The Night Mail

[AndyID]

'twere a wonderful Autumn day here today so me and IDSPIDY had to sneak out for a cruise with the lid off. Of course someone in a Lotus Espirit just had to overtake me going up the pass but I made sure he got a good run for his money 😄

 

The little Fiat only has a 1.4L engine but when the turbocharger gets going it really cranks out the power. The road-holding is impeccable too. A really nice piece of well-balanced engineering with Italian flare.

[Oldddudders]

Some people really know how to get the most out of life. A former colleague of Sherry's has txted to say she is staying in an apartment in Montmartre with a friend. This morning they hope to wander down the Left Bank - via a vegan bakery.......

[rockershovel]

8 hours ago, Chris Snowdon said:

I'm not sure whether I "get" that.

I did French from Ist Form onwards to GCSE (if we ignore the home-schooling during the whooping-cough epidemic of 1982).  Did Italian later.  My sister did French, Latin and German from Ist Form onwards.  I did OK in GCSE in the three individual sciences, but she did not (her out-of-hours Chemistry tutor was me...).  I then went on to demonstrate my complete ineptitude at Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Further Maths (no-one should be predicted a higher grade at Further Maths than at Normal Maths), got into a bidding-war about doing AS-levels for those and other subjects, then did humanities subjects for A-level instead.

Over the course of a job which followed many years later, I had to read, speak, write or listen-to about 16 languages, often on technical subjects, whereas there are only six working languages of the UN.  None of those involved discussing either biology and chemistry in French (par example, les travailles et decouvrements du Pasteur et Curie), chemistry and physics in German (not a UN Working Language) or electronics in Chinese (although a client was able to do that).  I had a colleague who was able to curse in French, which actually helped on one particular project...  I once greeted a colleague in his own language, which raised his boss's estimation of me.

Yes: facility with, or the ability to learn, a language is great, but I fail to see how it is relevant to a native English-speaker embarking upon a career in an branch of science or engineering.  The harsh fact is, that those who learn it as EFL, will do so because they are already good engineers and so can master "languages" (if they are any good at their own) and if they can't then their employeer will find them a friend.  Both, individually, will be well-paid, but still underpaid for what they do.  If you're a native English-speaker, you'll be asked to correct the grammar (which can have strange consequences).  This is something which I was not taught at school.

Surely, to conclude from the above, linking a particular specialism to whether or not someone can use a particular second language is absolute nonsense?

 

BTW, my career beggars belief, but my sister chose to ignore the messed-up Chemistry exam and is now a teacher, with rather more qualifications than me.

I didn't see the usefulness of the ability to speak, learn or more-or-less understand foreign languages .... until I found myself in a sector of work involving foreign travel. 

 

Now I still speak French (albeit with a strong Arabic accent from working in North Africa), I can understand Italian to some extent from working with Italians, likewise Dutch and have a limited grasp of Russian. 

[jamie92208]

Good moaning from La Belle France. No vegan bakery here but I will shortly be heading for a wander around Intermarche or at least the Chef Boutonne branch.  Two more steres of wood to move and stack this afternoon. I might, if I'm lucky get a shunter running on DCC this afternoon. 

 

Jamie

[DaveF]

9 hours ago, Tony_S said:

We went to a meeting at our son’s school that revealed all the course and exam options available for years 10 and 11. I looked at it while the deputy head told us what a wonderful piece of work it was. I noticed that that if a pupil took French they couldn’t do double science but those doing German could. As they had been put into French or German classes years previously with no choice (and our son did French) this didn’t seem right. Somimgimand enquire. First thing then deputy head said was that I couldn’t possibly have worked out all the combinations in a few minutes. Then he blustered about having to accept compromises. I then made the mistake of saying it didn’t seem fair that a language allocated years before restricted doing double rather than single science (3 sciences then had disappeared). He said “life isn’t fair, they have to get used to it”. I replied with “ replace fair with discriminatory”. I walked off to have a word with the head of science. He was appalled and suggested I should speak to the headteacher. She said the last two columns were clearly wrong, it would be sorted.,It was. I mentioned to Matthew that the deputy head seemed to assume parents were incapable of reading a subject choice grid. Matthew said the deputy head had a loud voice and smart suits and that was it basically. 

 

I can relate to that.  When I took over options, timetabling and staffing in my school I found a number of similar issues.  It is actually very easy to design a curriculum and options system where everyone gets their first choice, both for GCSE and A level.  You just have to make sure you think, listen to the Heads of Department, parents and above all students.  Then ignore all the other senior staff who say it cannnot be done.  The by product was that everyone was happier and we were able to give all our teachers some extra free time as we had fewer very small teaching groups.  I ended up doing it for 19 years.

 

Ofsted could not understand how we did it!  They said our staff had more free time than any other school they had visited yet our class sizes were below average and we didn't employ any extra teachers. 

 

In today's news it is raining, about 25mm in the last 2 hours.  It is expected to continue, alternating between heavy and light until about 7p.m. tomorrow (Wednesday).

