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Learning languages
2

Learning languages

Learning languages

(OP)
From some of the threads in this forum, it strikes me that English is a particularly quirky and difficult language to learn and it seems foolish that this language has evolved into the most common second language and the one we choose (or are forced) to do business in. This got me to thinking: which languages have people learnt as a second language and which were the easiest to learn? If there is a consensus, maybe we could start a revolution and have the next generation conducting business deals in Esperanto or Swhaili!

RE: Learning languages

The way things are going, we all need to learn Mandarin.

RE: Learning languages

I grew up speaking Tagalog, but moved to the States at such a young age, that I have forgottem most if not all of the language.  In high school I tried my hand at French, but like most languages, if it is not used it is lost.

I'm convienced that my brain is only wired for one language, and it just happened to be English (or should I say American?).  As far as conducting business in another language, I'd be dead in the water.  We could all communicate in Loren Ipsum at that point.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
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RE: Learning languages

What about the languages of major religous texts?
We could all do business in Hebrew, Arabic, or Greek!
Plus, learning the language would serve a dual purpose.

RE: Learning languages

Why would we learn Mandarin? There are more Indians than Chinese and not all Chinese speak Mandarin. A Chinese radio has an "on/off" button and not a whatever they may call it. I think there won't be less English speakers than there are now, at least not for the 1-2 next centuries.

I actually believe English is a very easy language to learn. Pronounciation can be funny ("woman" versus "women") but the verbs are uncomplicated (unlike Latin and Slavic languages), there's only one "the", nouns don't change depending on whether they're subject or object, adjectives don't change in function of gender and number, there's only "you" (unlike some Asian languages, I believe Vietnamese has something like 8 different terms depending on the age/gender/status of the person you talk to).

RE: Learning languages

I often wonder why the EU or UN don't start to push one of the artifical languages like Esperanto as a second language worldwide so we all know what we are talking about, and can ditch the irregular verbs etc that seem to litter all naturally developed langauges.  It would also give a common ground - everyone has to learn.  I feel embarrased sometimes when (as an englishman) I go abroad and almost everyone can talk english, and I haven't a clue even how to say please and thank you in their language (french and german excepted, but I haven't holidayed there!). Or hold a meeting with one of our continental partners who can speak english as well as I can (without swearing so much...).

RE: Learning languages

From http://www.infoplease.com/index.html

India:  Population (2005 est.): 1,080,264,388

China:  Population (2005 est.): 1,306,313,812

Mandarin is the "official" language of Mainland China, and thus the "official" line is that everyone in China is abel to speak Manarin.  Of course reality is different.

Mandarin has the largest number of speakers by far, with English second.  http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html

Similarly, Engilish is already an "official" language in India, so why learn Hindi or any of the other Indian dialects?

Mandarin will also get you by in Taiwan and Malaysia.

RE: Learning languages

Hindi is the national language of India, but major businesses and education is through English language. An average educated Indian will be knowing English,Hindi and his regional language.

RE: Learning languages

I would be interested to know how much of the world population would be covered if you could speak English, Mandarin and Spanish. That covers most of most of the population centres as either a first or second language. Add Urdu and French and whatever language the majority in Malaysia and Indonesia speak (I'm ashamed to say I don't know) and you have pretty much the full set.

Unfortunately the only language other than English in which I could hold anything approaching a comprehensible conversation would be French.

M

--
Dr Michael F Platten

RE: Learning languages

An interesting site ajack1, particularly regarding the fact that americans (and presumably other english speaking countries too) only speak about 2% of all english words, and that's the ones who have graduated. If you only know 2% of a language it's difficult to argue that anybody speaks english at all! Bring back latin.

corus

RE: Learning languages

I undertook Spanish at age 30. At age 40, I'm functional but still mess up my tenses, etc. I can communicate well enough to get by, though. I had an opportunity to serve as an intermediary between a Dutch customer and a Spanish vendor and managed alright.

My experience in China (on business) was that many people are trying quite hard to learn English. Also, most signs in the industrialized regions are either in English or have an English "subtitle." For them, knowing English is a way to set themselves apart from their peers.

My experience with a brief shot at self-taught Mandarin is "No freaking way." The tonality of the language and its effect on meaning seems impossible to master without having a native speaker around for guidance and feedback. I can't even imagine trying to learn the ideograms.

Like it or not, given that the global financial centers are in London and New York, the Indian competence with English and the Chinese attitude towards it, English has so much momentum that it's hard to imagine it ever being replaced as the language standard of business.

Of course, people probably felt that way about Latin and now Latin is dead but its own Ebonics (Spanish) is thriving...

Also, FWIW, English is also the official language of global air traffic control.

--------------------
Bring back the HP-15
www.hp15c.org
--------------------

RE: Learning languages

Begger,

You are correct about the tonality of Mandarin being a difficult thing to master when your native language has no similar concept.  Just to further confuse the issue, the Chinese, like most other countries, have regional accents as well (not dialects, accents when speaking Mandarin).

An interesting observation regaring the tones:  

As you know, a different tone can drastically change the meaning of a phoneme.  It has been my experience that Mandarin speakers that do not speak another non-tonal language are so ingrained with the tonality of Madarin that they are not really aware of if.  When "mis-toning" a word or two in a sentence to a Mandarin-only speaker you are likely to get only a quizzical look of non-comprehension.

If you mis-tone to a Mandarin speaker who is familiar with another language, and is aware that non-native Mandarin speakers have trouble with the tone thing, they will often run through the other tones of the questionable phoneme in their head until the find one that makes sense in context.

