polar wrote:Those reasons are as good as for me not to learn Dutch or Finnish - those folks's English are amazingly proficient. Anyway it's totally erroneous to assume that folks here have good command of English. prefixes.
It's kind of paradoxical. If a foreign people cannot speak English well, would you still learn their language? Which (stereotyped) peoples would you think to be of this category? If a foreign people can, then what, like the Anglophone peoples and some European peoples? As I can see it, it seems like peoples who are 1) speaking "small" languages and thus have to rely more on English, 2) less economically privileged, with English being one official language or 3) speaking difficult languages seem to be of this group. (Just like people like me?)
Bjarn wrote:I noticed this...I have had several swedes ask me what kind of person in Canada goes learning a language like Swedish. I didn't particularly specifically CHOOSE Swedish though, I just started picking it up listening to Swedish music and from people who did speak it and decided to stick with it as I never stuck with anything before.
Well, a bit similarly, I'd be very curious to know why non-Chinese people and non-linguists would want to learn Cantonese, because 1) its demographic base is now even smaller than Swedish, for example (except the SAR's, you could get by perfectly elsewhere) and 2) it must be then more difficult than Mandarin, for example. I'm not trying to keep it a secret code but, rather, am a bit pessimistic about it. Peoples speaking small languages have got to preserve them.