Question:
I remember that 10 years ago, when I travelled to Holland, I dined at
a Chinese restaurant. My group had a chat with the owner in
Cantonese. She told us that her children are learning many languages:
Dutch, English, French. We were amazed. She explained: "Our country
[the Netherlands] is very small. We need to learn more languages in
order to have a better future prospect. Knowing these languages
enables us to find job in other countries, not just Holland."
I think it is this attitude that gives the Dutch and the Swiss the big
motivation to learn foreign languages. Further, since the older
generations are also multilingual, this builds up confidence in the
society, because they know that learning a few languages is possible
and commonplace. I believe it is due to the same mindset that most
people in eastern Europe have mastered a few languages and speak
English very well.
OTOH, the opposite mindset "All foreigners will learn my language.
Why should I bother to learn theirs?" prevails in the USA. That
should explain why the Americans are so bad at foreign languages.
I'm not sure about Scandinavia. But I think those people and the
Germans simply enjoy an advantage when learning English (but not
French or Italian, for instance) because they speak a Germanic
language natively. The similarity gives a big help.
Marc> By the way, it's obvious that French have more problems with
Marc> basic English vocabulary, which is largely of Germanic
Marc> origin.
Does English have more cognates with French or
Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese? Come on. That's just an excuse
Answer:
Why? It's not surprising that they have to learn Dutch in
Holland.Having too learn two foreign languages at school is the
standard in most of Europe, not too impressive. In Germany, it's not
unusual to teach three.
I disagree, the (French-speaking) Swiss I've met are not much more
fluent in German than the French living close to the German border. And
most (young) Dutch I meet don't speak another foreign language than
English.
To my mind, most young people today think that English is THE world
language and knowing it well is absolutely sufficient.
To some extent, they are right: I'm working in a scientific field and
English really is all you need to communicate. (That doesn't mean that
there are no benefits in learning other languages, but those benefits
are not a sufficient motivation for a vast majority of young people...)
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