I still don't understand why English speaking people have so little understanding for foreign languages. Like, how is it possible they don't know that tomate in Spanish could be tomato in English?
I think that partially its because we don't think that learning other languages is necessary as 'everyone' speaks English. I've been embarrassed multiple times in Europe when the locals quite happily switch between multiple languages (sometimes in the same sentence as we discovered on a train in Italy) where we struggled to make ourselves understood.
I think that the other part is that we teach 'foreign' languages as very much a specialist subject (late on) rather than something fundamental. If they taught various languages from age 5 upwards we'd have many more multi-lingual speakers in this country.
I don't know about that. I learned my first English word when I was ten. And I wasn't talking about learning another language, just having a little understanding and finding similarities. The example I gave was from Pointless where they had to find the English name for Spanish vegetables. And there were 6 of the 100 people who had not identified the word tomate.
I have a smattering of words & phrases from French, German & Italian that I've picked up along the way. I even tried out some Japanese on an Australian woman who had Japanese heritage and she said she was moderately impressed (just being nice I think).
European languages do have a lot of words in common (or at least with common roots!) so I'm a bit surprised that some people didn't recognise "tomate" [lol]
7 comments:
Exactly!!!
One of the many reasons why English is so fun & complicated!
I still don't understand why English speaking people have so little understanding for foreign languages. Like, how is it possible they don't know that tomate in Spanish could be tomato in English?
I think that partially its because we don't think that learning other languages is necessary as 'everyone' speaks English. I've been embarrassed multiple times in Europe when the locals quite happily switch between multiple languages (sometimes in the same sentence as we discovered on a train in Italy) where we struggled to make ourselves understood.
I think that the other part is that we teach 'foreign' languages as very much a specialist subject (late on) rather than something fundamental. If they taught various languages from age 5 upwards we'd have many more multi-lingual speakers in this country.
I don't know about that. I learned my first English word when I was ten. And I wasn't talking about learning another language, just having a little understanding and finding similarities. The example I gave was from Pointless where they had to find the English name for Spanish vegetables. And there were 6 of the 100 people who had not identified the word tomate.
I have a smattering of words & phrases from French, German & Italian that I've picked up along the way. I even tried out some Japanese on an Australian woman who had Japanese heritage and she said she was moderately impressed (just being nice I think).
European languages do have a lot of words in common (or at least with common roots!) so I'm a bit surprised that some people didn't recognise "tomate" [lol]
Exactly. You can understand a lot of words that you know from other languages. But some people. [rolleyes]
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