People in Spain worry about their foreign-language ability being poor. There is a justification in this, though at least there is a recognition of the problem. In Britain, on the other hand, where the government is planning to make foreign languages optional from the age of fourteen (I think that is the age), it is inevitable that the present abysmal British attitude to languages will only worsen. 'Everyone speaks English anyway these days,' they say but anyone who has had dealings with taxi drivers, police or other authorities while in Europe will know that it is not the case. In some areas with a high number of tourists or of foreign residents it may be so, but anyone who has a bag pinched on the streets of Barcelona will not find a police officer speaking English. Nor, for that matter, are taxi drivers here renowned for their language ability, any more than their British counterparts. And apart from all that, it is sensible and polite to learn a little of the language of the country that you visit. Then there is business or politics; it may well be that Europeans will be happy to negotiate with a Brit in English – but what happens when they start plotting together in a language that isn't English and the Brit can't understand them?
The Dutch are sometimes held up as an example of how well languages can be learnt and it is true that many Dutch people have a good command of other languages. But there are a couple of points to be made here: the first is that Dutch is very rich in phonemes, which means that it has a lot of sounds and Dutch people find it easier than speakers of other languages to reproduce the sounds of other languages; a further important point is that speakers of small languages have a greater need to learn other languages, not only for travel but for education. If your mother tongue is English, or Spanish, or German, or French, for example, you will find that almost everything that you need to study is available in your own language. But if you speak Dutch or Danish or Finnish, or Slovenian, a point will come fairly soon when you will have to (or want to) start reading material that is not available in your own language, even in translation let alone original production.
Language teaching has come a long way from the 1960s when I learnt languages at school by the stultifying grammar-translation method. We had a standard boring text book called Whitmarsh for French, and for other languages we had an eccentric teacher who had his own system in which the first sentence that was learnt in any language that he taught (and he did night school as well as regular school teaching) was The table is an article of furniture. When I went to Cambridge in 1969 to study German and Russian I wanted to learn about what was happening in Europe; it was the period of détente, the eastern treaties, and so on. But I found that while it was possible to spend a year abroad as part of the course it was discouraged, and the course content consisted almost entirely of literature and very little of the modern use of the language, with Russian literature finishing in 1917 and even Solzhenitsyn not being approved reading. Now, I am pleased to say, that has changed completely and a year abroad is a compulsory part of the language course at the University.
I was thinking of this sea-change in language teaching the other day when a kind student lent me a copy of a classic English-teaching book, French in origin but widely used in Spain, called El inglés sin esfuerzo (English Without Effort). The first sentence taught in this book, known to a huge number of people here, is: My tailor is rich. The book has the usual collection of peculiarities used in language teaching material at that time. For example, here is the Ninetieth Lesson
Almost a quarrel
Mr S. pours himself out some whisky, and fills up the glass from the siphon.
With a smile he raises his glass and says: "Your health!"
– Isn't it strange, replies Mrs S., that you men must always be drinking something or sucking a pipe…
– Please don't scold; this is only the second whisky I have had tonight, and I have hardly smoked a dozen cigarettes the whole day.
– I am not scolding; I am only comparing men to women, to the disadvantage of the former.
– Oh let me laugh! What would you say if I rouged my lips and powdered my nose twenty times a day?
– Well, please do it. I shall not prevent you. But if what you say is meant for me, well then…
– Bessie my dear, do not get angry; you know I was joking.
– I don't appreciate that kind of joke.
– Now duckie! What a little spitfire!
He puts his arm round her waist and kisses her tenderly. They both laugh.
– Aren't we silly? What a funny pair of old lovers!
– Let us turn out the lights, lock the front-door and go to bed peacefully.
And elsewhere in the book we learn that: The Americans are very fond of Paris; one of their popular sayings is: "When good Americans die they go to Paris."
How times change!
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