Franconian Beer Message Board
The Umlaut in German |
| Posted by DonS on 2011-02-18 09:29:31 |
| This forum and its BBB equivalent have a set lingua franca (hey! that means "Frankish language!") to keep things on a relatively even keel. Often, English speakers from the likes of the USA, UK, Australia, and NZ are notoriously monolingual, and even though Canada is officially bilingual, I've met plenty of Great White Northerners who speak virtually no French at all. The English-speaking world's apparent indifference to non-English tongues stems from a long history of ascendancy and dominance, which has ossified into habit even as the dominance has passed (UK) or is in the process of passing (USA). And yes, acquiring a new language is tougher as one ages. I remember a couple of years ago, having a beer in Graz, Austria, and talking to a couple of English retirees. They had retired to the Netherlands, and lamented that the hardest part about learning a language at advanced years was that they could take the classes, pass the tests, and appear to have learned everything well, but simply couldn't retain it. It helps if one has been multilingual early in life; before I was six years old, I was already speaking both English and Brazilian Portuguese. I've forgotten almost all of the Portuguese, but had learned German reasonably well before leaving school for uni at age 18; this came in handy for my first visit to the Old Country at age 21, when I visited relatives (grandfather, uncles, cousins). Since then, I've acquired some ability in French and Dutch. I'm probably one of the lucky ones. More recent attempts have been at Spanish, but I'm a lazy sod, or I'd spend more time on it. And some languages are just plain fiendishly difficult for adult English speakers to learn: Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean are obvious examples, as are Hungarian and Turkish. One soldiers on, and acquires perspective. Next to these, other Indo-European languages are relatively easy. |