Most studied foreign languages in your country

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Formiko
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Re: Most studied foreign languages in your country

Postby Formiko » 2008-12-24, 8:15

lichtrausch wrote:
BezierCurve wrote:
His parents did what was best for him.


Well, even better would be to teach him both languages. I know people who raised their kids multilingually. And the kids can handle it amazingly well - even if they have to learn the third language on their way (say, of the country they live in); I heard it just takes consistency - each parent has to keep speaking to the kid in his own language.


Sure it's possible but it's quite difficult. It requires both parents being around the child quite a lot (many fathers can't do this because of work). The most likely outcome is that the child will speak 1 or at best 2 of the languages well and then the 3rd with low proficiency. That's assuming the parents don't give up entirely on the very time and energy consuming endeavour somewhere along the way.


My friend is an American who speaks fluent German. He moved to Germany, married a German woman, and now they have 3 kids together. They also speak French. They now live in the US. They speak German to each other, Mom speaks French to the girls, and Dad speaks English to the girls.
His 5 yr old is completely trilingual. She sees English as Daddy's language, so when Mom accidentally speaks to her daughter in English, she says C'est la langue de papa!. They are very diligent and their goal was to make their kids multilingual.. Our kids are amazingly multilingual as well. My son learned Yoruba when I was in Nigeria (He was 6). He just picked it up from the locals. Our other friends (they're photo-journalists) had a foster child and they moved to Bulgaria 3 years ago and took him with them. He was the translator for the first 3 months! I honestly believe kids in a foreign country have a stronger motivation to learn the language in order to make friends and to fit in. Children are sponges. They absorb EVERYTHING.
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Kenny
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Re: Most studied foreign languages in your country

Postby Kenny » 2008-12-24, 13:08

Yeah. It's like the ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine (isn't it complicated? :D), whose dad is Croatian but speaks perfect English being a translator, her mom's Hungarian, and as a result, she speaks all three languages almost perfectly :).
This friend (with the ex-girlfriend :D) is bilingual, too, btw. His Hungarian isn't impeccable but he speaks it just perfectly fine, it's only giving him trouble if he has too phrase very complicated things in a highly sophisticated fashion. But he's advancing as growing older and, well, they live in Hungary, so I guess by the time he reaches 20 he'll know just as much as anyone else I know. The funny thing is though, that he's never lived in the US (only been there twice) and his English is better than his Hungarian (his dad's from San Diego). Maybe it has to do with the fact that they lived in Zagreb for 7-8 years and only moved back to Hungary about 5 years ago.

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Re: Most studied foreign languages in your country

Postby Presto » 2008-12-24, 15:06

null wrote:in China:

1 English
2 Japanese
3 Russian
4 French
5 German
6 Korean
7 Spanish
8 Arabic


In the SAR,

1 English (mandatory from kindergarten thru the university and beyond; few actually become fluent, always controversial in the education system)
2 Mandarin (not mandatory at my time, now mandatory from grade 1 to grade 9; but few actually become fluent, me included)
(*3 Cantonese, for students who are new immigrants)
3 Japanese (with a big private tutoring market, and a so-called saturated market for mechandise, for example)

4 French, followed by all others - European or Asian or Chinese; those are in a very very small minority. I only got to know a few who are learning those languages; almost no one masters it to a very high degree - like being able to study at a foreign university. Our mainland is actually a place of far more language students of more languages than the "Asian international city".

And in Macau, I heard that English is the most popular; Portuguese, while useful for becoming a civil servant, is hardly studied outside a few schools. All that Portuguese I can see is on the street names. Practically nobody outside the government/the ethnic community knows Portuguese, and I didn't see (if at all) any tourist guides in Portuguese.

My own rant: Hong Kong people won't care about culture at all. We'll only do a lot of code-mixing with broken English only. First, what's the point of learning anything after #3? What's the point of learning English anyway? As of today, English still enjoys a higher social status, not just in education, as a language for business, for talking to Filipino maids, for every tourist, and probably for some of our classmates from the mainland, when our Mandarin sucks.

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Re: Most studied foreign languages in your country

Postby ILuvEire » 2008-12-27, 2:43

Vietnamese is picking up here in Austin. There's a language club at my high school (that I pushed for and am very active in :) ) and I think it's just a matter of time before we have formal classes. My elementary school had a native Vietnamese speaker class (they pulled them out of English, which was really controversial) where they read books and learned to write.
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