geo63:In Poland children learn English .. 12 years. After that long only about 30% of them can actually use the language..

Perhaps many Polish people can read English fairly well, but they need more practice speaking it. Organising exchange visits with schools in the UK might be a good idea, if the government offers subsidies to people who are not rich.

geo63:
Maybe one day - not too far away - Chinese will become a global language."

There was a sci-fi show called Dragonfly. Set in the future, the story said that the earth had 2 remaining languages -- English and Chinese. The cast of the show would speak English and curse in Chinese. It was pretty funny.

Leke:

geo63:
Maybe one day - not too far away - Chinese will become a global language."

There was a sci-fi show called Dragonfly. Set in the future, the story said that the earth had 2 remaining languages -- English and Chinese. The cast of the show would speak English and curse in Chinese. It was pretty funny.

There's a very similar show with that fits that description: Firefly. Did you (Leke) happen to mean that show instead?

geo63:

vincas:You may be right. Nobady knows what the future will be. But, the current situation is quite clear. A lot of people are learning English. who are learning Chinese?

About 50 million people worldwide are learning Chinese now and the number steadily grows. Many people are learning English, that is true. What percentage of them have any good command of English. How many of them are fluent speakers. It turns out that only 10% reach that level (there are researches in that subject). So 90% speak Globish, not English. This is because English is far more difficult than many people think. At first it looks simple. Then the more you learn the more and more weird it becomes. So the majority reaches only basic level of language skills - adequate for simple communication (tourism, asking way, shopping...) You reach that level in esperanto after 3 months of learning.

On the other hand I don't know how fluent are those who are studying Chinese. I suspect the same percentage as with English. I think that in this matter all natural languages are just the same.

If there are 50 million learning "Chinese," which language are they learning? Mandarin, Cantonese, one of the other languages spoken in China or different Chinese languages? These are all different languages, something I noticed at work one day when Asian food came up in a discussion and I mentioned Dim Sum. A colleague whose native language is Mandarin didn't know what I was talking about -- Dim Sum is the Cantonese term for that kind of food, the Mandarin one is totally different. They may be written the same way but the spoken languages are totally different.

etala:

Leke:

geo63:
Maybe one day - not too far away - Chinese will become a global language."

There was a sci-fi show called Dragonfly. Set in the future, the story said that the earth had 2 remaining languages -- English and Chinese. The cast of the show would speak English and curse in Chinese. It was pretty funny.

There's a very similar show with that fits that description: Firefly. Did you (Leke) happen to mean that show instead?

I'm almost sure he means Firefly, maybe they called it Dragonfly in Finland? A great show cut short by network stupidity.

I see no real possibility that any historic (or national if you prefer) language will ever be a global langauge. They wax and wane in appeal, but that doesn't change the fact that they're all hard to learn for people with a different native language, English included. In fact, this difficulty may be part of the reason they do wax and wane so.

As all-encompassing as Muslim rule tends to be in a country, I've read that Arabic took 1000 years to displace Egyptian and it never did displace the native languages in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc. That suggests it would take a loooooong time for any national language to become a true world language, far longer than any country or culture has ever remained in a dominant position.

If there's ever a true global language, I can only see it being Esperanto. It's the most international language imaginable, combining features of the three most widespread language families in the world (the Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages) with the agglutination found in almost 400 other languages, ones as diverse as Finnish, Turkish, Tamil and Japanese. People on every continent will find familiar elements in Esperanto, and it's easier to learn than other languages. I'm sure that's what has enabled it to spread as far as it has, and it will likely lead to it spreading further over time.

geo63:

vincas:In this way we can talk about any language.

What is the way out?

No, there is Esperanto, ready to be used:

1) fair
2) easy
3) precise
3) cheaper
4) doesn't belong to anyone
5) to be used to comunicate with foreigners only, so to preserve local languages

1) There are people who argue even vehemently to the contrary, and many non Esperantists who don't know Esperanto but know Esperanto's propaganda (yet are wordly enough to be familiar with many languages) have said before that "it's very European". You have to change their opinion first, whether its true or not.

