What English do you read, write, speak?

[Lance Dopestrong]

Ethnically a Breton, born in England, spent the formative years of my youth in Scotland, then went to prep school. I can switch between posh and Northern Isles Scots at whim.

I do passable French - was near fluent at one point it it doesn't get exercised enough. I can get by in Greek, learned from my Greek ex Wife, but can't read any of it. Barely recall a few words of Latin now. I guess I did OK for a mainly sassenach education.

[ambodach]

Unfortunately for the monoglots the Gaelic medium educated pupils get better results in exams in both languages and end up as more rounded individuals. This means that many parents choose to send their children to Gaelic education schools. There is no compulsion but there is fierce competition to get into such schools. Blinkered and hostile reaction is purely jealousy that our country of Scotland is on a roll despite the continual and untrue allegations in all the London controlled media. Nothing good ever happens here if you believe any of it.

[Paulatic]

All children get free transport meeting the following criteria
Under 8 and live more than 2 miles from school
8 or over and live more than 3 miles from school
Have a medical condition or additional support needs
Would have to walk a route which is considered by us to be unsafe for children to walk, even when accompanied by an adult.
The school itself says

Free transport will continue to be provided for children attending Gaelic medium primary education, from within a reasonable travelling distance

I can’t find any reference to their transport needs being addressed differently.
Looks very similar criterion in England too.
There is a demand for these bilingual schools from parents. Probably fuelled by their results so why not provide them?

Sorry i meant Scotland where Gaelic is taught exclusively in some primary schools ...
Inverness has a Gaelic only primary school , where the only language used is Gaelic .... equipping an entire generation for a life in a backwater ........
?

Did you mean exclusively or primarily?

Edit: to add I was forced to learn a dead language, Latin, for 2years. I wouldn’t say it was a waste of time though as there has been many occasions knowing some Latin has come in handy.

[Vorpal]

Sorry i meant Scotland where Gaelic is taught exclusively in some primary schools ...
Inverness has a Gaelic only primary school , where the only language used is Gaelic .... equipping an entire generation for a life in a backwater ........
oh .. it gets masses of subsidy .... English, Ulster Scots and Scots English speaking pupils have to pay for the school bus but the Gaelic kids get free transport .... why ???

Maybe because bilingual and multilingual people perform better in all sorts of things? Because being bilingual / multilingual gives people advantages in other subjects? Because being proficient in more than one language makes other languages easier to learn?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 084444.htm
https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-m ... ou-smarter

p.s. transport to schools have similar criteria across the UK, to the best of my knowledge

[reohn2]

I believe some children in the UK are forced to learn an almost dead language that its few users insist is important in the modern world.
A language that is not even spoken all over it's "mother Land" but only in the north of the country.
Some primary schools only use this pointless language rather than English !!!
Madness !!

Could it be that Gaelic is only spoken in certain parts of Scotland because the English forced the Scots to speak only English,(perhaps out of fear and conformity ?).And now the Scottish nation is reclaiming it's right to speak it's own language.
It was the same in Wales and your own country of origin Ireland was it not?

Personally I don't see anything wrong with expanding the minds of children by teaching them language skills,and certainly not when that language is of the country of their birth however pointless and dead outsiders may think it.
Or would you have the whole world forced to speak English so English people don't have go to all the trouble?.

EDIT:- there are many languages around the world spoken by fewer people than the Scots are we to term them as 'dead' or 'pointless'?
Equating the Gaelic language to cycling,utility cycling being a minority activity is it 'pointless or 'dead' because so few people in the UK participate and so shouldn't be encouraged?

[Cyril Haearn]

+1 for Latin, I learnt it for a while

What foreign languages (if any) are your children/grandchildren learning now, or studying at university?

[Ben@Forest]

Maybe because bilingual and multilingual people perform better in all sorts of things? Because being bilingual / multilingual gives people advantages in other subjects? Because being proficient in more than one language makes other languages easier to learn?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 084444.htm
https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-m ... ou-smarter

Neither of the articles you quote really come down on the side of proving bilingual people perform better, even the first article was researching children who have two languages because of familial reasons, not because they've been specifically taught a second language. We've all met people with a Norwegian mother or a Greek father who could speak a smattering of that language at 5 years old but can really still only speak at that ability or have lost it completely by the age of 21.

I write as someone who has been bilingual (as an adult) but who has not spoken German regularly since 1996. And even then when my German was very good I would find it difficult to understand radio adverts, they are quickly spoken and many include a local or cultural reference I could not know, therefore beyond the fact I knew it was for washing powder or televisions I missed the 'hook' or the 'joke'. So I was not 'fluent'.

And unless the languages are very closely related I don't think knowing one language makes another easier to learn. I don't think knowing what is now reasonable German and 'hotel' French would make it easier for me to learn Welsh or Mandarin. I was told quite a few times that by knowing English and German I should be able to pick up Dutch easily, but I can't say I found Dutch easy to comprehend when I listened in to it.

