English class in spain

[neospore 3]

As you Know

Spanish people spcecially teenagers(No offense for Spanish users) aren'good at English.

so my English class lasts 45min.

Let me telltou what happens in those 45min:

First 10min.Teacher waits patiently(incredible)

20min explainig the exsercises

Another 20min for explanations about pronunciating

last5min me reading excercise out loud Half class dont understand 'cause i'm half english

Thanks to that the teacher sometimes forgot to give us homework!!!!

Edited October 5, 2012 by neospore

[Stratos 3,192]

Is a a matter of interest. From my point of view, spanish teenagers think they can live all their lives inside Spanish speaking world.

[neospore 3]

Is a a matter of interest. From my point of view, spanish teenagers think they can live all their lives inside Spanish speaking world.

They also bring their phones to school to chat on tuenti

[+FLOGGER23 3,065]

I never learned english in any class, as i developed passion for modeling i learned it by reading manuals and histories from pilots, mom even sent me to some classes to an american school and i ended up breaking my leg for skipping them going anywhere else, so end up story, just whoever wants, can learn english, and it makes easy.

[FastCargo 412]

Is a a matter of interest. From my point of view, spanish teenagers think they can live all their lives inside Spanish speaking world.

 

English speakers aren't necessarily any better....

[JediMaster 451]

I can understand not wanting to learn a foreign language. Growing up we had to take Spanish or French and it was seen as a big nuisance.

 

I can NOT understand children BORN and RAISED in a country either showing no interest in learning that language or speaking it with a horribly thick accent! Imagine a child born and raised in Madrid who speaks Spanish like a BBC announcer!

 

No joke, there are Spanish speakers in Miami that were BORN there that speak English far worse than most people I've met in Mexico! They also seem to have this bizarre "I don't really want to be in this country, so I will try and pretend I'm not" attitude towards those of us who were born here and speak English. I don't understand it.

[macelena 1,070]

Personally, i was the worst English student in my class, teacher said i had an Texan-Scottish accent. We all couldn´t be Cockneys. It was worse, however, to learn all the verbs in French and so. For what i´m concerned, English is the easiest, most simple language to learn for a foreigner.

 

As a side note, my grandad was in the Spanish Navy during the Korean War, being sent to Long Beach and San Diego to crew a minesweeper we were getting transferred by the USN (Steel men in wooden ships, to get rid of all the UXOs and mines after our war and WW2). He was amazed by two things: the US logistics (specially being an Spanish Civil War child sent to a US wartime naval base) and by the fact that all his lessons in English were useless, as having been in New York, Long Beach and San Diego, he allways found somebody speaking Spanish.

[B52STRATO 215]

Personally, i was the worst English student in my class

 

The same treatment during my high school time past in France where the teens learn English as talk in London high-class neighborhood, and they told me that I got a "too much American accent". Here, in Caribbean, we took our first English lesson at the age of five/six, and most of our teachers were locals or coming from Puerto-Rico, Antigua or even Florida and most of the tourists are U.S, so it's hard to get a "so British" accent.

[Nixou 25]

I can understand not wanting to learn a foreign language. Growing up we had to take Spanish or French and it was seen as a big nuisance.

 

I can NOT understand children BORN and RAISED in a country either showing no interest in learning that language or speaking it with a horribly thick accent! Imagine a child born and raised in Madrid who speaks Spanish like a BBC announcer!

 

No joke, there are Spanish speakers in Miami that were BORN there that speak English far worse than most people I've met in Mexico! They also seem to have this bizarre "I don't really want to be in this country, so I will try and pretend I'm not" attitude towards those of us who were born here and speak English. I don't understand it.

 

You speak the language you are rised in, they speak spanish as you speak english. In their community English is as much foreign than Spanish and French are on yours. Now I could understand this to be a problem if the USA had a federal official language but it's not the case.

 

Not wanting to be in America is another problem though. There is no escuse to stay in a country you don't like, and administration should take appropriate measures to put those people out but as always, the interest of the people and the interest of the government are completely opposite

Edited October 6, 2012 by Nixou

[Capitaine Vengeur 263]

Is a a matter of interest. From my point of view, spanish teenagers think they can live all their lives inside Spanish speaking world.

One's own sphere always feels more securing and comfortable. Personally, there's a handful of French-speaking places where I'd like to end my life. Tahiti would sound fine, sure, but Geneva or Monaco would be acceptable choices too, had I a wallet as fat as a matress!

[Slartibartfast 153]

I must admit I am trying to learn German at present as I am living in Austria and damn is it tough... not helped by the fact that living in Vienna there are a lot of people who are happy to practice there English on you...