RE: Learning languages

As a french speaking canadian, I have learned english as my second language and took some courses of spanish. I must say that, for a french speaker, spanish is quite easy since it's very similar to french in many ways (same latin roots).

I agree that, on the other hand, english is pretty difficult. It requires practice and a lot of efforts. It has a lot of rules and irregularities, but I'd say that an english speaker must have a much harder time learning french (with all the genders, exceptions to all the rules, etc...).

I guess I am lucky to know french by "default"!

RE: Learning languages

French is unnecessarily complicated but it has an irresistable charm - just like everything else in France including the women.

Re China and India, MintJulep, I see I was wrong, there are more Chinese, though I still believe there are more Chinese (the young generation) who speak English than Indians who speak Mandarin or Kantonese. Same for other large countries like Brazil, Nigeria... English is undoubtedly the most common second language.

Anyway. Never tried Mandarin. The tones must be impossible to learn without a native speaker and I guess the characters will eventually be replaced by western script like in Vietnam or at least a simplified version as the country opens up further.

RE: Learning languages

Has anyone else found that native French speakers don't seem to tolerate pronuciation irregularities in their language as much as others?

I'm not French bashing, I think that the stereotypical view of them is way off the mark, but I had a chance to visit both Spain and France last year and started learning both languages at the same time using Rosetta Stone software.  I spent twice as much time learning French because I would be spending more time there, and I know my pronuciation must have been terrible, but the Spanish seemed to know what I was on about through the odd word I got right and used the context of the sentence to guess the rest.

The French version of American Idol was on at the time, and a contestant from Quebec had an accent that mainstream French speakers found so hard to understand that the program had subtitles anytime he spoke.  Now I may have misunderstood the situation, but I would think that an english speaking canadian would rarely need subtitles on a British television show.

I'd like to hear what people who learned their French in Quebec, Vietnam, North Africa, New Caledonia etc have to say about visiting the 'mother country'.

RE: Learning languages

Generally speaking, 'settled' counties like the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have a more homogeneous language than 'settler' counties, which frequently have strong regional dialects, viz. consider the the thick Scottish brogue in the British Isles.

RE: Learning languages

lewtam,
Not sure if that is really true but you're not the first person to say this, I've heard it before from french-speaking Swiss, and their pronounciation is really not far from the french in France.

RE: Learning languages

Language changes in all countries over time.

Example, the lisp heard in Castellano Spanish currently spoken in Spain came into being after much of the 'New World' was settled, so the lisp is not heard in North and South American Spanish.

A Spanish Professor in our area wrote a paper on the Spanish spoken by an isolated "colony" of Spanish speakers in South Louisiana left over from the early colonial days.  Lots of differences, because their language did not evolve with the world language.  Good for a doctoral dissertation in his case.

The French spoken in Canada and South Louisiana, which came from the same region of the 'new world' is very different from each other, and different from that spoken in France.  In the case of S. LA, vastly different.

Brazillian Portugese is distinctly different from Portugal's language.

If one in the USA listens to taped speeches of Franklin Rosevelt during WWII or watches early B&W 'talkies', you will hear language inflection that isn't spoken in the USA even 60-80 years later.

Accents within the USA quickly give away where someone is from.  They even vary widely within states.

The structure of the English spoken in the 'outback' of S. LA is greatly affected by the French language roots of the people, and has a lot more reflexive cases than standard English generally has.  I noticed that after learning romantic languages that have mandatory reflexive tenses.

My Venezuelan son-in-law, who has learned (southern) english was watching TV recently while someone was speaking 'ebonic' English, and he stated that he did not understand anything, while I was able to tell him all that was said.  I then hurt his feelings, having learned Spanish in Spain with a lot of follow on of Mexican Spanish, when I made the comparison of ebonic English to Venezuelan (street) Spanish, which is very difficult for me to understand.

So... IMHO it is hard to make generalities about languages.

rmw

RE: Learning languages

back in 1993... i read in the asian wall street journal in a note by a columnist that answered to letters of readers: one graduate student in international business asked what to learn as a  that as a 4th language as he spoke: english, mandarin and cantonese... french? german? italian? the columnist answered: spanish... if you consider that, in terms of people, mandarin is the the most widespread language... in terms of countries: spanish is.
and, because of his training, he would most likely be doing business with government officials, therefore: spanish was his best shot as in those countries most government officials are not very fluent in english.

as a freebie... here is all the spanish non-native speakers travelling to spanish speaking countries would need in normal situations:
- señorita! otra cerveza, por favor.

:oP


 

saludos.
a.

RE: Learning languages

Soon thereafter followed by; ¿Donde esta el baño? of course.

rmw

RE: Learning languages

al fondo a la derecha.

saludos.
a.

RE: Learning languages


A la izquierda es para mujeres.

RE: Learning languages

Banjo? Are Spanish bath-rooms anything like string instruments?

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org

RE: Learning languages

sk...
forget the banjo... u r doing ok with the cervezas.

saludos.
a.

RE: Learning languages

Just something to keep in mind; when you have ordered dos equis, you have only ordered one cerveza.

rmw

RE: Learning languages

Spanish is quite simple to learn.  Well defined rules, but I wish they would ditch the genered nouns.  Who the hell thought that would be a good idea?

As for Mandarin, it will be difficult for it to become the dominant language of business, if for no other reason than a large portion of their own population is functionally illiterate.  The lack of an alphabet is a serious stumbling block for learning to read and write a language. It is much easier to memorize 26 letters in an alphabet, than some 3500 ideograms and their contextual combinations.

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