 

The groceries have come with two missing items both of which I had added simply to make up the order to the minimum value so I am perfectly happy.

 

Today will be mainly an indoors day though I may go to a shop for a couple of things Asda don't seem to sell depending on how heavy the rain is.

 

David

[TheQ]

The school limitations on which subjects are possible to take together, hit me when I transfered from a school in England which you had to do French but it was not pushed, it had a heavy emphasis on woodwork, metalwork, technical drawing, and the sciences.

To a school in Scotland which was more general plus languages, Gaidhlig (native speakers), Gaidhilg (learners), English ( which for some was their second language), French and German.

 

[rockershovel]

6 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

I used to enjoy winding a French permanent representative to one UN agency up. She was a really pompous individual to start with and rarely seen, she at least had the good sense to leave most of it to her assistant perm rep who was a very accomplished chap.

 

At the agency concerned working groups are in English and if plenary had to continue past COB it was in English as the translators will only do 10 minutes over time. Every time she'd make a big thing about the sanctity of multi-lingualism at the UN, though oddly this never went to calling for other languages to be included or seeing a problem if documents weren't available in Arabic or Russian for example.

 

I used to enjoy agreeing with her and suggesting that it was also time to review the six languages to consider which should be included in the six based on how widely spoken they are globally. She took the bait every time and would give me a long rant about how French was the world's diplomatic language blah blah blah, it was great fun.

 

I know an Argentinian diplomat who makes similar interventions but she is just enjoying herself winding people up. Splendid lady, one of those gifted people capable of starting a fight in an empty room.

 

That said, to be sort of serious I do think languages should have a higher priority in British education and be more diverse.  The schools my children attended in England offered French with a more limited capacity for German and one offered Spanish. Like so many things attitudes to language seem to reflect a world of 50 or 60 years ago when world affairs and finance were dominated by a handful of countries in the western bubble (West as a political concept). 

"Linguistic diversity" is only a euphemism for "anti-British", "anti-American" or sometimes both. 

 

I saw quite a lot of it with Europeans. I don't mean in the sense of personal animosity, which I never really had problems with but in the sense of the endemic discrimination in business and employment. 

 

One of the great problems with Europe is that the tax, benefit and education systems don't align. Nor do the professional and technical registration systems. Dutch and Belgian tax are a good example. It was always an issue that those British likely to actually work in Europe were likely to have options outside Europe as well. 

 

European employers tend to regard jobs in other European countries as "home postings"  whereas Brits tend to feel that a job where you have to fly over the sea to a country where you don't speak the language, and have tax problems is no such thing. 

 

English is probably the most widely spoken language in Europe, but was never accepted as a "European language" for employment purposes. 

 

I spent a number of years in the ME, and subsequently in the FSU countries because I got a better deal than in Europe. I never had a job where visa issues were a problem and didn't have to deal with exclusion as a monoglot English speaker. I can't put it plainer than that.

[jjb1970]

I use linguistic diversity in the sense that young people should have access to a wider range of language options at school. The idea of French as a default with maybe German or Spanish as alternatives is far too narrow. Spanish is actually extremely useful globally but I think we should really ramp up languages such as Arabic,  Mandarin, Hindi, Russian,  Korean etc.

 

I am a total hypocrite as I am the archetypal British person when it comes to languages. However one of the things I am genuinely proud of about the offspring is that both are multi-lingual. Both are fluent in Indonesian, the boy is near native Spanish level and the girl very good while she is also getting pretty good at Mandarin.

[DenysW]

21 minutes ago, TheQ said:

a school in England which you had to do French but it was not pushed,

In my 1960s Grammar School, there was French Set 1, French Set 2, French Set 3, and, for those who really couldn't cope with French - Economics. And we wonder why the UK economy has been poorly run. It's been designed by those who weren't good at French as the main criterion for becoming economists.

[rockershovel]

8 minutes ago, TheQ said:

The school limitations on which subjects are possible to take together, hit me when I transfered from a school in England which you had to do French but it was not pushed, it had a heavy emphasis on woodwork, metalwork, technical drawing, and the sciences.

To a school in Scotland which was more general plus languages, Gaidhlig (native speakers), Gaidhilg (learners), English ( which for some was their second language), French and German.

 

Language teaching in English schools is a national disgrace and has long been so. It goes right to the top; David Cameron had the most expensive education money could buy, but had no useful command of any foreign language. Heath's French was the subject of derision even among the English. Macmillan spoke French but he was a lifelong Francophile. 

 

However there's a reason for this. Polylingualism in Europe is driven by the fact that a lot of people live within a bus-ride of another country, some of which are only the size of Rutland anyway. Many European countries have had very variable borders over time; Germany and Poland, for example. When Angela Merkel referred to there being "three million Poles in Germany" she meant nothing like what UKIP meant by "the Polish population of Lincolnshire", a county untroubled by the tides of war and revolution for the past century and more. 

 

Many Europeans also hear foreign language media on a daily basis. This is crucial, it familiarises the listener and habituates them. 

