(By Steve Kaufmann) There are over 6,000 languages in the world. Some are more important than others, not better or more advanced, just more important. Why? Because they are spoken by more people, in more countries. That does not mean that Finnish is not important to the Finns, and Maori is not important to the Maoris. It is just that these languages are not so important to the rest of us. On the other hand, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by over one billion people. Chinese origin words account for 60% of Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese vocabulary. Knowing Chinese will help you learn these languages too. It helped me. Chinese culture has influenced the world for thousands of years with its art, philosophy, technology, food, medicine and performing arts. Today China's economy is booming. Chinese seems well worth learning. Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese are essentially dialects of the same language. If you learn one, you can learn the others. I did. If you learn Spanish, you open the door to the culture, music, history and possible business dealings with 800 million people in 60 countries, including the US and Canada. If you get ambitious you could try Russian, as I have been doing for the last two years. Once you have Russian you can probably communicate with other Slav speakers. But hold it here! Before getting carried away, let's look at the present situation of language teaching. According to one Canadian survey, after 12 years of daily French classes, only one high school graduate out of 147(0.68%) achieved "intermediate" proficiency. Another survey of immigrants learning English in the US showed that "classroom instructional hours" had little impact on progress. If we cannot teach our own official languages in North America, what hope is there for other languages like Chinese or Spanish, let alone Russian, Arabic or Hindi? As a speaker of 10 languages I know the benefits of speaking more than one language. We simply have to change the way we go about teaching languages. To start with we need to dispel seven common misconceptions about language learning. |
/1 
|部落|Archiver|英文巴士
( 渝ICP备10012431号-2 ) 
GMT+8, 2016-10-5 12:11 , Processed in 0.057422 second(s), 8 queries , Gzip On, Redis On.
Powered by Discuz! X3.2
© 2009-2020 Best Translation and Interpretation Website
 |
