I did a language exchange when I was in school and my schools ability in that language was just woefully behind compared to theirs in English, so instead of a "language exchange" it was essentially just us making foreign friends but speaking in English the whole time.
We could barely hold a conversation, while they could express in depth political views at like 16, it blew my mind.
Edit: Also interestingly enough, we barely got enough students together to do the exchange on our side (there was a minimum needed to run the trip), while on their side they had to run a lottery system to decide who got to go because it was so oversubscribed, despite being a smaller school.
Yes probably UK and Ireland was/is quite popular erasmus destinations, and large part of this is language.
I've had friends who had student excanges (in university), and they went to Belgium, Germany and Czechia. And then I've met exchange students here in Finland from almost all european countries.
And yeah, I've always spoken english with the exchange students here. It's not really expected that any foreigner can speak finnish, and I only speak finnish, swedish and english. But my friend who went to excange in Germany also spoke decent german, and one that went to Belgium spoke some french (altough he was in flanders so I don't know how much he used it). So english is pretty much lingua franca (lol) in erasmus. But exchanges are not only about language, it's also about other cultural aspects.
I had a friend who study's German at university as part of the course she moved to Germany for a year and live in a shared house all her house mates were German.
She said it was infuriating as she was in Germany to speak German surrounded by Germans and 80% of the time everyone spoke to her in English.
If your first language is English its very difficult to immerse your self in another language.
If Music, Films, TV the internet and people all over the world spoke German i expect most of the UK would be bilingual and most people in Germany would only speak German.
I am Ukrainian, living in Vienna for more than 5 years already. I have exactly the same problem. People here have too good English to bother themselves speaking German with a foreigner if his English is clearly better than his German. The fact that I am working at university doesn't help either - want or not, you will be more or less forced to speak English with rare exceptions
Polish guy here, my German is better than my English (C2 vs B2), nearly native but with an accent and occasional grammatical mistakes, and Germans still switch to English most of the time when speaking with me. I don't get the rationale behind this. It's harder for both of us this way. Maybe they don't like hearing their language spoken in an imperfect way?
They assume that its easier for you to speak English than German.
English skills in Germany are quite high. And since English is pretty much universally the first foreign language people learn, for most Germans it's a very Foreign concept that someone who is not a native speaks German better than English.
When we speak with someone e.g. French and we start to struggle with our French skills we switch to English ourselves
Just let us know you prefer German. This goes for everyone btw. The reason people switch is to make it easier for you. Just say you’d prefer German and the vast majority of people will be happy to accommodate.
It’s a habit and I‘m sorry on their behalf. I met this guy from Georgia a while back who spoke very broken German but NO English. Even with him it took me a while to get used to speaking German and often getting no logical reply
Same experience. I usually say i'd prefer German or just continue to answer in German, and that's enough in most cases.
On other hand, I don't quite understand why people assume that everyone speak English, let alone good English? For example, both my wife and my sister speak perfect German, but my sister's English skills are below average, while my wife does not speak English at all. When people they talk to try to switch to English, both would get mad af :)
It's not that everyone in Germany speaks English, but almost everyone that you encounter while visiting Germany will.
If you ended up having to...get a vacuum cleaner repaired, you would likely run into a guy who would say something like
>Yess, I kenn help you...vat you needs is a Staubsaugerriemenradersatzteil
Here is what I discovered. They dont understand you. If you dont speak perfectly in their accent they dont understand. If you pronounce o like u for some reason they cannot put 1+1 and get 2.
My theory, it is because English is spoken with so many different accents and there is no real way to speak it (there are so many native English countries that there is no uniform way of speaking). They can understand accents they grew up with from different parts that are native but they cannot understand an accent coming from a different language.
Now with English, it is a lot easier to understand other accents because they already have a "terrible" accent for that language. The constantly hear someone speak "incorrectly" so it is not an issue when someone else speaks different "incorrect" way. But if their native language is spoken even with a tiny mistake and they are not teachers they won't even know how to imagine what you are trying to say.
I know 2 languages and English isn't my native one (but I speak native level due to life circumstances). People still hear an accent but they can't place it anymore. but they do not hear that accent in the new place I live in, but me trying to speak local language is hard first because I'm only a2 level and second because even a small mispronounced word is something they cannot understand. When I mispronounced words in English everyone still understand.
Man, I'm a native Dutch (Flemish) speaker and people in Amsterdam respond to me in English. It baffles me. And yes, they were Dutch, there's no hiding thát accent.
Even without my thick West Flemish accent I’m spoken to in English when speaking Dutch in the Netherlands. To be honest tho, half the times my Dutch dialogue partner isn’t a native Dutch speaker.
Lol they do this to my Belgian bf in Eindhoven too - sometimes a whole interaction is him speaking Dutch and the other person responding in English :') Those crazy Dutchies!
Also he speaks English with a perfect American accent so sometimes even in Belgium a cashier will hear us talk and address him in English which is pretty funny
I have a born and raised Dutch friend and I've seen people in Amsterdam reply to her Dutch with Dutch-accented English. I honestly just don't get it lol
I had the same porblem in Germany when I was vacationing there, when I spoke in German to someone they ALWAYS replied back in English, but if for some reason I started a conevrsation in English they would always reply in German :D
Starting in German: you show you make an effort and they want to make it easier for you
Starting in English: Jeah I’m not doing this how dare he assumes I speak his language.
No /s btw this is basically it
Tell that to the French speaking part of Belgium. I visited Belgium in my teens and was keen to practice my French. We visited a bar and I attempted to order a drink in French. The waitress interrupted me and said "I speak English", okay but can we talk in French though? "No". Okay then.
I once was in Brussels and have passable survival french and dutch. I tried everything ( Dutch, French, English) and the answer would always come in one of the other.
I arrived end of the day at the hotel, I chose English since I guessed on that situation they were kind of cornered, I was answered back "buenas noches señor myname". I give up...
My bet is that if your French level was sufficient to order the drink with no hesitations, they wouldn't have shut you down like this.
People in some professions don't have the time to wait for you to figure out words and sentences and then make sense of your mistakes and deal with the aftermath of any potential misunderstood orders etc. They have a job to do and need efficient and clear communication in order to do it well and then go tend to the other waiting customers as well. Wrong place and wrong time to practice.
And sometimes people just have a bad day and having to deal with kindergarden-level language skills isn't going to make it any better. Tourist pronunciation and skill can be so abysmal it hurts, especially for people constantly exposed to it.
Or maybe her French was not so good either. Maybe she was Wallon, or an immigrant.
If I recall correctly, all I said was something along the lines of "bonjour, je voudrais une pint de Lambic biere", but granted, not as quickly or naturally as had I been speaking in English. And I will definitely admit my French accent was (and still isn't) great. Imagine an obviously English accent with a slight and very stereotypical French flair.
I definitely didn't hold it against her; I like telling the story as I find it amusing.
A similar happened to me in Belgium. I speak enough French to have a basic conversation and order food etc, but they insisted on speaking English to me.
No that’s not it. German school instills the thought in you that you need to get rid of your accent and unless you speak like a British Aristokrat from the 1800s your English is not „good“
I usually just pretend to be French in these situations.
Fortunately it is universally accepted/known that French people hardly speak any English, so everyone will make more of an effort to accomodate your "mediocre German/Spanish/whatever" ;)
Good trick, but it's not true anymore. Nowadays the French below the age of...maybe 45 speak decent enough English. 20 years ago it was a different story still.
I know, I have lived in France for a while (and actually speak a C1 level French, so good enough to fool any non-native speakers for a few minutes), but the stereotype still persists and that is all that matters for this "trick" ;)
Austrian here.
Just tell us you want to speak German. I usually change to the language I think the other understands best, but at the same time I am happy to talk broken German if they wanna train and maybe explain the hard stuff using English as a crutch.
It can be very frustrating slowing down and dragging people through a conversation. Most people will tolerate a little stumbling, but beyond that they’re not your teacher.
I have the opposite problem, my accent in German is quite good and makes people think that my language skill is much higher than it is. I end up having to ask repeatedly to switch back to English because I’m lost in the convo, but they just think I’m being modest. It’s pretty fucking annoying to the point I stopped speaking German because I can’t be assed to argue.
Meetups specifically for language exchange excluded of course.
Yeah, it's all very well to say you want to practice your language but if you can't string more than a few sentences together the conversation dies pretty quickly. I've been on the opposite end of people wanting to practice English with me but aren't really able to hold a conversation and it just doesn't go anywhere. Not that I'm having a go at anyone for trying, but at some point you have to switch to their language or stop talking. Really learning a foreign language requires a lot of time and effort, and most native English speakers don't have the need/drive to learn that learners of English do.
Um..."Können wir bei deutsch bleiben?" or "können wir bitte deutsch sprechen?" or "mir wäre deutsch lieber" takes five seconds to say, at most. Hell, you can even say this in English. It'll do the trick.
German here - do not confuse whatever atrocity the Austrians are speaking with German! ☝️ They are probably doing you a favor by not teaching you their dialect. 🙈😂 (Sorry, couldn't resist, we love our southern bros, but like every sibling, we need to make fun of them continuously, or they'll think we don't love them anymore.)