[+Gunrunner 314]

Well, it can't be worse than France.

While it's true that received pronunciation is supposedly the standard used for learning English in France, you also have to consider that most English teachers barely practiced it beyond their own studies, most of them haven't spent any significant amount of time in English speaking countries and many of these don't even have a clue how ridiculous that situation is, correcting bilingual/bi-national students (which would be fine if the student was wrong, but that usually isn't the case).

I was raised in posh private schools, but still, very few competent foreign language teachers where available, the only decent ones we had were foreign nationals.

 

There also is a problem in the teaching methodology consisting of making students constantly translate between the foreign language and French, making it that much harder to learn anything and increasing the syntactic and vocabulary interferences between both languages.

Of course, with teachers far from fluent in the language they teach, it is a necessity but it is holding students back.

 

You also have to understand that in France there was a perception* of a hierarchy of foreign languages learnt in school.

 

*Hint: The description below doesn't represent what I think of these languages or the cultures, just how it was perceived and "sold" to us as we had to chose our foreign languages at school.

 

The three main languages learnt in school were English, German and Spanish. You had to take two, one of which was English and you did start by the one deemed to hardest of the two, so you had the choice of taking German-English or English-Spanish.

 

English was seen as a pragmatic, useful language, simple to learn, but a bit crass, boring, a language of commerce, not culture.

Spanish was seen as the language for the lazy, the economic interests in learning Spanish are smaller, the cultural ones limited, only "poor" countries use it beside Spain, it was mostly here as a concession to children of the Spanish immigration, so they can get easy credits.

German was the noblest choice, the hardest, the one good students would take and it represented our commitment to the European ideal and reconciliation with Germany.

 

 

Nowadays, in regard to English the situation is getting better, with better access to non-translated books, non-dubbed movies and series and a better generation of English teachers who spent at least some time abroad, it also is far more common to have native speakers teaching.

 

In my time, the only way to seriously learn a foreign language was to do it yourself, but the "exception culturelle" and our dub-culture limited the potential motivations to do so, until the advent of computing, leading to a whole generation of early geeks learning English by themselves.

 

However, the situation in that particular case has worsened has computing resources are now also widely available in French, leading to a situation where geeks and engineers can get by without any serious grasp of the English language, leading to very nasty situations with code commented in French or French engineers barely able to participate in multinational projects because of it; it's somewhat pathetic.

[FastCargo 412]

Language is one of those things that can be be very country/culture centric. Europe has an advantage in that there are several countries, close together, with small populations...you perforce have to be multicultural. Somewhere like the United States, a very large country with a large population...you could spend your whole life, living and traveling to different places, seeing vastly different landscapes and culture...and not have to speak anything but English.

 

English is one of those languages that is easier to learn because it tends to be pretty fault tolerant. You can mangle tones, stresses, even syntax and still be understood. It can be very hard to master because of all the exceptions though...and there are a lot, due to it nature of being a 'mutt' language (absorbing parts of other languages).

 

Asian languages to me are VERY difficult. In those, tone, stress and duration mean everything. You can mangle those in Anglo based languages and still be understood...you do that in an Asian language and whole sentences can change. Heck, China actually has 2 spoken languages that use the same written symbols for words but the spoken words are totally different.

 

FC

[+FLOGGER23 3,065]

And taking in consideration what FC said, English is becoming a liason language for all the world, in fact, we, in El Salvador aren´t too far away from inherit it for everyday duties, a large part of the population has certain level of english, due to a several reasons being among them, music, cable, internet and so on...

[JediMaster 451]

I don't think there's anything wrong with people wanting to be bilingual or multilingual. I do see a problem with people who think they should not have to learn the language of the country they're in because they can pretty much find people wherever they go that will speak their language to them. On top of that, they use it as a crutch or an excuse to break rules, behave crassly, or just do WTF they feel like because "I don't understand you" (even when there's a great chance they do).

 

A perfect example was in college I knew a girl who worked part time at a department store. Macy's or Sak's or one of those. It was in Ft Lauderdale or thereabouts, I forget where, she commuted to school from another county. She was working the counter when these 2 middle-aged women came up to her and asked her where something or other was in Spanish. She replied in English "I don't speak Spanish." The women turned to each other and angrily remarked, in Spanish, that it was unbelievable they'd have someone working there that didn't speak Spanish. She then responded, in English, "I said I don't speak Spanish, not that I don't understand it." They turned to her shocked, proving they understood her just fine as well. They just decided they didn't want to speak English and they expected all the stores they shopped at to allow that.

