Aportes: 24
Idioma: English
erinja (Mostrar perfil) 6 de abril de 2007 01:54:54
T0dd:Support for foreign language instruction in the US is very weak anyway.It's a really disappointing aspect of our culture, in general. Someone at work (an American speaker of German and Japanese) was just telling me today how shocking it is that in the US, you can be considered a very well-educated person without having even basic conversational proficiency in a foreign language. I've always been astounded at how many people could get through six or more years of studying a language and still barely speak it. Not that I should be so shocked, since I took 4 years of Latin and don't really speak it, but at least I could read and translate it!
Thehouse (Mostrar perfil) 6 de abril de 2007 02:17:10
Although I do ironically think that English became such an important business and scientific language partly because Americans as a whole so stubbornly refused to learn other languages
mccambjd (Mostrar perfil) 6 de abril de 2007 03:10:12
Thehouse:Although I do ironically think that English became such an important business and scientific language partly because Americans as a whole so stubbornly refused to learn other languagesOh, don't give us all the blame, the English were there first!
We are victims of geography and our own success--if we weren't separated by two oceans from our major trading partners and if English weren't the main language for business and science, more Americans would see the value of a 2nd (or 3rd) language...
erinja (Mostrar perfil) 6 de abril de 2007 13:17:00
mccambjd:We are victims of geography and our own success--if we weren't separated by two oceans from our major trading partners and if English weren't the main language for business and science, more Americans would see the value of a 2nd (or 3rd) language...Plus you can be a reasonably well-travelled American, travelling extensively across most of a continent (North America) and never needing more than English. I know many, many people who have never left the US and Canada, even though they have travelled a lot. It would be much more difficult for a European to go through life like that. It would be like spending your entire life never leaving California, or never leaving Pennsylvania. Hard to imagine! (though I suspect such people exist in Europe, and I have heard of Americans who have never left their home state)