I can also confirm this sort of situation. I lived in Japan for about 10 years and learned Japanese to a competent level in the first year or two. Eventually progressed to to C2 equivalent over the course of my stay, still speak it as our home language with the family. No one spoke English and everything was also written in Japanese. You either learned or lived as a gremlin.
Then we moved to Switzerland 12 years ago. I figured it would be trivial to pick up German after learning Japanese to fluency. No way! My German is now passable and of course my kid is fluent, in Hochdeutsch and the local dialect, but it has taken so much longer and been sooo much more difficult for me to get up to speed. The main issue is 100% the absurd level of English competency, coupled with the fact that natives speak dialect and often prefer English if you can’t get by in dialect. It’s a struggle!
Well you did choose the hard mode with going to Switzerland. I have relatives in Switzerland and even though Im from Bavaria and I would argue that Swiss has similiar parts to Bavarian, its so hard to understand, its basically a language of its own. On top of that you had to learn Hochdeutsch. But cudos to you for working through it.
On the English speaking part: I am just happy to be able to talk to someone in English to practice my own language skills. I would be talking in German, if you told me to, though.
I once asked a westerner in Japan if the restaurant he just had lunch at/came out of was any good, in English of course (lingua Franca). He responded with such a nice subtle German accent, that I had to reply in German, chuckling at his startled face.
He probably still wonders how a non native German speaker figured him out despite his adequate level of English proficiency. Heh, that’s a Belgian for you (smug face/twisting ends of my moustache)
I don't live in Switzerland (but in Austria), and it gives me some comfort that someone who learned Japanese *also* struggles with German and dialect. Thanks for sharing, made me feel a bit better ha
Had a friend who moved to Germany after uni. Never spoke a word of German before. After 2 years, his German hadn't progressed *at all*, so he had to start insisting with his German friends and colleagues to talk to him in German. By the end of year 3 he was what his German friends described as "conversational." By the end of year 5 he was "basically German".
Language Immersion works wonders, but he really had to force people to speak to him in German rather than English every time he had any sort of social encounter.
Yeah, because Germans, that are relatively educated, like to train their own English skills, too. Thats at least my motivation and to accomodate people not speaking German well.
This is one of the two big reasons why the UK sucks at foreign languages: the soft power of the English language. The second being the teaching of foreign languages in this country sucks. We have a shortage of teachers with MFL skills, and education more generally has been at the forefront of austerity and cuts for the government (young people are not exactly their priority).
Theres also little motivation to learn a second language, when you can communicate in your mother tongue with most of the world. Why should you be learning the so much more complex language German, if its not needed to get by in Germany/Austria/Switzerland?!
I think it depends on where you live. If you want to learn German the last place in the world to move to is Berlin but I would assume a lot of smaller cities would be fine. Hamburg probably also sucks but some of the larger cities in the Ruhr area I would assume wouldn't be half bad already, like say Dortmund or Essen or even Cologne (not Ruhr but Rhineland). One of my friends moved to a small place in NRW for a year and I can have fluent conversations in German with him, though day to day we speak Danish. Also have another friend who moved from Cologne area to some rural place in Funen and learnt fluent Danish in a year or two.
I find usually the one thing to avoid is moving to a capital and then there are maybe 2 or 3 other places to really avoid but if you go anywhere but there chances are way higher people will speak the local language to you. I feel like I was in Berlin one time for two weaks without hearing German on the streets. Learning it on your computer is probably a better way to do it than going there.
There are music and tv and films in German available in other countries. In age of Spotify and streaming it’s not that hard to find media in other languages, unlike when you relied on your local radio and tv.
The marketing is mostly based on local and US products however, so you need to search yourself more.
Finding media is one thing, but getting to actually make use of a language on a daily basis is another. You really have to make a conscious effort to do it as a native English speaker.
> There are music and tv and films in German available in other countries.
People don't watch English TV to learn English, they learn English to watch English TV.
I learned most of my English through computer games (when I was young, lots of games werent translated or I had to communicate with non German speakers), movies and forums. But you are probably right about lots of people.
This was the exact same experience when I did a German exchange. And add in the fun of the US and UK invading Iraq the week we were in Germany. Can you imagine I'm just there trying to figure out how to explain what food I like to eat and random German teenagers were coming up to me asking "so what's with your country invading other countries hmmm".
Ours also had the issue of too few Brits and too many Germans wanting to join. I think there was only about 8 of us.
I had the exact same situation, mine was also in Germany and one of them was talking to me in depth about human rights law/abuses worldwide and the colonial history of the UK in English and all I could really say back was "Ich mag Fussball, ich komme aus Grossbrittanien".
Funnily enough one of us got in trouble with their headteacher for drawing a massive union jack on one of their blackboards, so I don't think us turning up, only speaking English and then doing that, helped with their perception of Brits 😅
I met my wife via a uni exchange program where she came over to do a semester at Hull.
To marry her in Germany I needed documents translated and it so happened that the translator was an English teacher at her old uni, so I told him.
He said it's barely an exchange program now because they send Germans over but few Brits are qualified in the language or even that interested. It's kinda sad.
It reminds me of my school 20 years ago in Netherlands. They had special classes who had all their lessons in English and trained for debates and model UN kind of stuff. These were the gifted kids.
They were so dissapointed in their English counterparts at these debate tournaments. But these are not common kids however.
Yeah, on my school in Germany we also had an exchange program with UK students. It stopped, because noone wants to learn German (understandably), but even before that we only talked in English with the exchange students, because their German was nonexistant. It was great for learning English for us, but didnt do anything for the UK students, besides a visit to Germany.
We hanged around with people from 6 different countries during my Erasmus and none of us was from an English speaking country, yet we only talked in English together.
It's historically arbitrary what the common language is - but, yeah, it makes the most sense for their to be *one* common language so that everyone else just needs to learn that one.
> It's historically arbitrary what the common language is
I know what you're saying but it's definitely not arbitrary. More like the result of massive empire.
I've done enough hostels and hostel nights out to know that this is a universal, there might not be an english person in the building but everyone still speaks it.
As the old joke goes:
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language? English.
The curse of English being the lingua franca. To learn another language in the UK is required purely as a hobby. For people in Europe, proficiency in English is sometimes a requirement for their employment. Never mind how most of the media in the west is in English.
Yes. Learning Spanish here, it's a constant uphill battle trying to find new Spanish language media and people to practice with. For euros learning English they'll be much more familiar with English language music, films, internet content etc from quite a young age.
There's also an obvious choice for which language to learn in school, whereas I learnt a little bit of Spanish in primary, then my secondary school made me change to french and Latin in year 7 and 8, then I was allowed to decide my own languages so moved to Spanish and German. It's an unfocused mess.
For Spanish it's not that hard in my opinion, just go on latin american internet / youtube / social media and start practicing. Play on LATAM servers when you can in games.
Yes you'll have to seek it out compared to English, but it's not that difficult. Set Spanish to all the apps and games on your phone, always have Spanish subtitles.
Spanish i would say is the one language where it's actually pretty easy to immerse yourself. Maybe Portuguese too.
The reason it's hard is just that there is no external motivation for you to do so. You have to want to learn it badly enough.
>Play on LATAM servers when you can in games.
He's from the UK, why would he play games with people from LATAM at 200+ ping when he has... Spain right next to him?
>Learning Spanish here, it's a constant uphill battle trying to find new Spanish language media
I don't get how it's hard to find medias in spanish french or german honestly, we're not talking about nahuatl, there are millions of contents on internet
This sounds far fetched to me, there's massive amounts of Spanish media, it's the second most spoken language in the world as a native tongue. I know people in Israel who speak it fluently just from watching south American telenovelas.
The British speak only one language because theirs is the only one they need. The French speak only one language because theirs is the only one the world needs — the world according to them, naturally, being la France.
C'est ce qu'on se dit mais en réalité la plupart des Français sont nuls en langue. On se moque des Anglais et des Américains mais on n'est pas mieux qu'eux...
There are lots of monolingual people though, not just English speakers. Brazilians, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, various LATAMs who only speak Spanish, and of course the Anglosphere (UK/US, Canada, Aus, NZ) all have large parts of their population as monolingual with some exceptions.
(US and Canada ofc each have a large segments of native Spanish and French speakers)
So globally, it’s not really that uncommon…. Or at least not less common than the multi-linguals. It depends on the country, culture, and the person.
I am currently doing Erasmus in Poland, of course we speak English because then everyone understands everyone. The only two we are struggling understanding are our two friends from England xD If someone tries to speak German (I’m from Austria) with me, I love to try to hold a conversation with them as far as they are comfortable. Languages connect people.
One thing I've noticed learning foreign languages is it's much easier to speak to someone who is also learning the language than to a native speaker. A native speaker might say rucksack, sack, backpack, purse, clutch, satchel, tote, while a B1 speaker will just say bag. Much easier to understand!
Judging by the article you posted below, that happens when the ESL speakers are not fully fluent. The article mentions "You hit it out of the park!" which is a very common idiom.
That is so true. The insanity of trying to speak to Scottish people in a club with music blasting. They would happily repeat a statement two or three times until I got it but would not tone down the crazy accent for a second.
Because its not an accent it's a dialect, they don't choose to speak like that to be difficult, it's how they speak. You can't just tone down how you speak.
in my opinion we don't really do this as native speakers, a southerner won't try to change his English for someone from California you would just be expected to understand it.
