UK economy needs schoolchildren to learn languages

vivatifosi

aliasojo wrote: »

My daughter is desperate to learn Japanese.

Needless to say the only school that teaches it, is private.

Today's world is much more diversified than that of years ago. I do believe we should look at the choice of languages we offer in schools now, standard French and German that so may of the schools still only offer is a poor offering imo.

aliasjo, libraries often have language courses. Funnily enough I was doing some stockwork on ours today and we have a Japanese course. Could she get something from the library, see if she still likes it, then pursue it further if she does?

aliasojo

vivatifosi wrote: »

aliasjo, libraries often have language courses. Funnily enough I was doing some stockwork on ours today and we have a Japanese course. Could she get something from the library, see if she still likes it, then pursue it further if she does?

That'a good idea and something I hadn't thought of. Thanks.

CLAPTON

kabayiri wrote: »

I never understood why the idea behind Esperanto was never pursued. A common global language has more chance of success than 2m English children learning Cantonese.

It doesn't mean Esperanto was the ideal language of course.

We need a common global language which is simple in structure and tense. One routed in current usage and one which young people find easy to adopt.

Txt Spk it is then ! lol

English is the universal language

Why would anyone (foreign) want to learn esperanto when they can learn English instead?

pqrdef

vivatifosi wrote: »

British Chambers of Commerce say that children should compulsorily learn languages up to 16 if Britain is to compete for export business:

You mean, like the Americans do.

kabayiri

CLAPTON wrote: »

English is the universal language

Why would anyone (foreign) want to learn esperanto when they can learn English instead?

I agree. Esperanto should have been a stripped down version of English with a few words of 'Foreign' thrown in.

This idea of enforcement of language learning through schooling won't work in the main. It will take a generation to change the culture.

wymondham

Our local school has just started Spanish!

princeofpounds

Language teaching needs to start much earlier- young children soak up new words like sponges, especially if it's fun and involves singing and stories.

English grammar dropped off the curriculum for a while when I was at school, so at 11 we started learning French with its "verbs" and "tenses" without knowing what they were in our own language.

Absolutely agree with this. We start far too late, which is the #2 reason why we lag .

#1 reason is that we don't watch foreign language media much because global media is in english.

and #3 reason as also highlighted here is that English grammar is effectively no longer taught (since the 70s actually, not a recent development). Which means that learning the grammar of a new language is a nightmare because it's almost like learning a foreign language in a foreign language!

*onlyme*

I agree that teaching languages needs to start from a much younger age in this country.

I was born and raised in Belgium and I speak 9 languages. My husband is British. Our daughter is a Belgian national (only because the passport / identity card is MUCH cheaper then the British one...very MSE) but she doesn't speak a word of Flemish!

I tried to teach her from a baby, but she has a condition called Auditory Processing Disorder and it confused the hell out of her.

However now she is 10, she is learning French and Spanish, I am teaching her but still she has no interest in Flemish :rotfl:

SingleSue

My primary school had the right idea, we started learning French when we were 6 or 7, so by the time we got to high school, we were way ahead of all the other students from other primary schools. Unfortunately, we all had to start at the beginning again!

I've been teaching my boys different languages since they were babies, not just French (I was pretty fluent in French by my mid teens and acted as a translator when I was 15) and it has stuck. When we went to Disneyland (Paris!), I insisted that they spoke only in French to the staff...and they did very well indeed.

They also know bits of Spanish, Polish, Croatian, Swedish, Danish, Japanese, German, Italian and can do sign language too!

Strangely, my ex husband didn't much like me teaching them different languages.....he would get most irate by it.