Why Should We Bother Learning Another Language?
September 8, 2010
If you live in England then part of the curriculum at school is learning to speak another language. In fact when I was at school I had to learn not one, but two languages simultaneously, yet 10 years on (or in fact about 6 months after leaving school) then I can barely remember one word of them and have never used what I learnt in any way. So is there any point to learning a language?
You need to really want to learn a language if you want to succeed, you can’t just buy a little learn French DVD over the internet and go through that for an hour or two as you won’t be able to use what little you learn, even on holiday. Or you could end up in a pickle even if you do manage to find a useful phrase you can learn like ‘Which way is the beach?’ as they will assume as you are speaking their language you can understand them, and then start speaking to you in their own language.
If you want to learn to speak the language, either because you go on holiday there every year or you want to move there etc, then you really need to do a course of lessons in your own time and learn it for a year or so. It will take a lot longer than that to become fluent in the language, but you will be able to hold a basic conversation with someone and know a lot of useful phrases and words to help you out too. If you just want to speak a little bit of the language on holiday then it is probably better for you to get a phrasebook instead which you can look in anytime you want to ask for something.