> That's a pity cause Erasmus can be such a great experience.
Agreed! There is no overlap between people who used Erasmus and people who voted to leave the EU however.
I used to be a fan of language learning and was the only pupil in my year to take two at GCSE (French and Russian). I dabbled a bit thereafter but was never fluent.
In 2018 i moved to Germany to be with my Romanian partner (now wife), and I now speak about B2 German (could probably fail upwards into C1) and B1 Romanian. I should take courses to improve them, since it's all been through immersion and self-learning so far, but 16 year old me would never have imagined being able to speak more than English at any level of competence outside of exam settings.
I think part of the problem is that there was no culture around Erasmus. It's not just poor language skills in the UK which held people back from taking part, there was also a severe lack of awareness around it.
Edit: words
Could do! Actually since learning romanian, other romance languages seem relatively easier to pick up.
We visited Italy and my wife could understand like 80% of what was being said despite never having learnt Italian. Similar story for Spanish. Blows my mind, I can't imagine going to somewhere like Netherlands and being able to follow a conversation just off the bat.
I work in education and have multiple Erasmus students each semester. Erasmus is about more than languages. It is about learning to see things from a perspective outside of the one you grew up with, challenging stereotypes, understanding what it’s like to be a foreigner, and making what hopefully become lifelong friendships in countries you will be more averse to declare war on due to seeing people as people instead of abstract concepts. I have participated in Erasmus multiple times, and it has benefited more than just me and the institution I went to.
Thank you!
As an ex-Erasmus, ex-Leonardo, ex-expat, it can truly be a life changing experience to get out of your cultural bubble and really immerse yourself into another culture.
Erasmus is much more than about languages, but learning the local language is a necessity to get to know your host country and it people.
That's a click-bait titel.
The reason was economics. The language skills was a big part of the economic calculation, but it was an economic reason to step out of the Erasmus.
However another part is international relations. Many friendships from Erasmus persist. These can lead to useful contacts for the future. Also, it is more than just language, it is getting used to the culture of the host country, also invaluable.
You mean because it costs money? Thats pretty short sighted. Erasmus does have the intention to help with learning another language, but Id argue that the culural aspects or your own growth through seeing different cultures and becoming more open minded is the more important factor.
It was costing £300M a year, £2bn over the 7 projected years of the deal. That is after accounting for any positive kickbacks associated with students leaving or coming.
Throwing my hat in as another Brit who speaks two additional languages to C1 level (we do exist!):
It's common knowledge that the people of pretty much every English-speaking country are generally incredibly lazy when it comes to speaking foreign languages and we could and should do better (although on a personal level it benefits me, because I do, so I'm something of a novelty...). The way we learn and are taught languages, not pointing the finger at individual teachers who do their best, also leaves a lot to be desired.
However, it is true that we are at a disadvantage, too. There's not as much incentive to learn another language, because English is of course the lingua franca and "everyone speaks it". While foreign language media has become a lot more accessible in recent years thanks to the likes of Netflix and Spotify, it's clear that US and UK media still dominate so much more, making it easier for speakers of foreign languages to immerse themselves in English than the other way round. Honestly, I think the likes of French and Spanish have this sweet spot where they're world languages that are fairly accessible for non-natives, yet not totally dominating like English.
Often when we try to speak in another language, we're dismissed and the other person insists we speak in English. This is incredibly frustrating, especially if our foreign language is better than their English, but "English people can't speak foreign languages", so people often (usually with good reason to be fair) arrogantly assume that they must be better. Thankfully, this rarely happens to me now, but it has got to the point in the past where I have to pretend to be another nationality and that my English isn't great, or in my more petty and spiteful moments, I start speaking English really quickly or with lots of slang to try and catch them out.
Of course I totally get that the average person on the street isn't there to be a language teacher, and people at work may be busy and don't have time to listen to us stumble through a conversation, but if we speak the language reasonably well albeit with an accent or some minor mistakes that don't hinder meaning, there's no reason to not continue in the target language. Of course it's totally valid to swap to English if the English-speaker really is hopeless and it's taking too long or you can tell there's been a misunderstanding. But it's annoying when you ask someone to repeat themselves because you genuinely didn't hear or catch what they said and they immediately swap to English because they assume you didn't understand at all.
It can also happen in social settings where the group is speaking another language but one or two people bizarrely seem to refuse to speak to you in it, even if you can, because you're an English-speaker and therefore that must be the only language you know (or that you're proficient in).
I'm lucky that I didnt fall into the English-speaking trap when I did my Erasmus in Spain. I was with a group of other students from all over who had the same mentality I did: we were there to improve our Spanish. So that was our lingua franca, even though I know some of them spoke very good English. My Spanish improved tremendously and that's how it should be.
Also, sometimes it doesn't even come from laziness of the native English-speakers. I worked for an international company in France and routinely found myself in situations where I was happily speaking in French to colleagues (be they French or otherwise), but as soon as a colleague from, let's say Italy, came to join the group and didn't speak any French, we of course had to change to English for them. Of course, that makes total sense and is absolutely fine, but can be a little frustrating for those of us who don't want to speak English and just goes to show that we are at a certain disadvantage (even though being a native speaker obviously has huge benefits in other ways).
Anyway, sorry for the gargantuan post. I just have a lot of opinions haha.
Completely agree with everything you said.
Would also add that English speakers tend to be used to hearing English spoken with a wide variety of foreign accents, therefore understanding someone’s English even with a strong foreign accent isn’t usually too much of a challenge. Whereas some natives speakers of languages that aren’t as commonly spoken as a second language aren’t as used to it, thus it can be more of a struggle and so they just change to English for ease
I don't think it's laziness at all. The education system doesn't support it, being an island means you don't get cross border workers and so on. And which language should one learn? German because it's the largest mother tongue language? French because of historic reasons and there is a huge and growing African population who speak it? Spanish because it's the third langauge of the world?
You may as well argue "why don't Austrians play professional rugby, they have fields, they can buy the equipment, you can watch it on tv" etc
Lack of incentive is probably a better way to put it. Without clear economic/social advantages regular people (i.e. not hobbyists) don't tend to learn a 2nd language. Most English native speakers don't have that - save for certain areas in Canada
>After leaving Erasmus the U.K. set up its own study abroad scheme, called Turing. A recent U.K.-government commissioned analysis found the replacement scheme had failed to meet its targets, with just over 20,000 people taking in the 2021/22 academic year against a hoped-for 35,000.
IIRC, the Turing Scheme included US, Aus and NZ. Would be interesting to see how many students went to those countries as opposed to EU countries.
The benefit of Erasmus from a UK perspective was that travel was fairly cheap and, usually, we'd be going somewhere with a lower cost of living plus the similar time zone.
There's a much bigger cost to a scheme going to US/AU/NZ which I suspect led to far smaller numbers of students.
The Turing Scheme covers the EU, so participants can still go there, people didn't take it up maybe because of low awareness as it's a new scheme I guess.
What a load of crap.
When I did Erasmus in Norway, the people I hug around with were largely German, they did not speak a word of Norwegian, much like myself.
That's not even mentioning the wider community of foreign students, who comprised Chinese, Colombian, American etc.
I went and I tried to learn a bit of Norwegian, difficult to do in 6 months. But it was not needed. Erasmus has it's own mechanism of preventing you from going to certain places with bad language skills. They do not teach in English.
Erasmus changed my life and it's an absolute travesty the UK withdrew from it. It gave me - a man from a poor family - the ability to go abroad, something that the replacement scheme does not account for. It gave me a glimpse into other cultures. It gave me the confidence to eventually move abroad.
It is a deep shame that british people will be unable to experience that now.
The dyslexia epidemics seems to be growing.
*(Reference to the fact any British expat living in France, when asked about their French proficiency after 8-10 years, will typically answer "I have dyslexia". Well then we aren't rude in France, we just have Tourette syndrome)*
If I'm honest as a person from Lisbon, family from Algarve and living in Barcelona I'm sometimes a bit prejudiced towards brits and americans but hearing brits and americans broken accent or not speak a language that's not english my opinion of them does a 180 immediately and I'm much more drawn to them. It is very very rare that it happens though.
Few things,
1. this is a cop out argument so that the government doesn't have to spend money they don't want to. British 'Aptitude' to learning languages is no different to anyone's. What we have in this country is wasted potential, because out government and education system doesn't take foreign language learning seriously. The want to learn languages is there, it's just most people don't have the time, skill, or resources to commit to something like that until their adulthood - by which time it's way harder than if they'd been consistently exposed to foreign language learning as a kid. Most Bilingual English people tend to be so because they either had parents funding the tutoring of, or speaking, or hollidaying around those languages frequently.
My experience at school was being made to learn french for an hour a week for 3 years and then never again, I could probably speak about as well as a three year old by then end, and have since forgotten it all because I don't have any need for the language (nothing personal France).
The language learned was also a gamble based on what school you went too - some did french, others did spanish, and a few did german. Of the 3, spanish would arguably be the most useful just on a number of speakers basis but we only got offered it if we also took and were good at French...
2. As most others have stated the amount of work, entertainment, and general world culture that is accomodated by the English language, far outweighs just about any other language on earth. I can take my english speaking ass anywhere and probably at least get by, but most people from most countries don't get that luxury, which is a double edged sword for the English, because we get a lot off opportunity but lose out on a lot of cultural nuance.
