Category: Languages

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Language learning getting worse in the UK

It’s almost a yearly ritual – the BBC article on the poor state of language studies in the UK. Still, I was fascinated to learn, after my earlier rant on the subject, the reason why the government decided to end the compulsory teaching of a second language in the UK.

The government justified its decision to end compulsion by arguing, in effect, that you can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.

Its rationalisation was that it was better to encourage more language learning in primary schools (although ministers held back from making it compulsory at this level) than to force reluctant 14-year-olds to persist with something they had already decided they did not like or could not do.

Hmm. Aren’t maths, English, PE and a load of other subjects compulsory? So why not a language? Or even two?

Maybe the government’s trying to cover up the fact there’s such a shortage of language teachers. Certainly, I doubt there’s the required number for primary schools. But with so many of our young adults going off to Asia to teach English as a Foreign Language courses, couldn’t we do the equivalent here? Maybe it would help with our rabid, insular xenophobia for all things European if we introduced more British kids to continental Europeans at an early age and got them speaking languages then.

Just an idea.

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A guide to Hungarian in the strangest of places

Of all the sites to find a guide to Hungarian language and culture, the last one I would have expected was the LinuxFormat blog. Yet there one is.

Hungarian looks like a fun language, with all those joined up words and suffices for additional meaning: German on steroids, really, although Hungarian is one of the few members of the Finno-Ugric group of languages, and is not an Indo-European language like German.

I’m tempted to add it to my list of languages to learn: after all, if JRR Tolkien was moved by the beauty of Finnish to learn it, I’m sure it’s sister language must be mighty nice, too.

I suspect it’ll be going on the bottom of my list, though, unless that trip to Budapest that we keep threatening to do ever happens. Somehow, I think the likes of Italian and Welsh are going to come in more useful.

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Right hand – meet left hand. He’d like to introduce you to the government’s language education policy.

So, let’s get this right. First New Labour decides to end the mandatory teaching of at least one secondary language to children under the age 16. Now, it’s setting targets for schools to ensure that at least half of them continue learning a second language. Meanwhile, they’re trying to convince us all they’re trying to reduce the amount of paperwork and target-meeting that teachers have to do.

What’s wrong with this picture? Is it possible that the government have realised their mistake, don’t want to appear to have done a u-turn and have done the next best thing?

Personally, I think teaching everyone at least one secondary language up to the age of 18 would be an even better idea. I would have hated it at the time, but I would have been very grateful now.

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New words you never knew

I’m indebted to WebProNews for revealing the following new words that the next gen of predictive texters know – but most people probably won’t. They’re entertaining to say the least:

  • Lifehack – a tool or technique that makes some aspect of one’s life easier or more efficient
  • Mashup – new information created by combining data from two different sources
  • Placeshift – to redirect a TV signal so the viewer can watch a show on a device other than his or her television
  • Playlistism – judging a person based on what songs are on the playlist of his or her digital music player
  • Podjack – to plug the cord of one’s digital music player into the jack of another person’s player to hear what the person is listening to
  • Puggle – a dog bred from a pug and a beagle
  • Sideload – to transfer music or other content to a cell phone using the cell phone provider’s network
  • Vlog – a blog that contains mostly video content
  • Vodcast – a video podcast
  • Ubersexual – a heterosexual man who is masculine, confident, compassionate and stylish
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Birthday absence

Sorry I haven’t been posting for a few days: work and my birthday both got in the way. Enjoyed my day off, but now I’m straight back into the slog of things.

The good old Amazon wish list proved useful this year, yielding Teach Yourself Instant Italian and Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit?: The Encyclopedia of Modern Life, both of which I’ll be writing about later. Sarah also decided that I needed support in my rash promise to make a new Gordon Ramsay recipe every week (I made “Sublime scrambled eggs” yesterday) by buying me a blow torch. Crèmes Brûlées all round then.

My lovely wife is also taking me to the theatre on Saturday to see Otherwise Engaged, which should be fun: I’ll be posting a review of that on my media blog once I’ve seen it.

