Bilingual in Europe versus USA

Mxsmanic wrote:
EvelynVogtGamble(Divamanque) writes:


They do if the languages are properly taught!


The US is not the place to look for languages properly taught.

How would you know? Judging from your posts, you've not
been "home" to the U.S. in many, many years!

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 23:13:08 +0200, Dave Frightens Me
wrote:

Chinese is next to useless, coz it's extremely difficult to master,

Spoken Chinese is relatively easy, as it has almost no grammar.
Written Chinese is difficult, but it's very useful because it's
understood widely throughout Asia.

and even by the Chinese is seen as an inferior language.

Surely you're not serious!

Chances are
you will never need it in the business or social world. Japanese comes
in a number of flavours, but is only used in Japan.

Written Chinese is often used to communicate between
Japanese/Koreans/Chinese, because they all have some familiarity with
the Chinese characters, even though their spoken languages are very
different. If you're in a mixed group of Asians, you'll often see them
write Chinese characters on paper napkins, or even air-write them on
their hands, to clarify what they're saying in English.


--
Barbara Vaughan
My email address is my first initial followed by my surname at libero dot it
I answer travel questions only in the newsgroup

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:11:10 -0400, Dave Smith
wrote:

B Vaughan wrote:

Little children don't profit much from study of a second language,
unless it's immersion study. And then it has to be maintained
consistently or they forget it all again.

They pick up languages a lot faster than older children do. The idea is to teach
it and expand on the learning base, not to learn it and forget about it.

However, teaching children the names of objects or how to count and
sing a few songs in a foreign language does not make use of the
language-learning centers of their brains. One year, I taught English
for one hour a week to nursery school children here in Italy. They
didn't pick it up any quicker than the adult learners in my evening
school class and they had a strong Italian accent. Yet if those
children had been put in a nursery school in an English speaking
country, they would have been fluent in a few weeks, with no accent
at all. The brain of a young child is programmed to learn a language
quickly, but only if the language is learned in the way that's natural
to a human being, that is immersion.



--
Barbara Vaughan
My email address is my first initial followed by my surname at libero dot it
I answer travel questions only in the newsgroup

"B Vaughan" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 23:13:08 +0200, Dave Frightens Me
wrote:

Chinese is next to useless, coz it's extremely difficult to master,

Spoken Chinese is relatively easy, as it has almost no grammar.
Written Chinese is difficult, but it's very useful because it's
understood widely throughout Asia.

and even by the Chinese is seen as an inferior language.

Surely you're not serious!

Chances are
you will never need it in the business or social world. Japanese comes
in a number of flavours, but is only used in Japan.

Written Chinese is often used to communicate between
Japanese/Koreans/Chinese, because they all have some familiarity with
the Chinese characters, even though their spoken languages are very
different. If you're in a mixed group of Asians, you'll often see them
write Chinese characters on paper napkins, or even air-write them on
their hands, to clarify what they're saying in English.



Surely, the tonal elements of Chinese add an additional complexity on top of
normal language learning?

Surreyman

On 24 Aug 2006 14:56:02 -0700, "Iceman" wrote:

Dave Frightens Me wrote:
On 24 Aug 2006 11:21:12 -0700, "Iceman" wrote:

Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and maybe Arabic or Russian
are more valuable than French or German. And even many universities
don't offer all of those languages.

Chinese is next to useless, coz it's extremely difficult to master,
and even by the Chinese is seen as an inferior language. Chances are
you will never need it in the business or social world.

You have to be totally fluent in Chinese before it is any commercial
use - but people who are fluent and who have law, business, IT, etc.
skills are in huge demand.

I have spent quite some time in Hong Kong, and never needed it, except
for talking to someone poorly educated, like a taxi driver or
waitress.

And Portuguese is only of value in Portugal and Brazil.

But Brazil is a huge market, and there are far fewer
Portuguese-speakers in the US than Spanish-speakers. And it isn't the
huge pain in the ass to learn that the Asian languages or Arabic are.

