Learn foreign languages

i want to spalke nativly english

For now I speak only Serbian and English language but I would like to speak at least 5 languages and I hope that one day that wish o`mine will come true.

I’ve always had this, I’ve always wanted to learn more languages. I know three languages so far, French, English & Arabic. I still want to learn Italian & Spanish. German & other languages hopefully too.

i currently speak fluent english and japanese. i have studied french, but would need a major refresher course to function in a french speaking country. my top two languages to learn are spanish and farsi, but i would also like to learn russian and chinese. i think i’ll start with spanish, but farsi is definitely a close second.

UPDATE: a revised version of this essay can be found at http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/english-universal-language

I do not want to learn any other language than English. (My native language is not English).

I will try below to make a compelling argument for my decision, and I welcome feedback. Before replying, please read my argument in its entirety, and click hyperlinks if you are not familiar with the hyperlinked item(s).

Although (or perhaps precisely because) I work in the globalization industry, I have a strong opinion that the world would be a better place if everyone also spoke a common language in addition to their mother tongue. Today, English has the best chances to become that language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language).

Just consider the huge amount of knowledge that’s simply unavailable to you for the stupid reason that it’s written in a language you don’t understand. Should we encourage this by learning more languages so that people can generate more knowledge in more languages? How about instead we focus on one language, and better knowledge?

Did straying away from standards ever help in the long run? Aren’t you glad all power outlets are the same in the US and hate it when you have to buy adapters for Europe, or the other way around? Language is pretty much the same: a vehicle for communicating ideas among humans. I claim that ideas are more important than language itself.

I’ll address below several common attacks my proposal has received:

0. There seems to be a consensus among my opponents that everyone speaking a common language would be beneficial for humanity, except that that language should not be English. Therefore, I’ll skip demonstrating why a common language would be beneficial. I’d instead challenge my opponents to explain exactly what language that would be, and how they’d go about teaching it to the whole world.

1. Advocating English as a universal language is ethnocentric.

I am not advocating the propagation of English culture (particularly NOT pop culture… but I digress). I advocate teaching English purely as a vehicle for worldwide human communication. I don’t advocate my native language for this position, and I’m curious which non-English speakers would seriously advocate their own language. So far, the second best candidate would be Mandarin Chinese as a spoken language and Classical Chinese as the written form, but that’s thanks to China’s huge population. I don’t think any Chinese speaker in their right mind would advocate learning tens of thousands of characters. China’s own government realized the problem and has issued a number of simplification reforms.

The point is that for a universal language you have to either invent one, or make a pick among languages. I’ll demonstrate below why I think the best pick would be English.

2. English is a bad choice for a universal language. I agree with this argument as well. English is full of irregularities, its spelling is counter-phonetic (which explains why even native speakers have such a terrible time spelling it), there are all sorts of dialects from Aussie to Ebonics, and it’s full of slang. If people prefer to learn Esperanto, I’m very fine with that. Interlingua would be even easier to learn. Work has also been done on simplified and normalized versions of English.

• Modern English is sometimes described as the world lingua franca.[2] English is the prominent international language in communications, science, business, aviation, entertainment, and diplomacy and also on the Internet. It has been one of the official languages of the United Nations since its founding in 1945 and is considered by many to be on its way to become the world’s first universal language.—Wikipedia
• As a non-native speaker you are always an outsider,” Tuerp said. “If you want to get noticed in your field, you absolutely have to publish in English.—from a University of Michigan article

Dismissing this argument as ad numerum won’t help with the reality of English’s spread.

3. it would be boring if everyone understood English. Consider this: how fun would the cyberspace be, if we still had all the disparate, incompatible networks that couldn’t talk to each other, back in the dawn of the Internet? Fortunately, the Internet started using gateways to translate between these networks, until the networks understood it’s much more efficient to just speak the same protocol directly.

All I’m asking is that we accelerate skipping the translation stage we’re mired in nowadays. There are far more interesting regional aspects than language: culture (which is translatable to a very high degree; and that which is not translatable would not be accessible to non-speakers anyway), geography, society, cuisine, customs etc.

4. Culture would be lost. Let me tell you why it won’t, taking as an example the Chinese culture. Now, Chinese culture that’s not translated in English is only accessible to Chinese speakers. For all others, it’s as good as lost. If future Chinese speakers keep writing in Chinese, more culture will be lost. If, as I propose, everyone learns English as well, those Chinese writers will realize they can expose their culture to a much larger audience if they write in English.

To clarify my point: I propose mandatory education in a universal language (English, now) starting with every child’s general education. After 4 generations, assuming that everyone spoke the same language (be it English or Esperanto):

1. existing works in some language X are lost anyway to those who don’t speak language X, regardless of whether everyone speaks (also) English or not
2. which is easier, and propagates culture more: translating from language X into tons of languages A, B, C etc., or translating into just English?

5. Learning another language is a good challenge and helps expand your thinking. This is something I agree with. However, not all languages are equal. If you’re keen on learning a spoken language, it has been demonstrated that Esperanto is about 6 times as beneficial to learn as English:

What Helmar Frank’s research at Paderborn and for the San Marino International Academy of Sciences shows is that one year of Esperanto in school, which produces a communication ability equivalent to what the average pupil reaches in other European languages after six to seven years of study, accelerates and improves the learning of other languages after Esperanto.

(from Propaedeutic value of Esperanto). If you actually want to develop your thinking, I think that learning a programming language is much more beneficial to one’s intellect and rigorous thinking, than learning another human language.

6. Finally, ask yourself what this site would look like and how useful it would be and how many friends you’d make from all over the world and how many cheers your entries would get and so on, if nobody understood today’s de-facto common language: English.

So, please, stop this post-tower-of-Babel language mess. Learning a language takes YEARS. Is your life so in order, and have you accomplished all your other goals, that this is the best thing left to do?

May I kindly suggest that instead of learning some other language for your selfish benefit, you teach English to children?

I am a poliglot and speak 3 languages. I want to learn another language now but I live in Spain and it would difficult to learn German over there :-) It takes more time. By the way, I am french so it was pretty funny to take german classes with a spanish teacher. So I decided to stop. I will learn German with a book and go on vacation in Austria or Germamy. I love languages, TO LEARN A LANGUAGE YOU HAVE TO LIKE IT…

I’m trying to learn Irish and am really having problems. I have a teach yourself Irish book-CD set. Everyday I go over the same lessons as yesterday and discover I have learned almost nothing!

enrolled in beginner’s japanese this fall!

i especially want to learn french, latin, tagalog, and sign language.