But as a celebration party for the day, we did a tour of Greenwich, taking in The Mitre pub and Café Sol. The latter is a reasonable TexMex, although we encountered the strangest waitress there. She spoke fluent, accentless English, but couldn’t understand a word of it. Very strange. Wished she’d had a label on her saying “I’m from…” so that we could have used our combined French, German, Spanish, Russian, Welsh and Greek to have a stab at helping her out. She was probably from Poland though, so we’d almost certainly have been stuck on a certain river without either a paddle or one of our main courses all the same.

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Does “Instant Spanish” actually work?

As regular readers may know, I’m working my way slowly through Teach Yourself Instant Spanish. I’m on week five now (flash cards will be going up on the site soon, once they’ve had a thorough testing) so that’s only a week to go and then some revision to consolidate.

The big question is: does it work? Is this all for nothing? Now, I had good results with Teach Yourself Instant Greek, so I was willing to assume the same of Instant Spanish. And I’ve been having relatively good results with the occasional bits of Spanish I’ve heard on the tele: I even managed to cope without the subtitles during Lost‘s Ana-Lucia flashback last week.

So I decided to do a written test today and I was pleasantly surprised.

Continue reading “Does “Instant Spanish” actually work?”

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Sucking in three languages. Or maybe four.

So I’m on the phone, trying to set up an interview – in French. It’s going well. I can understand her, even though she starts our conversation off in German, just to throw me. She can understand me, even though she’s French and normally only non-French French speakers can understand me.

Then she hits me with the double-whammy of “Your French is very good” (why, merci beaucoup!) and “You can speak in English if you want” (if my French is good, why would you say that?) then starts speaking in English. So now I’m having trouble “code switching” and can speak neither French nor English – I hate it when that happens.

But then things get worse. She asks me a question and instead of “Yes” or “Oui”, I say “Si”. Normally, I’m pretty much guaranteed to start speaking German accidentally at times like this, but I actually started speaking Spanish. How odd is that, given I’m still on “Week 4” of Instant Spanish? It wouldn’t have mattered so much if it weren’t for the fact “Si” means something almost completely the opposite in French.

So now I suck in four languages, including English. Brilliant.

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Gullible people required

If you don’t live in SE London, you probably don’t get this rubbish through your door:

Mr. Yousaff

International Spiritual Healer God Gifted

Born with this Knowledge

I can give help and advice no matter what your Problem is,

I can solve them with one visit. I can help you with Practical solutions concerning marriage, business and court cases and sexual problems. I can improve your life and I can bring back your lost friends, loved ones and relations, I can make your marriage better and I can give instant good luck in family Problems, I can remove from your life black magic, illness and eliminate habits like Drinking and smoking etc.

Anyone who has these problems contact

Mr. Yousoff Now

QUICK RESULTS GUARANTEED

First thing this guy needs is a magic wand to fix his punctuation and capitalisation. If he can bring back the dead, a full stop shouldn’t be too hard. The second thing he needs to do, of course, is decide whether he’s Mr Yousaff or Mr Yousoff.

However, my burning question is: “Does Mr Yous(a/o)ff actually make money?” If he fixes everything with just one visit, he must have higher call-out charges than the average plumber, just to break even. And are there really enough staggeringly gullible people to support him? Sure, there’s a reasonable number of Africans living here, who I’m guessing are his target market (insert disclaimer about Africa not being a single country, all have different cultures, etc). But they can’t all believe this stuff surely, any more than 100% of the locals round here watch Second Sight on Living or the French are a homeopathy-only nation? I could do a vox pop to find out, but that would involve stepping out into the oh-so-cold air. So maybe I won’t. (Gosh, what a fantastic journalist I am. In mitigation though, I wouldn’t be paid for it and I do have a lot of deadlines to meet right now – all of which will pay me.)

Even if any of them do believe, though, is a psychic sticking his badly phrased flier from the 18th century in someone’s letterbox the cultural equivalent of an undertaker driving around town in his hearse, shouting into his loudhailer about two for one offers – that is, possible but not the done thing? I’m sure there’s a case study for a marketing mag in there somewhere.