The British love to moan about how bad we are at speaking foreign languages. (I suspect, perhaps unfairly, that Americans are equally bad, but don’t beat themselves up about it. Perhaps one of our US contributors could comment.)
However, I’ve just read this in (the English translation of) the French physicist Sebastien Balibar’s rather fine book The Atom and the Apple
the more I hear scientists speaking in English, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that on average the French are pretty bad at foreign languages. I think only the Russians and the Japanese are worse.
When a Frenchman doesn’t point out our flaws, perhaps there’s hope for us yet…
PS – A little further in the same piece here’s a wonderful philosophical challenge worthy of Bertrand Russell. Bear in mind that this is a book translated from French to English. It says:
Roger Balian pointed out that the French conjunction or _ does not exist in English._
So how do you represent in English a phrase saying that a French word hasn’t an English equivalent? Is the ‘or’ here a French word? If not, how did they translate it? Boggle.
ou?
Well, yes, Mike, but ‘or’ does exist in English…
I completely agree, or disagree. I assumed it was just a badly constructed sentence, and read it as
But after doing that, I realise either my interpretation is so bad, or the original sentence is so badly constructedm that something’s wrong somewhere, no matter how you look at it.
Remember the original was written in French. It says
Roger Balian pointed out that the French conjunction or does not exist in English.
Now the question is, are they using a French word ‘or’, like their word for gold, but in this case a conjunction which has no equivalent in English or did they translate as ‘or’ the word that, er, doesn’t exist in English???
My observations are that Americans are far more likely to speak a foreign language than are British people. I am fluent in Spanish and Dutch, but many Americans I know speak at least one language additional to English. Conversely, I know hardly any British people who are fluent in a second language.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that Americans receive far more education about English grammar than Brits seem to do. When I worked in two different British editorial offices, I found myself unable to communicate with my fellow editors at a detailed level because people didn’t know the vocabulary: I’d talk about gerunds, participles, indirect objects, adjectival clauses, the part perfect conditional tense, declension and conjugation, noun plurality, the subjective mood, and quite a few people didn’t know what I was talking about. Some even seemed hazy on what constituted an adverb. These Brits could write well to be sure, but could not describe what they were doing or diagram a sentence — something we start learning at about age 6 or 7 and continue learning for the next 9 or 10 years.
Of course, meta knowledge about one’s native tongue is typically reinforced when learning a foreign language, as you need to know what all the parts are to learn their rough equivalents. So people who don’t study foreign languages might be a bit hazier about the structure of their own.
Americans like to gripe about the French being snobbish about people speaking French while in France. At the same time, they apparently fail to see the hypocrisy in their own snobbishness about people here speaking English. This is almost invariably directed at Spanish-speaking immigrants from south of the border. You would be astonished at the hostility many Americans have at the idea that automated phone systems ask them to choose between English or Spanish. Initiatives to define English as some sort of official language pop up in various parts of the country from time to time. While I share the annoyance of many of my compatriots at not being able to communicate with customer service people with bad English, I don’t know why they are so fussed with the idea that Mexicans and Guatemalans are more comfortable doing business on their linguistic home turf. I know if I were in, say, Mexico, and had to sign up with service from some business, I’d be more comfortable if there were an English speaker on the other end of the line, even though I speak decent Spanish.
It must have been this word or (This is in French, obviously)
I am too easily distracted by Google-challenges. Found it by Googling “le mot or”. Anything else gave me tons of English pages or French pages about gold.
Unless I read it wrong it seems to be roughly to ‘but’ what ‘si’ in French is to ‘oui.’ I think…
Jenny – I guess the reason I’d assumed many Americans don’t speak another language is the relatively high proportion who have never left the US, but of course one doesn’t imply the other. Of course some would argue that these days Spanish is not a foreign language in the US, any more than either Welsh or English is a foreign language in Wales…
Of course some would argue that these days Spanish is not a foreign language in the US
I live in a border region of a border state, and when I go shopping, or out the front door to walk my dog, or to a restaurant, I’m as likely to hear or read Spanish as English. While I was waiting for my friends’ flight to arrive last week, I was sitting next to three middle-aged and elderly Hispanic women, who were having an animated conversation that flowed seamlessly between Spanish and English.
With regards to impressions of Americans abroad, the main assumption that I encountered is that I would always exaggerate my abilities and accomplishments. I don’t think I’m guilty of this behavior in any circumstance, but I was especially sensitive to and cautious about it when I lived in England. It was such a pervasive bias that my British postdoctoral mentor specifically asked me about how “over the top” he should be, when he wrote letters of recommendation.
“or” in French can be thought of as somewhere between"now2 and “yet” (I believe).
“now” not now2 or even nowt. Curse the mis-hit shift.
As a Spaniard that has lived in the UK, Germany and now lives in the US and has spent extended periods of time in France my impression is that the French have a long way to go before they can compete with the Brits in ignoring as much as possible foreign languages. While the average Frenchman or Frenchwoman is unlikely to speak English with the same degree of fluency than many Scandinavians or Dutch, it still beats easily the average Brit whose idea of mastering a foreign language, in many cases, is restricted to dos cervezas por favor.
Having said that, my guess for the second spot on the European competition let’s not speak foreign would be Spain. Your mileage might vary but it takes some merit to be so bad at foreign languages when a sizable part of the GDP (still) comes from tourism.