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Uh, yeah. That&#8217;s a second language. And 25-30% learn French, Spanish and\/or German.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Christian Christensen (@ChrChristensen) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ChrChristensen\/status\/1026927696486510594?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 7, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>So non-native English speakers learn non-English foreign languages at approximately the rate Americans do. In short, only about 20-30% of any country bothers learning a non-English foreign language.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of polyglots like to get all high and mighty about Brits and Americans not speaking foreign languages, but for non-English speakers learning English is an obvious choice with benefits which can be realised immediately. But what foreign language should a Brit or American choose to learn? The answer isn&#8217;t so obvious, and I put the question to my interlocutor:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">In the US? Spanish. In the UK? German, French, Spanish or Chinese.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Christian Christensen (@ChrChristensen) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ChrChristensen\/status\/1026929446178222080?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 7, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Well, I&#8217;m a Brit and I confess it&#8217;s not immediately obvious to me I should learn Chinese I assume he means Mandarin). At least, not in the way it&#8217;s immediately obvious a Norwegian or Lithuanian should learn English. And the fact he&#8217;s listed four languages suggests the choice isn&#8217;t all that obvious, doesn&#8217;t it? I mean, you spend a few thousand hours learning Spanish and then what? You go on holiday?<\/p>\n<p>And here&#8217;s the thing: people (<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ChrChristensen\/status\/1026827946370195456\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">including Mr Christensen<\/a>) think being able to speak a foreign language opens doors for business and employment to a far greater degree than it does. For example, I know a Turkish lady who went to China in 1997 and learned Mandarin, and it was very useful because at that time few people spoke English. But within a decade anyone doing international business spoke English, and now it&#8217;s not really an advantage except for social occasions and practical, day-to-day living. The Turkish lady eventually left China and now works in France, where her Mandarin is utterly useless save for a few comical occasions when she meets Chinese on the street. She is now struggling to learn French, but what really matters is she speaks and writes English to full professional fluency. <em>That<\/em> is what her employers are interested in, as well as her professional skills.\u00a0I know another woman, an American, who is fluent in English, French, Mandarin, and Russian. Sure, she has certain advantages when she&#8217;s actually in France, China, or Russia but she struggles for work because her professional CV isn&#8217;t very strong. Employers would rather hire an an expert who only knows English than someone with a weak CV who speaks a dozen languages. In my own case, my erstwhile multinational employer was not in the slightest bit interested that I spoke Russian: when I tried to invoke it to get assigned to Russian projects, nobody was interested.<\/p>\n<p>Those who think Americans or Brits learning a foreign language will give them some sort of business or economic advantage have no idea what they&#8217;re talking about (Christensen is a <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ChrChristensen\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">professor of journalism<\/a>). If you want to do business with the Chinese as a foreigner, you&#8217;re better off improving your product or service such that they want to buy it rather than wasting hours learning Mandarin. Now if you want to live in a particular country and get among the local culture, learning a language is highly recommended if not essential. But please, enough of this sneering at native English speakers for not learning foreign languages: take English out of the equation and hardly anyone else learns foreign languages either, and when they do it&#8217;s basically a hobby.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I&#8217;ve noticed a lot of the sneering comes from polyglots who were gifted languages as a child, either from a foreign parent, going to school abroad, or by growing up in a country where a second language is learned from birth by default. Those who&#8217;ve learned a foreign language as an adult tend not to pass remarks on the subject, much less sneer at those who haven&#8217;t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve probably written about this before, but this tweet reminded me of one of my pet peeves. % of students learning a foreign language (@pewresearch): Norway: 100% Austria: 100% France: 100% Croatia: 99% Poland: 96% Bulgaria: 93% Sweden: 92% (European &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/7997\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[72],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7997"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7997"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7999,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7997\/revisions\/7999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}