2) I can go with that (Indonesian, Afrikaans, Sumerian and Swahili are also easy though)

3) If Esperanto does become favoured like English is now, this will change very quickly. The people who make English expensive to learn now will make Esperanto expensive to learn. You have to first make it so this doesn't happen, but you will help English/Whatever the expensive international language is in the process.

4) Yep.

5) Nup. Actually, the more I think of it, the more I feel that if Esperanto were to succeed English, because of its ease it would mean that people wouldn't care about languages other than their own and Esperanto (there'd be no financial incentive, the job prospects would be smaller, translators would find that there'd be less work for them). This would adversely affect the international language learning community, by making it so people go "why bother? I'll just learn Esperanto", meaning you'd have only people with interests other than wanting to learn a 2nd language for the sake of it. I reckon this would take away a quarter of language learners of "exotic" languages world wide, thus stemming growth for many languages.

To turn this around, people would have to become bored enough with Esperanto that they feel they need to learn exotic languages to find some sort of unique identity and make themselves stand out from the crowd, but it's hard to say whether that would be enough to reverse damages (also remember that endangered languages are put in even more danger if the economic conditions are bad, and the community feels that they need to abandon their language if the "international language" of choice will give them jobs, even if that's flawed reasoning.

Epikuro57:If there are 50 million learning "Chinese," which language are they learning?

Mostly Mandarin. If it's the Chinese govt speaking, they tend to only care about Mandarin (as far as their international image is concerned, they want to avoid the burden of choice). Otherwise, Universities/colleges/schools across the world tend to have mandarin as their only choice, and they'd be a great source for these statistics (we can't count people learning by themselves or from friends or in the country without any courses, but if we could I think we'd see that there's many people learning non-mandarin chinese that way).

As for people who spend all their time learning English and not doing too well, look at English speaking countries. We learn HEAPS of languages and barely anyone ends up speaking them!

And I'd find it interesting to see how many people are ending up fluent from Esperanto by speaking it in schools. It wouldn't surprise me if they forget it all right after school since there's no place to use it apart from the quirky-imaged Esperanto community.

Once again, this is a problem that transcends the language being learnt. If we "solve" it (I mean, do we need to force people to learn languages? Something for another debate), then we may help Esperanto's competitors too. As a non-finvenkist, that's a "sacrifice" which I think is totally acceptable.

ceigered:And I'd find it interesting to see how many people are ending up fluent from Esperanto by speaking it in schools. It wouldn't surprise me if they forget it all right after school since there's no place to use it apart from the quirky-imaged Esperanto community.

It is much easier to forget English than esperanto. There are some facts about this issue - some people, that lived in another country for couple of years, lost their good command of English. It took them up to a month to return to the prevoius state. With esperanto it is a matter of days (3 to 7). If you do not use English frequently, you just can't speak it fluently (constantly looking for a right word, bad accent, bad grammar...) And if esperanto were to be taught as the first foreign language at all schools around the world, the esperanto speaking community would have grown fast.

I agree that teaching esperanto is against English teaching industry. Because English is difficult, their jobs are secured for years. So money is all that matters in this beautiful world of ours.

ceigered:And I'd find it interesting to see how many people are ending up fluent from Esperanto by speaking it in schools. It wouldn't surprise me if they forget it all right after school since there's no place to use it apart from the quirky-imaged Esperanto community.

In answer to your question, I'd say that pretty much everything that is taught at high school is forgotten, unless one decides to specialise in it later. At primary school we learn more fundamental stuff which doesn't get forgotten, plus we're younger and that seems to help a lot. If a kid could read a simple text, remember 400 roots or so, and have a conversation in EO by say the age of 12, I think it would not be forgotten so easily in adulthood.