[pwa]

We often have claims here in Wales that children educated in Welsh (who of course also speak English) do better than children educated in English, but I feel there is an obvious flaw in that interpretation. In much of Wales the dominant form of school is English speaking, and these schools take children with parents who are interested in their education, and children whose parents who are not. But sending your child to a Welsh speaking school is an active choice, unlikely to be made by parents who don't think about education. So there is a form of self-selection going on, with less motivated children not going to Welsh speaking schools. So of course those schools do a bit better.

(All schools teach Welsh, but the English medium schools do it as a second language)

[Cyril Haearn]

Even if learning a second language young does not help one to learn others later, (I choose to believe studies that claim it does ) I think it is a great enrichment, the thing is to keep using both

After 20 years abroad one understands hints, Anspielungen, in my case often better than many natives because I read so much in their language

Ben, do you know what these are:
Merkel-Raute
HSV-Raute?

[Vorpal]

Maybe because bilingual and multilingual people perform better in all sorts of things? Because being bilingual / multilingual gives people advantages in other subjects? Because being proficient in more than one language makes other languages easier to learn?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 084444.htm
https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-m ... ou-smarter

Neither of the articles you quote really come down on the side of proving bilingual people perform better, even the first article was researching children who have two languages because of familial reasons, not because they've been specifically taught a second language. We've all met people with a Norwegian mother or a Greek father who could speak a smattering of that language at 5 years old but can really still only speak at that ability or have lost it completely by the age of 21.

I write as someone who has been bilingual (as an adult) but who has not spoken German regularly since 1996. And even then when my German was very good I would find it difficult to understand radio adverts, they are quickly spoken and many include a local or cultural reference I could not know, therefore beyond the fact I knew it was for washing powder or televisions I missed the 'hook' or the 'joke'. So I was not 'fluent'.

And unless the languages are very closely related I don't think knowing one language makes another easier to learn. I don't think knowing what is now reasonable German and 'hotel' French would make it easier for me to learn Welsh or Mandarin. I was told quite a few times that by knowing English and German I should be able to pick up Dutch easily, but I can't say I found Dutch easy to comprehend when I listened in to it.

A second language does help to learn a third, even if they are not related. It gets your brain used to thinking about things in a different way, and develops your language learning strategy. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/li ... earn-third

Most of the research on benefits of second language acquisition have been with children because there is an existing controlled environment (schools) that researchers can often access. There is a paper here that summarises some of those documented benefits with citations.

As for 'proving' that it helps, well, it's just evidence. There is a great deal about language acquistion that we do not understand. There's also evidence that children growing up bi/multilingual have delayed language acquisition in all of their languages. I think that is true for my children. So, their English vocabulary is smaller than that of typical children the same ages growing up in a monolinguistic family in the USA or UK. But they have at least two vocabularies to draw from (Mini V also knows some words in other languages)

I write as someone who grew up in a multilingual household and who has learned two languages as an adult. I'm not fully fluent in any language except English. Even after 5 years in Norway, i still often miss jokes and things. Though I get more of them than I used to, and I've even managed to tell a few (one or two have even worked ). I know, for example, that reading greatly improved my French and Italian, so I make an effort to read regularly in Norwegian. I read newspapers and young adult novels.

[Cyril Haearn]

http://www.childrens-books-bilingual.co ... dex-en.php

This is a good idea, childrens stories in more languages than one might shake a stick at

Could be just the thing for children who have learnt Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Norweigan ..

[NATURAL ANKLING]

Hi,
Not new news but China (you can guess who is at driving seat now EX PM, trade pathways UK-China ) want 80 % not the current 70 % to be able to speak Mandarin, so there is not so much different languages that are used in their country.

And we have to tow the line in increasing mandarin by 16 - 24 year olds from 2 - 4 %.....................

Mandarin most widely world spoken....................but English................most useful........................so who's telling who what to do........

[Cyril Haearn]

Ethnically a Breton, born in England, spent the formative years of my youth in Scotland, then went to prep school. I can switch between posh and Northern Isles Scots at whim.

I do passable French - was near fluent at one point it it doesn't get exercised enough. I can get by in Greek, learned from my Greek ex Wife, but can't read any of it. Barely recall a few words of Latin now. I guess I did OK for a mainly sassenach education.

Sounds a bit like me

I tell people I am half Welsh, half German and half English

Some understand immediately, others think I am not quite normal
+1

[NATURAL ANKLING]

Hi,
Put it this way if you could see the world now and born in any country, what language......second language would you value

[Cyril Haearn]

Hi,
Put it this way if you could see the world now and born in any country, what language......second language would you value

I think there is a lot to be said for a small language, Norwegian or Czech or Dutch

Or a very different and exotic language, there are hundreds in PNG

The Korean script is allegedly easy to learn, that might be my choice

One has an advantage if one can speak the local lingo, people might get sick of having to use English so much