Especially if you already know another romance language. I can read
Portuguese, and usually pick up the gist of what they are saying.

In summation, there really isn't an obvious second language to learn
in the world, unless you want to move to a specific place.

Well, in my field, law, and in the closely related field, finance,
there is a lot of demand for people who speak those languages to be
based out of New York or London, and only make occasional trips to
China, Brazil, Russia, etc. Even a lot of Western professionals who
are "in region" are based out of cities like Dubai or Hong Kong rather
than Cairo or Guangzhou.

It's clearly not for everyone, and you have to be willing to put in the
work to become totally fluent in a difficult language and to make
repeated trips to developing countries. But for someone who does have
an interest in those countries or cultures, fluency in one of those
languages is far more of a commercial advantage than fluent French or
German would be.

Yes, you're probably right.
--
---
DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com
---
--

On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 06:25:23 +0200, Wolfgang Schwanke
wrote:

Hatunen wrote in
:

In Canada, if a job posting calls for applicants to be bilingual, it
means French and English.

You mean Quebecoise and English.

You mean Québecois and American.

Come on, American is English! It's the same language with a few
different nouns, and a different accent!
--
---
DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com
---
--

On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 06:26:08 +0200, Wolfgang Schwanke
wrote:

Dave Smith wrote in
:

It's funny, but I took French in high school, had s few immersion
experiences, have spent time in Quebec and France, and had work dealt
with some Quebecois and some real French people. I can understand
French in France. I can actually communicate with people there and
understand what they are telling me. When French Canadians speak their
French to me it sounds like a different language.

You do realise that many people who learn English at school have
similar problems in North America?

I don't believe that. It only takes a couple of days at the most to
tune your ears to a different accent.
--
---
DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com
---
--

"Dave Frightens Me" wrote in
message

Come on, American is English! It's the same language with a few
different nouns, and a different accent!

And some appalling verbs, like "gotten". And leaving out prepositions, as
in "A couple Eurostar questions".

Ian

On Fri, 25 Aug 2006, Dave Frightens Me wrote:

Especially if you already know another romance language. I can read
Portuguese, and usually pick up the gist of what they are saying.

Really ? I haven't formally studied any other neolatin language but my
mother tongue italian however ...

- I can read french since ever (one of my essays at the end of high
school 30 odd years ago was on the philosophy of mathematics in
Henri Poincare' which I read in original) but I do not dare to
write it. I can somehow follow spoken french specially on familiar
topics, but I do not dare to speak (recently at an astronomical
project meeting when only french, belgian and italians remained,
the majority of the people switched to french, with the presentation
on the screen in english, I followed, and interacted in english)

- I can read spanish but I do not dare to write it. I can follow
spoken spanish although I've often the impression is spoken too
fast (faster than italian). I may even dare speak (once in Chile
I had to train laser machine operators at ESO, which I did in
an invented spanish arranged from italian ... successfully)

- I can read portuguese and other languages (catalan, or italian
dialects) with decent understanding ...

... BUT I had the definite impression that spoken portuguese
(in Portugal) was almost not understandable, not because of
the speed, but because so many sounds were altered or perturbed
with respect to the written form

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On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 15:41:00 -0700, "EvelynVogtGamble(Divamanque)"
wrote:



Mxsmanic wrote:

Students don't make the connection between academic study of languages
and real cultures that give rise to them.

They do if the languages are properly taught!

From the (anecdotal) point of view of an English teacher who dealt
with inbound students to the UK, and, as a qualified guide, also took
them on cultural tours, I'd agree generally with Evelyn's assertion.

It was interesting to see groups arriving with the teachers from their
own countries. It didn't seem to matter where the groups came from:
enthusiastic teachers tended to engender enthusiastic students.

However, there is also the attitude of students to take into account.
Some were studying English because it was part of their course, full
stop.They were in the UK because they had to be. Whilst rarely
resentful, they took little interest in their surroundings. The age
factor and is also important: younger students wanted to go shopping
rather than visit historic monuments.




Keith, Bristol, UK

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