Languages - unpopular

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people dont use the maths they learnt at school either! so you might do a few sums but i cant think of a time when pythagorus was important to my life. i dont care whether or not other countries are teaching english, we should be learning other languages as well! not going backwards. i know it is possible to get through life without a language but it just really frustrates me that no one seems to care that there will be no bilingual people left. oh well i suppose if they arent gonna bother teaching languages it doesnt matter that there will be no teachers left.

i saw a dutch guy on the news today and his english was perfect. my friends went to amsterdam and this guy shouted at them on a train because they were speaking to some guard or something in english. he went into some rant about how he has gone out of his way to learn english but we are too lazy and arrogant. lol. but i hate the fact that we have this reputation!

as i said, i think they should be compulsory throughout school. i have a cousin who lives in north spain, and at 5 years old he started learning english and basque on top of spanish, and when i go to spain he always starts speaking to me in english. another one of my cousins is 14 and he can have a pretty good conversation with me in english, but before i went to uni there was no chance i had the confidence to reply in spanish, even though i understood quite a bit. and they always want to learn more of it. whereas english kids dont give a monkeys, or rather they havent got the skills or confidence to do it. making languages non-compulsory isnt exactly the way to combat this. and its hardly encouraging people to do them and enjoy them. they should be promoting languages as a cool thing!

Reply 41

Sabrosa

princessa

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4183180.stm
and one of them were saying that it cuts down the choice you have and might prevent you from doing a subject you need.

GCSE students nowadays seem to think that the subjects you "need" are media studies, social care and PE...at least that's what it looks like from the amount of people doing them!

And the government wonders why the amount of students getting As is increasing.

Reply 42

princessa

Sabrosa

GCSE students nowadays seem to think that the subjects you "need" are media studies, social care and PE....

dont they offer/planning to start a GCSE in hairdressing? it is a useless subject! hairdressing is a perfectly valid career but you advance yourself through it by vocational, on the job training and experience, not an academic qualification. there are plenty of vocational courses at further education colleges and so on, it is a waste to push important and useful subjects out of the way for such things. people will take them because they are an easy option. the students say so themselves.

i cannot believe more than twice as many people do PE as german or spanish!

Reply 43

Sabrosa

princessa

I was amazed when i found out you could actually do a GCSE in PE, but i didn't know that many more people did it! Saying that though, there were only 3 people in my school (including me) doing A-Level German when i was there, and none were doing french (Spanish wasn't offered to our year). And the thing is, languages are going to be far more useful to people in the future than PE ever can be!

I didn't know that about hairdressing. It's all to get the government's statistics up...it's so...pathetic! There are so many people out there doing qualifications in things like hairdressing, social care etc. who would be far better suited to things like building and even languages (which this country needs), but won't do them because it's just so easy to get A grades in things like hairdressing.

Reply 44

princessa

Sabrosa

I was amazed when i found out you could actually do a GCSE in PE, but i didn't know that many more people did it!

my friend did a gcse in dance and got an a*. she said it was a walk in the park :rolleyes:

in her defence though, she did do it out of school, and she did do 13 GCSEs, and three of them were languages so i will let her off.

Reply 45

emom100

part of teh problem is how they teach languages at school. when i was at middle school (years 5-8) i was taught french by a pe teacher reading from a book. i learnt nothing and by the time i got up to upper school my teacher had to re-teach everything from scratch cos we had learnt a lot of crap. i could name 20 differnt ice cream flavours (i would struggle doing that in english now) but i couldn't string a sentence together. at school you seem to learn loads of vocab and no grammar, at uni if you start a language from scratch it is grammar, grammar, grammar and the odd bit of vocab so you actually have the structures to deal with the language quickly. i don't know why they don't teach like that in school. overal i had over 8 years of french, got an A* at gcse butwas crap. i can barely remeber anything and i think i was scared from years of doing nothing really and not learning much. I had an amazing teacher for the last 2 years and that was why i got a good grade. However, the damage had been done and i never really liked french because of the years i found it dull etc. spanish on the other hand i didnt start until year 9 and learnt a lot more in a lot quicker timecand subsequently went on to study it at uni. If the government wants to make primary school kids learn french then they really have to make sure there are enough good teachers to do it, otherwise they will be achieving nothing.

Reply 46

kellywood_5

It just makes me laugh how the government make languages optional at GCSE, then complain that not enough people are taking them! What did they expect? I strongly believe it should be compulsory to study at least one foreign language at GCSE. It puts us to shame that some foreigners can speak English better than some English people, who often take the arrogant attitude that because English is an international language, there's no point in them making the effort to learn a foreign language. Also, if everyone was forced to take languages at GCSE, there might be more taking them at A-level; for example, I didn't really like French that much at Key Stage 3, but I had to do the GCSE and I loved it. Now I want to do it at uni. And if more people take the A-level, that means more people will take degrees.

Reply 47

luke88

I really believe this government is seriously destroying education in this country.

Reply 48

BarbedRose

The most amusing, and sad, excuse I heard when I wondered aloud why English children weren't forced to learn foreign languages at primary school was that it would be too hard for them :confused:

So...why is it the children in every single other country do English from an early age, which is a very hard language to learn. It makes me so ashamed.
I can see why English people don't bother learning languages, but I don't see why more people aren't interested. With another language you can access much more of a culture, and speak to more people, than if you just read translations or get them to speak to you in English. It has a purpose in life. It wouldn't be so 'difficult' for children if our government made it compulsory for primary schools to teach one modern language (I would say out of French, German or Spanish). I think part of the problem is the difficulty in finding qualified people though...

Kellywood - Isn't it compulsory for students to take at least one modern language at GCSE? I thought it was, but that's probably just my school.

Reply 49

princessa

BarbedRose

Isn't it compulsory for students to take at least one modern language at GCSE? I thought it was, but that's probably just my school.

no, not anymore. schools with sense make it compulsory but it is not obligatory for students to take a language at gcse anymore.

Reply 50

kellywood_5

princessa

no, not anymore. schools with sense make it compulsory but it is not obligatory for students to take a language at gcse anymore.

It's optional at my school, but I suspect it's only because their pass rate will suffer otherwise :rolleyes:

Sadly that will be the same for many schools.

Reply 51

priya

i agree with barbedrose, children should be taught languages from a younger age. look at most people who study languages at university. at least a quarter of them have had exposure to other languages from an early age- whether it was going to france every year with family, or being bi-lingual. the skills can develop from a young age, if nurtured properly. otherwise, of course it's going to be difficult for people to learn foreign languages!

Reply 52

Onearmedbandit

Sorry this isn't really my territory, but I thought I might lighten the mood with a semi-relevant quote from Homer Simpson:

"English pfft... who needs that? I'm never going to England!"

:biggrin:

Reply 53

_Sian_

Re: compulsory GCSE languages.

I was a late bloom as far as languages go. I didn't really take an interest in them until my last year of GCSE so if I hadn't have been forced into taking them then I probably wouldn't even consider doing a degree in it. So for me it's been worth it.