Hacker News Reader

Comment by theycallmemorty | Hacker News Reader

Mono-lingual Canadian here with a question for both of you:

What do adolescents in your countries think of learning english?

Most anglophone Canadians start learning french in grade 4, unless their parents put them in an immersion program at a younger age. In Ontario we were required to take French until grade 9 and after that the VAST majority of us stopped because we hated it.

Is it like that with English in other parts of the world? Or is English enough of a prestige language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_%28sociolinguistics%29) that young people enjoy learning it?

View on HN

I think it's both at the same time. It's something they thrust down your throat in school from an early age and it is hated accordingly. But contrary to some of the other subjects, school is not the only place in which you're confronted with english. There's also games, music, movies, the web, talking to people from other countries and later science. So I think necessity and inevitability has replaced prestige as the dominant motivation over the past 15 or 20 years or so.

In South Africa we have 11, yes, eleven, official languages, with English being one of them.

It's easy for most people who's mother tongue is not English to learn it, as it's everywhere - government, media, advertisements, entertainment, you name it. So it's a necesity, not a status symbol.

It's also interesting to note that English kids generally struggle to pick up a second language, even if they live in a community that speaks another language, just because English is so pervasive, and there's no need for them to pick up a second language. This despite the fact that you have three languages at school, at least up to grade 9.

South Africa's national language is bad English :)

While I do think that everyone should learn English in SA, research has shown that mother tongue education (especially at primary and secondary levels) are extremely important.

There are a lot of parents doing their children a disservice by sending them to English schools.

Finland has two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. Schoolchildren start learning English at grade 3, and Swedish at grade 7. Swedish is widely hated and outright despised, while people just Generally learn English and consider it a part of the education.

Perhaps the difference is that there is so much English culture everywhere that you can't avoid it, while if you are not from near the Swedish-speaking areas, you will never actually use the language.

In Sweden I wouldn't say that kids enjoy learning it, but everyone sees it as absolutely necessary. It's also used every day because all music, all TV-shows (except some really bad Swedish shows) and all movies are in English.

Since we start so early and never stop until we're 18, everyone just kind of accepts it as something part of life and by the time you're 18 you're perfectly fluent.

It's definitely a prestige language in Scandinavia, remember that most of our pop culture is in English.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com