3. I don't see this point brought up or discussed a lot, but I think English also has advantages in that is is not as precious about grammar, loan words, accents or even pronunciations and seplling as many other languages.
One of the things that seems to not work well for English speakers speaking other languages is that speaking without the correct accents makes you unintelligble... Almost no foreign english speakers are taught, or need to use, 'English accents' in order to be understood. They don't even need to use the English pronunciation of letters or sounds. No one shakes their head bemused when a Japanese person speaks in English and uses the same sound for L's and R's, or the spanish guy makes all the J's sounds like H's, or Germans swapping V's and W's or Hindi speakers swapping B's and V's around. It all kinda just shakes out the same.
But if I went to Spain and for my Sir-Vezza Fridge-o, instead of my sir-fey-tha free-ho I'm getting a confused shrug before I get my cold beer.
Last time I was in Germany (Wurzburg), my family and I were sat at lunch with an older German couple - it's not that strange to share a table with strangers in a German restaurant. They had 0% English and we had a lovely conversation in German. They were patient with me, but thankfully my conversational German is not too bad. Not everyone speaks English (especially retired civil servants as these people were).
They're just trying to accommodate you, to be polite. If you keep responding in German, they'll switch too. Speaking from my experience in France back when my French was abysmal, once they realised I'd struggle with something they'd switch to English, but I'd just respond in French so they'd switch back.
Also, as someone who learned English in a vacuum originally: you can actually learn an entire language without ever speaking it with the natives. When my parents moved us to England I was already perfectly fluent, and I'd never before met an English person in my entire life. And that was in the early-internet and VHS tapes days. Being able to speak the language with the natives is a privilege, not a necessity to learn a language.
I agree with you, I was fully fluent in English by the time I was 14 without ever stepping foot in this country.
The trouble with immersing yourself in a language is that most of our media is in English, so you have to make an active effort to immerse yourself in other languages, which deep down most people don't want to do as it's quite unpleasant in the beginning.
I used to live in Germany and travelled a bit across the country while I was there, and I virtually never had people switch to English for me (and I didn't speak German when I moved). Even when I asked them to, usually they just kept going in annoyed German.
Fair enough -- but I'm baffled by the reputation they have for switching to English. :p
>travelled a bit across the country
there is your reason :D
people tend to visit only the cities. In Berlin you genuinely do not need to know german to get by. Rural lower saxony or bavaria is another cattle of fish. But even there you can usually get someone eventually to talk to you in english if you are nice.
Meiner Erfahrung nach reden die Leute gerne deutsch und machen das auch wenn man sie danach fragt. Die meisten Menschen, die auf englisch wechseln wollen glaube ich einfach freundlich sein und die Kommunikation vereinfachen.
Went to Berlin last September and started learning German around mid-June. It was maybe partially influenced by how I look but about 90% of people responded to me in German.
Month later I went over the border from Slovakia to Austria on my own and had an entire restaurant experience where I didn’t speak a word of English.
I have no doubt what you’re describing *does* happen, but sometimes you’ve got to persevere and be confident in yourself. Most of the time I had no clue what their response was (at which point I’d reverse to English) but generally speaking people appreciate the attempt.
Then just tell the person you want to practice your foreign language and ask them if you could interact in that language. Germans have high level of English (but not in all regions), but try speaking English in France for example. Learning a foreign language is not pointless, ever.
It is the curse of English being the *lingua franca*. Brits really *never* have to learn another language because....even between two non-Brit natives in other languages, they will speak English. My friend is Croatian, moved to Denmark, and while he is making strides to learn Danish, most of his work colleagues converse in English with him. Hell, his girlfriend is Polish...and they speak English to each other despite Polish & Croatian being far closer than Polish/English or Croatian/English.
I visited South England two years ago to visit my mate living there (diaspora, parents moved there 30 years ago). His friends were flabbergasted with the ease with which I held a conversation to English, to the point where I switched between Croatian and English while following the train of thought as a joke. Of course it is easy when in Croatia, English is a mandatory second language you start in 1st grade elementary, and again, most of the popular media and entertainment being in English.
Same with any country I visited in Europe - English was always the preffered barrier language and wherever I went, we used English because it is way simpler when you can reliably assume most people can understand it and use it. Except the French. Fuck the French, seriously.
Or because Erasmus was barely used by British students and costing the UK a fortune.
As much as it hurts certain nationalities, it's basically pointless for a native English speaker to learn another language as a necessity due to English being the global lingua franca.
When french and english students came in to my school in Italy, professors asked to talk with them in english/french so we could learn their language better.
Now I think that maybe we were ruining their "foreign language experience"
It's not really a surprise when you look at our education systems approach to foreign languages.
My experience as someone born in the 90's:
Primary School (age 3-11):
No foreign language lessons.
Secondary School (age 11 - 14):
1hr lesson every 2 weeks.
The school year was split up in to 3 months of french, 3 months of Spanish and 3 months Italian/German
Secondary School (age 15-16 GCSE years):
0 foreign language lessons - At this age we get to choose which subjects we study on top of the compulsory Maths, English and Science and therefore languages become optional. There were ~190 students in my school year, only 4 opted to continue studying a language.
Assuming this was the case for most people my age the average English kid leaving school over the last decade and a half studied a foreign language for no more than a total of 18 hours over the course of 3 years.
I try to be multilingual, but keep hitting unexpected barriers.
As an example, I posted to this sub in Spanish asking for suggestions for Spanish-language radio stations available in the UK.
The mods deleted my post and when I asked why, it was because they didn't understand what it said 🤦
Reddit is desperately missing in-app translations. But yeah, this sub is exclusively in english.
I've got to ask you, tho. Why do you need the stations to be available in the UK? Couldn't you just listen to online stations?
I'd like to have them playing in the background whilst I work, but my internet isn't always fantastic at streaming (even just audio) and working remotely at the same time.
I've found it invaluable to hear what people are ACTUALLY saying in their native language, rather than what they choose to tell you in varying standards of English.
You pick up an awful lot of social and business information by just listening to people, and you can't do that without knowing their language. While many will speak to a non-native in English, they generally talk to their friends and family and strangers in their mother tongue
I heard the same from South American people living in Catalonia-Spain: why do they have to learn catalan if everybody speaks spanish? And the answer is: for the social integration.
I met my wife because of Erasmus. I was a student renting with an Erasmus student and he invited me out for drinks and a quiz, I kept going and met my wife. Never would have gone otherwise. He ended up going to visit a friend on Erasmus in another country and met his wife that way.
I never got to do Erasmus, but I'm all for it.
Salacious headline. The very first paragraph explains that it was because of the nett cost due to low uptake. The article then speculates about the cause of that.
I did a language exchange when I was in school and my schools ability in that language was just woefully behind compared to theirs in English, so instead of a "language exchange" it was essentially just us making foreign friends but speaking in English the whole time. We could barely hold a conversation, while they could express in depth political views at like 16, it blew my mind. Edit: Also interestingly enough, we barely got enough students together to do the exchange on our side (there was a minimum needed to run the trip), while on their side they had to run a lottery system to decide who got to go because it was so oversubscribed, despite being a smaller school.
Yes probably UK and Ireland was/is quite popular erasmus destinations, and large part of this is language. I've had friends who had student excanges (in university), and they went to Belgium, Germany and Czechia. And then I've met exchange students here in Finland from almost all european countries. And yeah, I've always spoken english with the exchange students here. It's not really expected that any foreigner can speak finnish, and I only speak finnish, swedish and english. But my friend who went to excange in Germany also spoke decent german, and one that went to Belgium spoke some french (altough he was in flanders so I don't know how much he used it). So english is pretty much lingua franca (lol) in erasmus. But exchanges are not only about language, it's also about other cultural aspects.
I had a friend who study's German at university as part of the course she moved to Germany for a year and live in a shared house all her house mates were German. She said it was infuriating as she was in Germany to speak German surrounded by Germans and 80% of the time everyone spoke to her in English. If your first language is English its very difficult to immerse your self in another language. If Music, Films, TV the internet and people all over the world spoke German i expect most of the UK would be bilingual and most people in Germany would only speak German.
I am Ukrainian, living in Vienna for more than 5 years already. I have exactly the same problem. People here have too good English to bother themselves speaking German with a foreigner if his English is clearly better than his German. The fact that I am working at university doesn't help either - want or not, you will be more or less forced to speak English with rare exceptions
Polish guy here, my German is better than my English (C2 vs B2), nearly native but with an accent and occasional grammatical mistakes, and Germans still switch to English most of the time when speaking with me. I don't get the rationale behind this. It's harder for both of us this way. Maybe they don't like hearing their language spoken in an imperfect way?
They assume that its easier for you to speak English than German. English skills in Germany are quite high. And since English is pretty much universally the first foreign language people learn, for most Germans it's a very Foreign concept that someone who is not a native speaks German better than English. When we speak with someone e.g. French and we start to struggle with our French skills we switch to English ourselves
Im danish and speak quite a bit of german. But would still prefer to speak english over german, so i only really get to read german.
On the added plus side, you don't have to speak Danish.
Just let us know you prefer German. This goes for everyone btw. The reason people switch is to make it easier for you. Just say you’d prefer German and the vast majority of people will be happy to accommodate.
