After a very successful ”Day of Multilingual Blogging” organised during the European Day of Languages, the European Commission in the UK has launched a new challenging language related question/competition on their facebook page:
What’s your good reason for learning a foreign language? We’re hopefully going to use the 10 best in a campaign to promote language learning.
Feel free to share your good reasons on their facebook page and in the comments section of this blog!
Q. What is your good reason for learning a foreign language?
A. It enables me to communicate with people of other nationalities. Some English speaking people assume or expect foreigners to speak English as they say English is an international language. However, I feel this is a tad arrogant, it is far better for them to make the effort to learn a foreign language.
Thanks!
I just had dinner with some colleagues from the UK who were amazed at the amount of languages me and my Belgian colleagues were speaking. More and more English speakers realise they do need to learn more languages to open up to other cultures.
Being passionate about languages myself I realise it’s because I’m also passionate about the different cultures these languages give me access to. In my view, learning a language is not only about mastering its grammar, but willing to feel different cultures. One of my main reason has always been to be able to read literature in its original language. Being a literary translator and writer, I know how frustrating the loss can be when you move from one language to another. Thankfully, there are very good translators out there and I can’t read all the authors I want in their native language either (I can do it in 5 at the moment, and I am willing to go further as much as I can!), but the more I learn, the more complete I feel.
I think it’s not necessarily only about being entirely fluent in a language (and able to read literature in that language, even though that is of course a fantastic ability). People often appreciate it if you make that step and say something in their language, even if it’s something simple and you then have to switch back to a lingua franca. And even a low level of competence can help you understand the culture much better. I spent six weeks in Indonesia this year and started learning Bahasa by looking at terms that had made it into German (“orang utan” meaning “man of the woods”, “guru” = “teacher”, “mata hari” = eye of day = the sun). First glimpses at what a beautifully metaphorical language Bahasa Indonesia is, it really shows the appreciation of Indonesians for the environment they live in. And “jam karet”, “rubber time”, for example, made me understand why we were not picked up as agreed at 8 in the morning to go to a nearby school to teach English on our first day of volunteering in a village in Lombok. The explanation was: “It is raining, we’ll wait until the weather is better.”, which meant we started our classes the next day. I must admit it did make me wonder what happens during the rainy season….
In Bahasa, from memory don’t they just say the word twice for the plural – anak for child, anak anak for children. OK makes conversation a bit longer but great idea. Off to eat biscuit biscuit
Learning a foreign language is like opening a door to another culture. It is a discovery, day by day, not only of the language, words, phrases, but also the style of thinking of that language. It amazes me how different those styles are. I think language is a characteristics of a nation, especially its development. There is nothing better that learning a language when you are motivated, it is such a pleasure! On the other hand, if it is a ‘must’ and you don’t like it, it could be a nightmare. I think that nowadays you need to communicate in at least two foreing languages – mainly for studying and working.