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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is …
A Language with Benefits?
Or
Am I Lucky to be a Native English Speaker?
So, it won’t have escaped your notice that I’m a native English speaker. British English, to be specific.
Speaking English as my native language, of course, gives me huge benefits in some things. English is what people call the global language, or the universal language - although who knows what else is out there in the universe. In other words, there are a lot of people who speak it as a first language, but not only that, it’s a language that is spoken as a second language by even more people. Why is that? Because English is largely considered to be the language of business and if you don’t speak it, you could end up being at a disadvantage.
So, yes. In that way, I’m lucky to be a native English speaker. I have an advantage, or a privilege, if you prefer. I also understand that English is not an easy language to learn as a second language. That’s it’s a bit weird compared to many other languages. Does that make us weird? Who knows?
But, let’s think about the reverse of that for a moment. There are some statistics out there, which probably came from a census, that say that 36% of UK adults can speak more than one language, but only 17.5% can speak fluently. Well, if people are self-reporting fluency, that figure could be wildly out either way, but that’s not a very high percentage and I think that’s because, if English is the ‘global language’, where’s the motivation to learn other languages?
However, I don’t think that’s the only issue. As I said, English is pretty different to most other languages, which has the knock-on effect that it means it makes other languages difficult for us to learn, too. So, many people don’t. People generally prefer to do things that are easy, not ones that are difficult and take a lot of time. So, after they leave school, they give up all thoughts of languages.
What makes languages difficult for us? Well, so many things.
We don’t have gendered nouns, so that as a concept is pretty wild to us and difficult to get our heads around. The languages we do learn tend to be romance languages, or Germanic. Linked to that, of course, is that we don’t, apart from minor exceptions, have agreements of adjectives.
Our verb conjugations are a lot less complex, certainly than romance languages. So having to learn all the different endings can be really taxing.
Also, we don’t have accents, unless it’s a borrowed word, such as café, but most people don’t use the accents even then.
If I were to say we don’t have a subjunctive, though, I’d be lying. See what I did there? But, it’s limited, and the majority of people rarely use it. They’d have said - if I was to say we don’t have a subjunctive - which sounds wrong to me, but is widely accepted. And, honestly, I probably don’t use it sometimes. So, learning subjunctive constructions, where they appear widely in a language is, I’m not going to lie, one of the biggest difficulties.
And, of course, we never roll our Rs. There are many other sounds that aren’t familiar to our mouths, even though we do have a lot of strange pronunciations of words in English. You’d think we’d have covered everything with that, but we haven’t, not by a long way.
I’m sure I could cite a lot more things that we have difficulty with, but then this would just become one boring old list and no one wants that. But I do think this explains why people in my country are less inclined to learn languages. It really isn’t their fault, I guess, because no one chose to be born in a country that speaks the global language.
We are all lucky. But I’m even luckier, because I do learn languages and those that don’t have no idea what they’re missing out on.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.