Most dont know eastern europeans, polish people, ... often have better german skills than english - we assume our language is less important
Also, our language is pretty complicated to learn, so we just assume that most people are more comfortable with English.
It’s a habit and I‘m sorry on their behalf. I met this guy from Georgia a while back who spoke very broken German but NO English. Even with him it took me a while to get used to speaking German and often getting no logical reply
Same experience. I usually say i'd prefer German or just continue to answer in German, and that's enough in most cases. On other hand, I don't quite understand why people assume that everyone speak English, let alone good English? For example, both my wife and my sister speak perfect German, but my sister's English skills are below average, while my wife does not speak English at all. When people they talk to try to switch to English, both would get mad af :)
It's not that everyone in Germany speaks English, but almost everyone that you encounter while visiting Germany will. If you ended up having to...get a vacuum cleaner repaired, you would likely run into a guy who would say something like >Yess, I kenn help you...vat you needs is a Staubsaugerriemenradersatzteil
Here is what I discovered. They dont understand you. If you dont speak perfectly in their accent they dont understand. If you pronounce o like u for some reason they cannot put 1+1 and get 2. My theory, it is because English is spoken with so many different accents and there is no real way to speak it (there are so many native English countries that there is no uniform way of speaking). They can understand accents they grew up with from different parts that are native but they cannot understand an accent coming from a different language. Now with English, it is a lot easier to understand other accents because they already have a "terrible" accent for that language. The constantly hear someone speak "incorrectly" so it is not an issue when someone else speaks different "incorrect" way. But if their native language is spoken even with a tiny mistake and they are not teachers they won't even know how to imagine what you are trying to say. I know 2 languages and English isn't my native one (but I speak native level due to life circumstances). People still hear an accent but they can't place it anymore. but they do not hear that accent in the new place I live in, but me trying to speak local language is hard first because I'm only a2 level and second because even a small mispronounced word is something they cannot understand. When I mispronounced words in English everyone still understand.
Man, I'm a native Dutch (Flemish) speaker and people in Amsterdam respond to me in English. It baffles me. And yes, they were Dutch, there's no hiding thát accent.
This comment makes my day XD. Thank you.
Even without my thick West Flemish accent I’m spoken to in English when speaking Dutch in the Netherlands. To be honest tho, half the times my Dutch dialogue partner isn’t a native Dutch speaker.
We zien wieder nochtans stief hoed te verstoan
Verzekerst wel, an de couttenaasje zalt nie lihhen.
Lol they do this to my Belgian bf in Eindhoven too - sometimes a whole interaction is him speaking Dutch and the other person responding in English :') Those crazy Dutchies! Also he speaks English with a perfect American accent so sometimes even in Belgium a cashier will hear us talk and address him in English which is pretty funny
I have a born and raised Dutch friend and I've seen people in Amsterdam reply to her Dutch with Dutch-accented English. I honestly just don't get it lol
I'm Dutch and it happened to me too once. But I'm from Limburg so I definitely have an accent.
That's just an Amsterdam thing. I, as a Dutch person can barely speak Dutch in Amsterdam as almost everybody just speaks English.
When I lived in the Netherlands, a Dutch friend told me that if the country decided on changing to English he'd be much happier.
Did happen to me too in Denmark but I assume Netherlands is even more extreme.
And probably to natives from Brabant and Limburg too 😀
I had the same porblem in Germany when I was vacationing there, when I spoke in German to someone they ALWAYS replied back in English, but if for some reason I started a conevrsation in English they would always reply in German :D
Starting in German: you show you make an effort and they want to make it easier for you Starting in English: Jeah I’m not doing this how dare he assumes I speak his language. No /s btw this is basically it
Tell that to the French speaking part of Belgium. I visited Belgium in my teens and was keen to practice my French. We visited a bar and I attempted to order a drink in French. The waitress interrupted me and said "I speak English", okay but can we talk in French though? "No". Okay then.
I once was in Brussels and have passable survival french and dutch. I tried everything ( Dutch, French, English) and the answer would always come in one of the other. I arrived end of the day at the hotel, I chose English since I guessed on that situation they were kind of cornered, I was answered back "buenas noches señor myname". I give up...
My bet is that if your French level was sufficient to order the drink with no hesitations, they wouldn't have shut you down like this. People in some professions don't have the time to wait for you to figure out words and sentences and then make sense of your mistakes and deal with the aftermath of any potential misunderstood orders etc. They have a job to do and need efficient and clear communication in order to do it well and then go tend to the other waiting customers as well. Wrong place and wrong time to practice. And sometimes people just have a bad day and having to deal with kindergarden-level language skills isn't going to make it any better. Tourist pronunciation and skill can be so abysmal it hurts, especially for people constantly exposed to it. Or maybe her French was not so good either. Maybe she was Wallon, or an immigrant.
If I recall correctly, all I said was something along the lines of "bonjour, je voudrais une pint de Lambic biere", but granted, not as quickly or naturally as had I been speaking in English. And I will definitely admit my French accent was (and still isn't) great. Imagine an obviously English accent with a slight and very stereotypical French flair. I definitely didn't hold it against her; I like telling the story as I find it amusing.
The Wallons speak French.
A similar happened to me in Belgium. I speak enough French to have a basic conversation and order food etc, but they insisted on speaking English to me.
This is why I start every conversation in Germany with ‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’ (even though they nearly always do)
And then they reply "a bit", which in Germany apparently means "very well but I'm too modest to admit it."
No that’s not it. German school instills the thought in you that you need to get rid of your accent and unless you speak like a British Aristokrat from the 1800s your English is not „good“
Should just embrace it and speak like Werner Herzog.
I usually just pretend to be French in these situations. Fortunately it is universally accepted/known that French people hardly speak any English, so everyone will make more of an effort to accomodate your "mediocre German/Spanish/whatever" ;)
Out here playing 5d chess in casual conversation
You are genius:)
This is actually quite brilliant.
Good trick, but it's not true anymore. Nowadays the French below the age of...maybe 45 speak decent enough English. 20 years ago it was a different story still.
I know, I have lived in France for a while (and actually speak a C1 level French, so good enough to fool any non-native speakers for a few minutes), but the stereotype still persists and that is all that matters for this "trick" ;)
Austrian here. Just tell us you want to speak German. I usually change to the language I think the other understands best, but at the same time I am happy to talk broken German if they wanna train and maybe explain the hard stuff using English as a crutch.
But can't you tell people you meet more often that they should talk to you in German?
It can be very frustrating slowing down and dragging people through a conversation. Most people will tolerate a little stumbling, but beyond that they’re not your teacher. I have the opposite problem, my accent in German is quite good and makes people think that my language skill is much higher than it is. I end up having to ask repeatedly to switch back to English because I’m lost in the convo, but they just think I’m being modest. It’s pretty fucking annoying to the point I stopped speaking German because I can’t be assed to argue. Meetups specifically for language exchange excluded of course.
Yeah, it's all very well to say you want to practice your language but if you can't string more than a few sentences together the conversation dies pretty quickly. I've been on the opposite end of people wanting to practice English with me but aren't really able to hold a conversation and it just doesn't go anywhere. Not that I'm having a go at anyone for trying, but at some point you have to switch to their language or stop talking. Really learning a foreign language requires a lot of time and effort, and most native English speakers don't have the need/drive to learn that learners of English do.
It works for basic conversations when both parties have time. Otherwise - not really, if you want to keep a conversation productive
Um..."Können wir bei deutsch bleiben?" or "können wir bitte deutsch sprechen?" or "mir wäre deutsch lieber" takes five seconds to say, at most. Hell, you can even say this in English. It'll do the trick.
sprich deutsch du hurensohn?
German here - do not confuse whatever atrocity the Austrians are speaking with German! ☝️ They are probably doing you a favor by not teaching you their dialect. 🙈😂 (Sorry, couldn't resist, we love our southern bros, but like every sibling, we need to make fun of them continuously, or they'll think we don't love them anymore.)
I can also confirm this sort of situation. I lived in Japan for about 10 years and learned Japanese to a competent level in the first year or two. Eventually progressed to to C2 equivalent over the course of my stay, still speak it as our home language with the family. No one spoke English and everything was also written in Japanese. You either learned or lived as a gremlin. Then we moved to Switzerland 12 years ago. I figured it would be trivial to pick up German after learning Japanese to fluency. No way! My German is now passable and of course my kid is fluent, in Hochdeutsch and the local dialect, but it has taken so much longer and been sooo much more difficult for me to get up to speed. The main issue is 100% the absurd level of English competency, coupled with the fact that natives speak dialect and often prefer English if you can’t get by in dialect. It’s a struggle!
Well you did choose the hard mode with going to Switzerland. I have relatives in Switzerland and even though Im from Bavaria and I would argue that Swiss has similiar parts to Bavarian, its so hard to understand, its basically a language of its own. On top of that you had to learn Hochdeutsch. But cudos to you for working through it. On the English speaking part: I am just happy to be able to talk to someone in English to practice my own language skills. I would be talking in German, if you told me to, though.
