Berichten: 35
Taal: English
Armand6 (Profiel tonen) 10 augustus 2015 12:14:37
ravana:maybe it will be good that children have 1 year of esperanto in 4 th year of elementary school .Is it 9-11 years? They will forget everything, and I mean everything, in a month or two. Children are terrible with foreign languages until they've reached puberty.
ravana (Profiel tonen) 10 augustus 2015 12:27:28
Vestitor (Profiel tonen) 10 augustus 2015 12:57:28
Armand6:People do not learn English for 10 years to acquire the level of proficiency most Esperanto learners demonstrate here and elsewhere. English is a very simple language.Sometimes I have to look askance when I hear this. The people who speak English as a foreign language are really judging their own competence and each other's. Sadly it's often way below the level of native speakers, but the thing is English is a world currency and native speakers don't do that much correcting, so people get the idea they're far more proficient at it than they actually are.
The idea that 1-2 years of English is enough to work properly in professional environments in the language is pure nonsense. The Northern European countries are usually classified as having the best English (though I think parts of India and Asia are actually better), yet even there it's patchy and a lot of it is poor. English is not easy, it is familiar and that gives people the impression that if they sound like an American sitcom, they must be good.
Armand6 (Profiel tonen) 10 augustus 2015 13:26:09
ravana:In yugoslavia slovenians and macedonians had one year of serbo-croatian at 4 th year.And what that was expected to accomplish? What could those children do? AFAIK both Slovene and Macedonian has high lexical similarity, and Slovene has also high grammar similarity to BCS too.
Vestitor:even in [Northern European countries] it's patchy and a lot of it is poor.It may be 'poor', but it does its job nevertheless, so it doesn't matter.
ravana (Profiel tonen) 10 augustus 2015 13:39:17
Vestitor (Profiel tonen) 10 augustus 2015 13:47:29
Armand6:It does matter actually because sometimes it doesn't do the job at all. That's the problem.
Vestitor:even in [Northern European countries] it's patchy and a lot of it is poor.It may be 'poor', but it does its job nevertheless, so it doesn't matter.
Armand6 (Profiel tonen) 10 augustus 2015 14:02:17
Vestitor:It does matter actually because sometimes it doesn't do the job at all.Do you have some specific examples?
Alkanadi (Profiel tonen) 10 augustus 2015 14:02:22
Vestitor:The idea that 1-2 years of English is enough to work properly in professional environments in the language is pure nonsense.This is very true.
ravana (Profiel tonen) 10 augustus 2015 14:11:52
Vestitor (Profiel tonen) 10 augustus 2015 21:37:57
Armand6:I gave them: Scandinavian English, Dutch English etc. It is patchy with a small core being very good and the rest middling to poor. I particularly recall a chemistry text written in English by two Danes which shouldn't have been allowed out by the publisher; it must have been the blind leading the blind. An amateur can't really be the judge of another amateur.Vestitor:It does matter actually because sometimes it doesn't do the job at all.Do you have some specific examples?
All you have to do is open your eyes and ears and there are examples galore if you are willing to acknowledge them.
Basic English is a different thing, but that's not suitable for academic work alongside very proficient natives. Its another argument for Esperanto really.