Edited October 6, 2012 by JediMaster

[Capitaine Vengeur 263]

Master, I have often seen even more miserable examples in a neighbouring European country, bilingual of old: Belgium. My place is well linked to Flanders, where I go visting and shopping from time to time, and my parents' place is close to Wallony, where we often go together. In Flanders, I have met many shop-owners or people in the street first refusing to answer me in French, until they realized I was a French foreigner, not a Belgian Walloon. Then they proved able to perfectly speak French. And in Wallony and center Brussels, I saw as well in many shops and restaurants waiters refusing to speak or understand basic Dutch, and thus forcing their Belgian Flemish customers to pathetically stammer French. I'm sure they would have made some efforts, had the tourists been Dutch. Without some efforts from both sides, this poor kingdom is doomed.

 

By comparison, consider Switzerland, a tiny country who have happily survived centuries of multilinguism, without any insuperable hitch...

[+Gunrunner 314]

Capitaine, I was about to post along the same lines, also including the Quebec/Canada situation and positing that Switzerland works for two different reasons, the first historical as the various linguistic communities were drawn together naturally and not somewhat artificially and also because the economic disparities between linguistic communities are far less important in Switzerland than in Belgium (with a role reversal in the late 70's) or Canada.

[Dysko 93]

By comparison, consider Switzerland, a tiny country who have happily survived centuries of multilinguism, without any insuperable hitch...

Really? Whenever I've been in Switzerland's northern cantons I couldn't speak Italian, and I was lucky to find people who spoke English...

As far as I know, Italian is accepted only in Canton Ticino (since it borders Italy). Some months ago me and Spillone104 went to Meiringen air base (Canton Bern), and only the soldiers spoke in English with us. When I sent an e-mail in English to the airbase command asking for the flight schedule (yes: in Switzerland you can ask for military flight schedules!), I received a reply in German. Thank you, Google Translate!

When I've been in Zurich in july everybody spoke only German (and, as some German-speaking friends told me, "Swiss" German seems to be quite different from "normal" German).

However, when I went in Samedan (St Moritz's airport, Canton Graubunden, where the official language is Romansh) I could find many people who spoke English.

[+Jug 99]

Gotta tell you guys that learning Portuguese was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. I am not a natural at languages and, but for the kind hospitality of my Brazilian friends, I would still be butchering the language (well, I still do, but I butcher it less). I would say that Americans need to get used to the international context of today's world and learning another language is just part and parcel of that. I would suggest that the languages that are based in Latin are the best (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romainian, Italian, and some others). They are called the "Romance" languages and knowledge of one will enable you to find the bathroom and get something to eat in most of the others. My wife learned with me and, at the end of the day, she is better than I am.

[Nesher 628]

just got back from Barcelona and a lot of the locals don't know English at all, lucky enough some of them did know

although you can manage without, it's always good to learn English or another language!

[JediMaster 451]

Yes, especially since in your case I'm guessing there MOST locals don't know Hebrew.

[Nesher 628]

Yeah.. at least my friends knew a bit Spanish so we got along fine

we met an Israeli guy who lives there.. so he is pretty much local :)

[Capitaine Vengeur 263]

just got back from Barcelona and a lot of the locals don't know English at all, lucky enough some of them did know

although you can manage without, it's always good to learn English or another language!

just got back from Barcelona and a lot of the locals don't know English at all, lucky enough some of them did know

although you can manage without, it's always good to learn English or another language!

I suppose most people in Barcelona are actually bilingual, speaking Catalan, and Castilian as a foreign language...

[fallenphoenix1986 603]

Used to be pretty decent with Spanish though I havn't had to use it at all in 7 years, can still read and listen well enough to get the bulk of what is being said however my spoken Spanish is basically down to a retaurante level. I've also managed to get to restaurante level in French, Greek and Russian however with noone to speak to I can't see me getting much further any time soon. Tried to get a start on Japanese a couple of years back and am still recovering from being mindf****d

 

Craig

[shotdown 8]

As you Know

Spanish people spcecially teenagers(No offense for Spanish users) aren'good at English.

so my English class lasts 45min.

Let me telltou what happens in those 45min:

First 10min.Teacher waits patiently(incredible)

20min explainig the exsercises

Another 20min for explanations about pronunciating

last5min me reading excercise out loud Half class dont understand 'cause i'm half english

Thanks to that the teacher sometimes forgot to give us homework!!!!

 

First 10min.+20min+Another 20min+last5min = 45 min? Seems like someone here is as good at maths as spanish teenagers at english Sorry, couldn't help it.

Now seriously, considering what our governments have done for the last 30 years concerning aducation, is a wonder spanish teenagers can even speak spanish.