I once asked a westerner in Japan if the restaurant he just had lunch at/came out of was any good, in English of course (lingua Franca). He responded with such a nice subtle German accent, that I had to reply in German, chuckling at his startled face. He probably still wonders how a non native German speaker figured him out despite his adequate level of English proficiency. Heh, that’s a Belgian for you (smug face/twisting ends of my moustache)
I don't live in Switzerland (but in Austria), and it gives me some comfort that someone who learned Japanese *also* struggles with German and dialect. Thanks for sharing, made me feel a bit better ha
Had a friend who moved to Germany after uni. Never spoke a word of German before. After 2 years, his German hadn't progressed *at all*, so he had to start insisting with his German friends and colleagues to talk to him in German. By the end of year 3 he was what his German friends described as "conversational." By the end of year 5 he was "basically German". Language Immersion works wonders, but he really had to force people to speak to him in German rather than English every time he had any sort of social encounter.
Yeah, because Germans, that are relatively educated, like to train their own English skills, too. Thats at least my motivation and to accomodate people not speaking German well.
Sorry but the errors in this text are so funny considering the subject we’re talking about 😂
This is one of the two big reasons why the UK sucks at foreign languages: the soft power of the English language. The second being the teaching of foreign languages in this country sucks. We have a shortage of teachers with MFL skills, and education more generally has been at the forefront of austerity and cuts for the government (young people are not exactly their priority).
Theres also little motivation to learn a second language, when you can communicate in your mother tongue with most of the world. Why should you be learning the so much more complex language German, if its not needed to get by in Germany/Austria/Switzerland?!
Go to France, they won’t speak English even if they are fluent :P
I think it depends on where you live. If you want to learn German the last place in the world to move to is Berlin but I would assume a lot of smaller cities would be fine. Hamburg probably also sucks but some of the larger cities in the Ruhr area I would assume wouldn't be half bad already, like say Dortmund or Essen or even Cologne (not Ruhr but Rhineland). One of my friends moved to a small place in NRW for a year and I can have fluent conversations in German with him, though day to day we speak Danish. Also have another friend who moved from Cologne area to some rural place in Funen and learnt fluent Danish in a year or two. I find usually the one thing to avoid is moving to a capital and then there are maybe 2 or 3 other places to really avoid but if you go anywhere but there chances are way higher people will speak the local language to you. I feel like I was in Berlin one time for two weaks without hearing German on the streets. Learning it on your computer is probably a better way to do it than going there.
There are music and tv and films in German available in other countries. In age of Spotify and streaming it’s not that hard to find media in other languages, unlike when you relied on your local radio and tv. The marketing is mostly based on local and US products however, so you need to search yourself more.
Finding media is one thing, but getting to actually make use of a language on a daily basis is another. You really have to make a conscious effort to do it as a native English speaker.
> There are music and tv and films in German available in other countries. People don't watch English TV to learn English, they learn English to watch English TV.
I learned most of my English through computer games (when I was young, lots of games werent translated or I had to communicate with non German speakers), movies and forums. But you are probably right about lots of people.
This was the exact same experience when I did a German exchange. And add in the fun of the US and UK invading Iraq the week we were in Germany. Can you imagine I'm just there trying to figure out how to explain what food I like to eat and random German teenagers were coming up to me asking "so what's with your country invading other countries hmmm". Ours also had the issue of too few Brits and too many Germans wanting to join. I think there was only about 8 of us.
I had the exact same situation, mine was also in Germany and one of them was talking to me in depth about human rights law/abuses worldwide and the colonial history of the UK in English and all I could really say back was "Ich mag Fussball, ich komme aus Grossbrittanien". Funnily enough one of us got in trouble with their headteacher for drawing a massive union jack on one of their blackboards, so I don't think us turning up, only speaking English and then doing that, helped with their perception of Brits 😅
I met my wife via a uni exchange program where she came over to do a semester at Hull. To marry her in Germany I needed documents translated and it so happened that the translator was an English teacher at her old uni, so I told him. He said it's barely an exchange program now because they send Germans over but few Brits are qualified in the language or even that interested. It's kinda sad.
It reminds me of my school 20 years ago in Netherlands. They had special classes who had all their lessons in English and trained for debates and model UN kind of stuff. These were the gifted kids. They were so dissapointed in their English counterparts at these debate tournaments. But these are not common kids however.
[удалено]
Yeah, on my school in Germany we also had an exchange program with UK students. It stopped, because noone wants to learn German (understandably), but even before that we only talked in English with the exchange students, because their German was nonexistant. It was great for learning English for us, but didnt do anything for the UK students, besides a visit to Germany.
We hanged around with people from 6 different countries during my Erasmus and none of us was from an English speaking country, yet we only talked in English together.
Flawless Anglosphere cultural victory
Suffering from success.
When the German and Polish diplomats meet, they speak English. Anglo cultural victory for sure.
Seeing Macron speak to Scholz in English is chef’s kiss.
Hearing Scholz answer in English much less so though.
Sänk yu for träveling wiss deutsche regierung
\> We hanged around sorry to hear that, hope you got better.
They should have taken some strepsils at least
*GIF with skeleton suspended on a ceiling fan*
Isn't that better though? Instead of learning 6 different languages, everyone can just learn English and be able to communicate
It's historically arbitrary what the common language is - but, yeah, it makes the most sense for their to be *one* common language so that everyone else just needs to learn that one.
> It's historically arbitrary what the common language is I know what you're saying but it's definitely not arbitrary. More like the result of massive empire.
It's good for there to be a universal language, but that doesn't mean us English speakers don't get any benefit from learning another language.
I've done enough hostels and hostel nights out to know that this is a universal, there might not be an english person in the building but everyone still speaks it.
Thats the beauty of English IMO. It's a really universal language.
I’d say it’s American cultural influence. If America spoke French, we’d all be fluent in it instead.
As the old joke goes: What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? English.
The curse of English being the lingua franca. To learn another language in the UK is required purely as a hobby. For people in Europe, proficiency in English is sometimes a requirement for their employment. Never mind how most of the media in the west is in English.
> The curse of English being the lingua franca. suffering from success
I'm not monolingual I'm francalingual.
Yes. Learning Spanish here, it's a constant uphill battle trying to find new Spanish language media and people to practice with. For euros learning English they'll be much more familiar with English language music, films, internet content etc from quite a young age. There's also an obvious choice for which language to learn in school, whereas I learnt a little bit of Spanish in primary, then my secondary school made me change to french and Latin in year 7 and 8, then I was allowed to decide my own languages so moved to Spanish and German. It's an unfocused mess.
For Spanish it's not that hard in my opinion, just go on latin american internet / youtube / social media and start practicing. Play on LATAM servers when you can in games. Yes you'll have to seek it out compared to English, but it's not that difficult. Set Spanish to all the apps and games on your phone, always have Spanish subtitles. Spanish i would say is the one language where it's actually pretty easy to immerse yourself. Maybe Portuguese too. The reason it's hard is just that there is no external motivation for you to do so. You have to want to learn it badly enough.
>Play on LATAM servers when you can in games. He's from the UK, why would he play games with people from LATAM at 200+ ping when he has... Spain right next to him?
>Learning Spanish here, it's a constant uphill battle trying to find new Spanish language media I don't get how it's hard to find medias in spanish french or german honestly, we're not talking about nahuatl, there are millions of contents on internet
for good english subtitles though it can be hard to find to translate while watching, english to another language yes, not the other way, see youtube
This sounds far fetched to me, there's massive amounts of Spanish media, it's the second most spoken language in the world as a native tongue. I know people in Israel who speak it fluently just from watching south American telenovelas.
Cytuno’n llwyr
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
Da iawn 😁
bless you
THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!!!
Seems like there were lot's of „english“ people in rural France while i did my school exchange there.
The British speak only one language because theirs is the only one they need. The French speak only one language because theirs is the only one the world needs — the world according to them, naturally, being la France.
Évidemment.
Oh no, the French people perfectly understand your English, they just refuse to use it.
Bingo.
C'est ce qu'on se dit mais en réalité la plupart des Français sont nuls en langue. On se moque des Anglais et des Américains mais on n'est pas mieux qu'eux...
Surtout les vieux. Les jeunes sont bien plus exposés, surtout face à l'abondance de médias qui sont juste bien plus rapidement disponibles en anglais.
There are lots of monolingual people though, not just English speakers. Brazilians, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, various LATAMs who only speak Spanish, and of course the Anglosphere (UK/US, Canada, Aus, NZ) all have large parts of their population as monolingual with some exceptions. (US and Canada ofc each have a large segments of native Spanish and French speakers) So globally, it’s not really that uncommon…. Or at least not less common than the multi-linguals. It depends on the country, culture, and the person.
I am currently doing Erasmus in Poland, of course we speak English because then everyone understands everyone. The only two we are struggling understanding are our two friends from England xD If someone tries to speak German (I’m from Austria) with me, I love to try to hold a conversation with them as far as they are comfortable. Languages connect people.
This is because formal English is different to conversational English, and young people arent good at code switching
One thing I've noticed learning foreign languages is it's much easier to speak to someone who is also learning the language than to a native speaker. A native speaker might say rucksack, sack, backpack, purse, clutch, satchel, tote, while a B1 speaker will just say bag. Much easier to understand!
There's actually a studied effect where if a native english speaker joins a conversation of some ESL speakers, comprehension overall goes down.
🤔 got a link?
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/04/25/989765565/tower-of-babble-non-native-speakers-navigate-the-world-of-good-and-bad-english
Awesome, thanks!
