PigtailsOfDoom wrote:
Kalivha wrote:
Your English is pretty good.
That being said, British people are always impressed by people who speak more than one language because it is so uncommon here!
Really? I thought all European countries taught their students multiple languages. I guess that's just because every European student I've come in contact with is multi-lingual. I remember my freshman year in high school we had an exchange student from Germany who was fluent in 7 different languages. That impressed the hell out of me.
In England, foreign languages are mandatory for two years. Two years at school mean nothing language-wise.
In college (sixthform), people tend to either go do sciences or languages or mix a lot with all sorts of things, so a lot of people who do languages do more than one.
In Germany, when I was in school, everyone had to do two foreign languages, one from Year 5 and one from Year 7. They start in preschool with English now in most places, and generally the people who go to grammar school are good at them, but the others come out with no knowledge that is actually any use, even if they get decent marks in English.
I personally learned Mandarin Chinese from when I was 9 for 6 years and I'm getting back into it a little bit now, but not to the point where I could do much with it. In school in Germany, I did 10 years of Latin, 8 years of English (which did not teach me the English I use today, some people got A's in it while being far from my level of English proficiency, even at college level), 7 years of Greek (I started failing all my exams at some point and only got an A in my GCSE/high school diploma in it because I cheated in the exam), 3 years of Hebrew, a year of Dutch (read this as "reading Dutch newspapers, eating fast food and talking about booze and weed with our school vicar"), and half a year of French, half of which was a complete waste because our teacher was ill for months.
In England, I've done English on every level (I sat the Literacy exam and the Advanced Subsidiary Eng Lang/linguistics exam within a month of each other), German at AS Level and my A Level speaking exam is actually next week, and Dutch at AS and I've got the A2 exam in June for that. Dutch is actually my best language apart from English and German, and I'm nowhere near fluent in it.
My brother doesn't speak English because he went through education before the Iron Curtain stopped being an issue, but he's somewhere between conversational and native-level fluent in 12 or so languages, if you count the Romany dialects he speaks.
My parents both know some basic Russian, and my mum knows some very basic English.
I am going to blatantly state something here that is in line with what I know of sociolinguistics but that I can't back up with studies or anything: Similar to how middle class people have the greatest social mobility that shows in their own language, they are also most likely to speak more languages. It ties in with social network theory, because working class people don't move out of their social circle; they work, go to the pub, and sleep with pretty much the same people, usually. They don't have a need to learn more languages. People who go to university (especially abroad!) need language skills, and generally have more of an interest in stuff.
Plus, you wouldn't have them at an American university if they didn't speak English, and since you move in linguist circles it makes even more sense!
ETA: Nobby actually speaks like 7 languages; he's also one of the people I know who've moved up the social ladder the quickest, proving my point.
Edit²: It's actually
not called "social networking theory", silly Kali!
Edited, Apr 20th 2011 8:58pm by Kalivha 
