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Old 14-05-2006, 20:19   #35
freddie freddie is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: Slovenia
Age: 43
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I agree that there's always been a need for a lingue franca in history. English simply took over from latin and later french. Besides british colonialism and later US dominance I think it also got a boost from technological revolution. English seems to be the language elect for technology.

I also agree it's pretty easy to learn but only up to an extent. It's easy to learn it sufficiently to communicate and understand, yet it's awfully hard to go that final mile and learn it properly. I can bet most of us non native english speakers here will never achieve standars of an average native english speakers. It's exactly the opposite with German in my experience. The grammar and initial understanding is a bitch, but once you get passed that you pretty much have most of it covered. The road to fluency is significantly shorter than with english. And french... don't even get me started with french... I just started with basic stuff and I can already tell it'll be a tough nut to crack.

About the smugness of native english speakers... I think they are MUCH less smug than native speakers of some other euro languages. All people I've talked to who were only fluent in English expressed some sort of regret or sometimes even shame about not speaking anything else. While I got an impression in France that people wouldn't respond even if they did understand english. French, italians, germans to name just a few... from my observation a general tendency with those nations is that they feel PROUD for not speaking anything else (that certain "speak French/Italian/German or fuck off" vibe), while native English speakers are actually ashamed of it.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sabeena
...and they say that its harder for you to learn another language when you get older
That's true. Kids up till 9/10 can learn new langauges almost effortlessly. Their native langauge vocab hasn't developed yet fully and also they they're very suseptible to new ideas. Families with parents who speak different langauges at home are bilingual without even trying. They often confuse two langauges and form sentences by meshing both languages together. Then it all gets sorted out in school and you get a brand new bilingual. Straight from the shop.
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freddie | TatySite.net t.E.A.m. [ multyman@hotmail.com ]

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
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