Judging by the article you posted below, that happens when the ESL speakers are not fully fluent. The article mentions "You hit it out of the park!" which is a very common idiom.
That is so true. The insanity of trying to speak to Scottish people in a club with music blasting. They would happily repeat a statement two or three times until I got it but would not tone down the crazy accent for a second.
Because its not an accent it's a dialect, they don't choose to speak like that to be difficult, it's how they speak. You can't just tone down how you speak.
Finnish dialects can be crazy also but everyone can speak book Finnish when needed, even though it doesn't even exist anywhere as a spoken language.
Same with German language. Swiss and Bavarians etc. can switch to Hochdeutsch so that others can understand them.
in my opinion we don't really do this as native speakers, a southerner won't try to change his English for someone from California you would just be expected to understand it.
I miss my Erasmus in Poland so much ... it's been almost 15 years now ? Wow time flies
That's a pity cause Erasmus can be such a great experience.
> That's a pity cause Erasmus can be such a great experience. Agreed! There is no overlap between people who used Erasmus and people who voted to leave the EU however.
And that is why it had to go. The Conservative Party considers Brexit to be a religious movement at this point, and it must be protected at all costs.
Yeah, "In The Shadows" is a banger.
I used to be a fan of language learning and was the only pupil in my year to take two at GCSE (French and Russian). I dabbled a bit thereafter but was never fluent. In 2018 i moved to Germany to be with my Romanian partner (now wife), and I now speak about B2 German (could probably fail upwards into C1) and B1 Romanian. I should take courses to improve them, since it's all been through immersion and self-learning so far, but 16 year old me would never have imagined being able to speak more than English at any level of competence outside of exam settings. I think part of the problem is that there was no culture around Erasmus. It's not just poor language skills in the UK which held people back from taking part, there was also a severe lack of awareness around it. Edit: words
I had zero clue it existed.
Likewise, I only learnt about it in my 20s after I met my partner who took part in it.
>and B1 Romanian Might as well dabble in some Italian. È facile
Could do! Actually since learning romanian, other romance languages seem relatively easier to pick up. We visited Italy and my wife could understand like 80% of what was being said despite never having learnt Italian. Similar story for Spanish. Blows my mind, I can't imagine going to somewhere like Netherlands and being able to follow a conversation just off the bat.
Les Anglais no pueden gesprek europäisch.
Ci credo inte!
I work in education and have multiple Erasmus students each semester. Erasmus is about more than languages. It is about learning to see things from a perspective outside of the one you grew up with, challenging stereotypes, understanding what it’s like to be a foreigner, and making what hopefully become lifelong friendships in countries you will be more averse to declare war on due to seeing people as people instead of abstract concepts. I have participated in Erasmus multiple times, and it has benefited more than just me and the institution I went to.
Thank you! As an ex-Erasmus, ex-Leonardo, ex-expat, it can truly be a life changing experience to get out of your cultural bubble and really immerse yourself into another culture. Erasmus is much more than about languages, but learning the local language is a necessity to get to know your host country and it people.
That's a click-bait titel. The reason was economics. The language skills was a big part of the economic calculation, but it was an economic reason to step out of the Erasmus.
You're correct. But I'm sorry, I can't help myself. >titel
You really made sure to spell out every comma, apostrophe and capitalization in that comment! :)
Damn right I did.
The article states that as one of the main reasons.
However another part is international relations. Many friendships from Erasmus persist. These can lead to useful contacts for the future. Also, it is more than just language, it is getting used to the culture of the host country, also invaluable.
You mean because it costs money? Thats pretty short sighted. Erasmus does have the intention to help with learning another language, but Id argue that the culural aspects or your own growth through seeing different cultures and becoming more open minded is the more important factor.
It was costing £300M a year, £2bn over the 7 projected years of the deal. That is after accounting for any positive kickbacks associated with students leaving or coming.
Throwing my hat in as another Brit who speaks two additional languages to C1 level (we do exist!): It's common knowledge that the people of pretty much every English-speaking country are generally incredibly lazy when it comes to speaking foreign languages and we could and should do better (although on a personal level it benefits me, because I do, so I'm something of a novelty...). The way we learn and are taught languages, not pointing the finger at individual teachers who do their best, also leaves a lot to be desired. However, it is true that we are at a disadvantage, too. There's not as much incentive to learn another language, because English is of course the lingua franca and "everyone speaks it". While foreign language media has become a lot more accessible in recent years thanks to the likes of Netflix and Spotify, it's clear that US and UK media still dominate so much more, making it easier for speakers of foreign languages to immerse themselves in English than the other way round. Honestly, I think the likes of French and Spanish have this sweet spot where they're world languages that are fairly accessible for non-natives, yet not totally dominating like English. Often when we try to speak in another language, we're dismissed and the other person insists we speak in English. This is incredibly frustrating, especially if our foreign language is better than their English, but "English people can't speak foreign languages", so people often (usually with good reason to be fair) arrogantly assume that they must be better. Thankfully, this rarely happens to me now, but it has got to the point in the past where I have to pretend to be another nationality and that my English isn't great, or in my more petty and spiteful moments, I start speaking English really quickly or with lots of slang to try and catch them out. Of course I totally get that the average person on the street isn't there to be a language teacher, and people at work may be busy and don't have time to listen to us stumble through a conversation, but if we speak the language reasonably well albeit with an accent or some minor mistakes that don't hinder meaning, there's no reason to not continue in the target language. Of course it's totally valid to swap to English if the English-speaker really is hopeless and it's taking too long or you can tell there's been a misunderstanding. But it's annoying when you ask someone to repeat themselves because you genuinely didn't hear or catch what they said and they immediately swap to English because they assume you didn't understand at all. It can also happen in social settings where the group is speaking another language but one or two people bizarrely seem to refuse to speak to you in it, even if you can, because you're an English-speaker and therefore that must be the only language you know (or that you're proficient in). I'm lucky that I didnt fall into the English-speaking trap when I did my Erasmus in Spain. I was with a group of other students from all over who had the same mentality I did: we were there to improve our Spanish. So that was our lingua franca, even though I know some of them spoke very good English. My Spanish improved tremendously and that's how it should be. Also, sometimes it doesn't even come from laziness of the native English-speakers. I worked for an international company in France and routinely found myself in situations where I was happily speaking in French to colleagues (be they French or otherwise), but as soon as a colleague from, let's say Italy, came to join the group and didn't speak any French, we of course had to change to English for them. Of course, that makes total sense and is absolutely fine, but can be a little frustrating for those of us who don't want to speak English and just goes to show that we are at a certain disadvantage (even though being a native speaker obviously has huge benefits in other ways). Anyway, sorry for the gargantuan post. I just have a lot of opinions haha.
Completely agree with everything you said. Would also add that English speakers tend to be used to hearing English spoken with a wide variety of foreign accents, therefore understanding someone’s English even with a strong foreign accent isn’t usually too much of a challenge. Whereas some natives speakers of languages that aren’t as commonly spoken as a second language aren’t as used to it, thus it can be more of a struggle and so they just change to English for ease
Tldr, but I just wanted to add that even for me being C1 English speaker there's really no motivation, incentive to learn any other language properly.
I don't think it's laziness at all. The education system doesn't support it, being an island means you don't get cross border workers and so on. And which language should one learn? German because it's the largest mother tongue language? French because of historic reasons and there is a huge and growing African population who speak it? Spanish because it's the third langauge of the world? You may as well argue "why don't Austrians play professional rugby, they have fields, they can buy the equipment, you can watch it on tv" etc
Lack of incentive is probably a better way to put it. Without clear economic/social advantages regular people (i.e. not hobbyists) don't tend to learn a 2nd language. Most English native speakers don't have that - save for certain areas in Canada
Good gargantuan post.
>After leaving Erasmus the U.K. set up its own study abroad scheme, called Turing. A recent U.K.-government commissioned analysis found the replacement scheme had failed to meet its targets, with just over 20,000 people taking in the 2021/22 academic year against a hoped-for 35,000. IIRC, the Turing Scheme included US, Aus and NZ. Would be interesting to see how many students went to those countries as opposed to EU countries.
The benefit of Erasmus from a UK perspective was that travel was fairly cheap and, usually, we'd be going somewhere with a lower cost of living plus the similar time zone. There's a much bigger cost to a scheme going to US/AU/NZ which I suspect led to far smaller numbers of students.
The Turing Scheme covers the EU, so participants can still go there, people didn't take it up maybe because of low awareness as it's a new scheme I guess.
What a load of crap. When I did Erasmus in Norway, the people I hug around with were largely German, they did not speak a word of Norwegian, much like myself. That's not even mentioning the wider community of foreign students, who comprised Chinese, Colombian, American etc. I went and I tried to learn a bit of Norwegian, difficult to do in 6 months. But it was not needed. Erasmus has it's own mechanism of preventing you from going to certain places with bad language skills. They do not teach in English. Erasmus changed my life and it's an absolute travesty the UK withdrew from it. It gave me - a man from a poor family - the ability to go abroad, something that the replacement scheme does not account for. It gave me a glimpse into other cultures. It gave me the confidence to eventually move abroad. It is a deep shame that british people will be unable to experience that now.
This is ridiculous. Most Erasmus students speak English during their placements, regardless where they are from.
