A question for native English speakers!LEARN a 2nd LANGUAGE
"Guest" what the hell are you doing here,why hiding you nickname, are you ashamed to reveal your name? Face it, polyglot and Aquatar were ryght.
"Your linguistic philanthropy is rather a camouflage concealing the insecurity of being monolingual, while still seeking approval and gratifying in a hedonistic manner the only ability you posses. Or is it just plain inter-socializing because there are more native English speakers on this forum than pupils?"
>And I also find it unforegivable when native English speakers go to a country where another language is spoken, without having made any effort at all to learn even the basics of that language, and then almost demand that the inhabitants of that country speak to them in English.<
ignarance and laziness period.
euro wrote: "Native English are LAZY"
People who make the above claim are lazy.
euro wrote the following gibberish:
"why hiding you nickname"
"ryght"
"ignarance"
"and laziness period."
The above demonstrates ignorance, laziness and hypocrisy.
Don’t you see that people here, forget their first native language after moving to America?!? Hard to believe. But that shows the cruel ignorance of the American society. A drama!
>I was fluent in German -- I spoke it better than I spoke English -- and now I barely remember a handful of words.<
>My dad lost his, and he didn't leave Mass. until he was 28. And yes, he was fluent as in he spoke Portuguese like a native<
A DRAMA!
Perhaps I confused you, at asia. My father never lived in Portugal itself. He was born and raised in the US state of Massachusetts (Mass.), which has a large Portuguese immigrant population. His grandparents were immigrants; he was second-generation American.
What a load of rubbish this thread is. Nobody MUST do anything. What about tribes living out in the middle of nowhere, say the Amazon - should those people learn other langauges? what happens when people come there? surely it would be courteous if the tribespeople spoke to them in the vistors' native language?
It's like lambasting a doctor for not being a professional football player in addition to the practice of medicine.
Well, it's not really. But it's still an attempt to bash people over the head with your opinion.
>What a load of rubbish this thread is. Nobody MUST do anything. What about tribes living out in the middle of nowhere, say the Amazon - should those people learn other langauges? what happens when people come there? surely it would be courteous if the tribespeople spoke to them in the vistors' native language? <
Don’t mention the TRIBES dude, they are not living in the civilised world.
Civilisation means at least a hospital, police, fire fighters, constitution, senate, and a set of laws. The Romans and the Greeks had them all 2000 years ago. The tribes from the Amazon, Australia, Africa, etc are not a civilized group of people in the modern context, and they never were.
Minimum Education means you have a basic knowledge of other foreign languages, not just knowing they exist.
"Civilisation means at least a hospital, police, fire fighters, constitution, senate, and a set of laws."
You mean like Zimbabwe?
"The tribes from the Amazon, Australia, Africa, etc are not a civilized group of people in the modern context, and they never were."
What of the Zulu, then?
<<Minimum Education means you have a basic knowledge of other foreign languages, not just knowing they exist.>>
Yeah, screw all that math, science, and history that the rest of us wasted our time on, then! Until we speak Polish or Cantonese we're all morons?
What a load of crap, euro. Pardon my French.
<<Minimum Education means you have a basic knowledge of other foreign languages, not just knowing they exist.>>
Really, in what country?
My husband speaks English, but not because of school (liceo or otherwise). Because he had to learn English in order to work here in the US, because the job he wanted could not be found in Italy.
I also fully expect that had he grown up an English speaker, he would have never learned a foreign langauge, but because of school, but because he would have not needed to learn the lingua franca for his field of work.
He speaks no other foreign language except to say "Je suis le man" jokingly in French, which isn't even French.
I should add that my husband is Italian, from the EU. His mother language is Italian.
euro and polyglot – you’re probably young and you don’t (yet) realize that every person and every culture has their own mix of circumstances, experiences, achievements, influences, biases, priorities, wants, and needs, and that’s what shapes the world.
A person is not lazy or ignorant just because they have not done one specific thing that you have done.
Yes, I suppose if we all want to not be seen as lazy, we should try to learn the native Indian language, sorry can't remember the name, Navajo or something, which has 990 forms of each verb hehe
Not everyone is interested in learning languages, either. It may have nothing to do with being arrogant or lazy or any of the other criticisms people like to throw around so much -- they just may choose to invest their time and efforts into other studies or pursuits. There's no reason why anybody "has" to learn other languages in order to prove some snob's point. There are plenty of monolingual people in every country -- it doesn't make them stupid!