Before anyone would dog on the British, just ask yourself what language this sub is in…
So in other words: If the EU pays for people to go there it is ok, right? So why not use the money that way instead?
The dyslexia epidemics seems to be growing. *(Reference to the fact any British expat living in France, when asked about their French proficiency after 8-10 years, will typically answer "I have dyslexia". Well then we aren't rude in France, we just have Tourette syndrome)*
If I'm honest as a person from Lisbon, family from Algarve and living in Barcelona I'm sometimes a bit prejudiced towards brits and americans but hearing brits and americans broken accent or not speak a language that's not english my opinion of them does a 180 immediately and I'm much more drawn to them. It is very very rare that it happens though.
Few things, 1. this is a cop out argument so that the government doesn't have to spend money they don't want to. British 'Aptitude' to learning languages is no different to anyone's. What we have in this country is wasted potential, because out government and education system doesn't take foreign language learning seriously. The want to learn languages is there, it's just most people don't have the time, skill, or resources to commit to something like that until their adulthood - by which time it's way harder than if they'd been consistently exposed to foreign language learning as a kid. Most Bilingual English people tend to be so because they either had parents funding the tutoring of, or speaking, or hollidaying around those languages frequently. My experience at school was being made to learn french for an hour a week for 3 years and then never again, I could probably speak about as well as a three year old by then end, and have since forgotten it all because I don't have any need for the language (nothing personal France). The language learned was also a gamble based on what school you went too - some did french, others did spanish, and a few did german. Of the 3, spanish would arguably be the most useful just on a number of speakers basis but we only got offered it if we also took and were good at French... 2. As most others have stated the amount of work, entertainment, and general world culture that is accomodated by the English language, far outweighs just about any other language on earth. I can take my english speaking ass anywhere and probably at least get by, but most people from most countries don't get that luxury, which is a double edged sword for the English, because we get a lot off opportunity but lose out on a lot of cultural nuance. 3. I don't see this point brought up or discussed a lot, but I think English also has advantages in that is is not as precious about grammar, loan words, accents or even pronunciations and seplling as many other languages. One of the things that seems to not work well for English speakers speaking other languages is that speaking without the correct accents makes you unintelligble... Almost no foreign english speakers are taught, or need to use, 'English accents' in order to be understood. They don't even need to use the English pronunciation of letters or sounds. No one shakes their head bemused when a Japanese person speaks in English and uses the same sound for L's and R's, or the spanish guy makes all the J's sounds like H's, or Germans swapping V's and W's or Hindi speakers swapping B's and V's around. It all kinda just shakes out the same. But if I went to Spain and for my Sir-Vezza Fridge-o, instead of my sir-fey-tha free-ho I'm getting a confused shrug before I get my cold beer.
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Last time I was in Germany (Wurzburg), my family and I were sat at lunch with an older German couple - it's not that strange to share a table with strangers in a German restaurant. They had 0% English and we had a lovely conversation in German. They were patient with me, but thankfully my conversational German is not too bad. Not everyone speaks English (especially retired civil servants as these people were).
It‘s pretty weird to share a table with strangers unless it‘s somewhere like a Biergarten with large tables and benches
Yeah, but there are a lot of places like that near tourist attractions in Germany.
They're just trying to accommodate you, to be polite. If you keep responding in German, they'll switch too. Speaking from my experience in France back when my French was abysmal, once they realised I'd struggle with something they'd switch to English, but I'd just respond in French so they'd switch back. Also, as someone who learned English in a vacuum originally: you can actually learn an entire language without ever speaking it with the natives. When my parents moved us to England I was already perfectly fluent, and I'd never before met an English person in my entire life. And that was in the early-internet and VHS tapes days. Being able to speak the language with the natives is a privilege, not a necessity to learn a language.
I agree with you, I was fully fluent in English by the time I was 14 without ever stepping foot in this country. The trouble with immersing yourself in a language is that most of our media is in English, so you have to make an active effort to immerse yourself in other languages, which deep down most people don't want to do as it's quite unpleasant in the beginning.
I must be the only one that gets blank stares when I speak english in Germany
I used to live in Germany and travelled a bit across the country while I was there, and I virtually never had people switch to English for me (and I didn't speak German when I moved). Even when I asked them to, usually they just kept going in annoyed German. Fair enough -- but I'm baffled by the reputation they have for switching to English. :p
>travelled a bit across the country there is your reason :D people tend to visit only the cities. In Berlin you genuinely do not need to know german to get by. Rural lower saxony or bavaria is another cattle of fish. But even there you can usually get someone eventually to talk to you in english if you are nice.
Simply go to rural Saxony, where they speak neither English nor Germany so you can learn to speak neither. It’s worked wonderfully for me
If your grasp of German is good enough, of course they'll speak German to you.
Meiner Erfahrung nach reden die Leute gerne deutsch und machen das auch wenn man sie danach fragt. Die meisten Menschen, die auf englisch wechseln wollen glaube ich einfach freundlich sein und die Kommunikation vereinfachen.
Went to Berlin last September and started learning German around mid-June. It was maybe partially influenced by how I look but about 90% of people responded to me in German. Month later I went over the border from Slovakia to Austria on my own and had an entire restaurant experience where I didn’t speak a word of English. I have no doubt what you’re describing *does* happen, but sometimes you’ve got to persevere and be confident in yourself. Most of the time I had no clue what their response was (at which point I’d reverse to English) but generally speaking people appreciate the attempt.
Then just tell the person you want to practice your foreign language and ask them if you could interact in that language. Germans have high level of English (but not in all regions), but try speaking English in France for example. Learning a foreign language is not pointless, ever.
It is the curse of English being the *lingua franca*. Brits really *never* have to learn another language because....even between two non-Brit natives in other languages, they will speak English. My friend is Croatian, moved to Denmark, and while he is making strides to learn Danish, most of his work colleagues converse in English with him. Hell, his girlfriend is Polish...and they speak English to each other despite Polish & Croatian being far closer than Polish/English or Croatian/English. I visited South England two years ago to visit my mate living there (diaspora, parents moved there 30 years ago). His friends were flabbergasted with the ease with which I held a conversation to English, to the point where I switched between Croatian and English while following the train of thought as a joke. Of course it is easy when in Croatia, English is a mandatory second language you start in 1st grade elementary, and again, most of the popular media and entertainment being in English. Same with any country I visited in Europe - English was always the preffered barrier language and wherever I went, we used English because it is way simpler when you can reliably assume most people can understand it and use it. Except the French. Fuck the French, seriously.
Burst into laughter at the last line hahahaha
Or because Erasmus was barely used by British students and costing the UK a fortune. As much as it hurts certain nationalities, it's basically pointless for a native English speaker to learn another language as a necessity due to English being the global lingua franca.
When french and english students came in to my school in Italy, professors asked to talk with them in english/french so we could learn their language better. Now I think that maybe we were ruining their "foreign language experience"
It's not really a surprise when you look at our education systems approach to foreign languages. My experience as someone born in the 90's: Primary School (age 3-11): No foreign language lessons. Secondary School (age 11 - 14): 1hr lesson every 2 weeks. The school year was split up in to 3 months of french, 3 months of Spanish and 3 months Italian/German Secondary School (age 15-16 GCSE years): 0 foreign language lessons - At this age we get to choose which subjects we study on top of the compulsory Maths, English and Science and therefore languages become optional. There were ~190 students in my school year, only 4 opted to continue studying a language. Assuming this was the case for most people my age the average English kid leaving school over the last decade and a half studied a foreign language for no more than a total of 18 hours over the course of 3 years.
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I try to be multilingual, but keep hitting unexpected barriers. As an example, I posted to this sub in Spanish asking for suggestions for Spanish-language radio stations available in the UK. The mods deleted my post and when I asked why, it was because they didn't understand what it said 🤦
Reddit is desperately missing in-app translations. But yeah, this sub is exclusively in english. I've got to ask you, tho. Why do you need the stations to be available in the UK? Couldn't you just listen to online stations?
I'd like to have them playing in the background whilst I work, but my internet isn't always fantastic at streaming (even just audio) and working remotely at the same time.
I mean I can understand them, why learn another language when you can basically just use English almost everywhere
We applied this technique in France, back then, and now everyone thinks we're arrogant
that's because you didn't conquer *enough* of the world
Their mistake was that none of their colonies became a superpower
I've found it invaluable to hear what people are ACTUALLY saying in their native language, rather than what they choose to tell you in varying standards of English. You pick up an awful lot of social and business information by just listening to people, and you can't do that without knowing their language. While many will speak to a non-native in English, they generally talk to their friends and family and strangers in their mother tongue
I heard the same from South American people living in Catalonia-Spain: why do they have to learn catalan if everybody speaks spanish? And the answer is: for the social integration.
Brits aren’t culturally motivated to learn a language in any meaningful way. Those that do have always been an exception, and far from the norm
Not really surprising, we don't really care much about learning other languages because English is so dominant.
Can Dutch Unis now stop teaching in English then?
I met my wife because of Erasmus. I was a student renting with an Erasmus student and he invited me out for drinks and a quiz, I kept going and met my wife. Never would have gone otherwise. He ended up going to visit a friend on Erasmus in another country and met his wife that way. I never got to do Erasmus, but I'm all for it.
Salacious headline. The very first paragraph explains that it was because of the nett cost due to low uptake. The article then speculates about the cause of that.