 

They see nothing unusual in this. Most of Central and Southern Europe was once within the Dual Monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an Empire which used multiple languages of government. This us now beyond living memory, but only just. The subsequent Soviet era is well within living memory. 

 

Learning Gaelic or Welsh is an interesting case. Few Scots or Welsh actually speak either language. A colleague of mine turned down a posting to Milford Haven (with BP) because of the disruption to his children's education resulting from the requirement to study Welsh in school, at the expense of other languages. BP were unsurprised and put him on a single-status, rotational posting instead...

[jjb1970]

1 hour ago, AndyID said:

The little Fiat only has a 1.4L engine but when the turbocharger gets going it really cranks out the power. The road-holding is impeccable too. A really nice piece of well-balanced engineering with Italian flare.

 

Small capacity highly blown engines are great. Mrs JJB had a VW Golf GT with the 1.4 turbo engine and a DSG gear box, it was great. Very free revving and with quite a kick, it was almost hot hatch like despite being quite a big and heavy car.

Edited 5 hours ago by jjb1970

[DaveF]

When I was at school I had to do French and Latin.  When I chose my options for O levels at the end of the third year (Year 9 for younger readers) I decided to drop Latin and pick up German.  I had to persuade school I was serious but they agreed after some discussion - even back then I could be quite forceful.  Mum and Dad agreed fortunately.

 

I was always much better at understanding than speaking both langages, reading them is quite easy.  They were both useful when I went to University as I could use relevant texts and journals without having to find a translation - it sometimes upset my lecturers when I knew things before they did.

 

I doubt I'll ever visit other countries again but I do use both languages when I am looking for information about Swiss railways for making models.  I maintain a working knowledge by watching German (and a bit of French) TV by satellite and streaming.

 

Now and then it also comes in handy when I meet tourists who have got themselves lost in Northumberland. 

 

David

[Mike Bellamy]

On 07/10/2024 at 08:37, Happy Hippo said:

  So if the down home is on, and the driver of the loco ignores it, the train can continue off down the line. 

 

Our local 7mmNG group had a large exhibition layout with working signals - and a very observant layout supervisor with a fines tin. 10p for every error towards drinks in the pub. He refused my offer to put a fiver in at the start of the day rather than count up the number of my mistakes !

 

 

On 07/10/2024 at 09:34, Winslow Boy said:

the days of two council workmen standing around watching one dig a hole, or words to that effect, hadn't existed for  quite some time.

 

I thought of that example at the end of our exhibition on Sunday - one of the layouts had to be moved back from the Community Centre and across the car park to the clubroom. However we had decided that for ease of operation, it was to be put back in the clubroom facing in the opposite direction so every one of the 8 boards would be in a different position. I counted 12 club members all standing around debating which board should go first - eventually after quite some time they agreed that the one that goes in the corner should go first !

 

 

23 hours ago, PupCam said:

 how repetitive and tiresome it is to have multiple layouts all producing constant noise pollution*.   

 someone thought it appropriate to repetitively play a musical instrument behind a layout for most of the  weekend.  IIRC someone eventually told him TSTFU

 

At the same exhibition this weekend - I hadn't realised just how loud an old Hornby 3-rail layout could be until I went into one of the rooms where there were no visitors at that time and so no background noise. However the sound of a couple of old locos dragging a load of wagons seemed deafening.

 

One of our members builds tram layouts - at this show he brought a continental one with a fairground complete with a musical tune constantly playing. Another is based on Elstree including a mock-up of part of the film studio - with an Airfix Lancaster there for the filming of The Dambusters, complete with 4 working motors turning the props - again rather loud and unexpected when they started on a timer.

 

 

16 hours ago, Dave Hunt said:

Me too. One I will mention, though, was a straightforward aircraft electrical on/off switch that was about $3 from the manufacturer but $80 via MoD procurement.

 

When I worked at the University, we were contracted to accredit RAF training with a recognised qualification - those on the Weapons Systems Operators Course at Cranwell who I believe were recruited (after basic training) as Sergeants would get a Foundation Degree in Aviation Studies. A common first year before specialising in radar, sonar, weapons, loadmaster etc for their second year. I was the boss's bag carrier and had to take notes of the meeting and after an interesting and informative tour around the facilities we got down to the real business of finding out exactly what they would be doing. We had an external adviser with us from another university who was checking on our own internal process to ensure that we would be offering something that was comparable with other institutions and as an 'expert' he was given a pile of handbooks and manuals to look through.

 

On the first page it said 'Identify the On/Off Switch and turn to the On position' - his comment was 'That's a bit basic isn't it and not what I would expect at Degree level'. Agreed said the panel of Officers but just turn over a couple of pages . . . . . . .Oh goodness he said that's bl**dy complicated isn't it !!  Everything got approved - but we were only able to approve the first year for the Linguists - their second year was Classified and we never saw any of their specialist training.

 

We only had the contract for a few years and then they transferred to another university - probably a cheaper offer.

.

 

Edited 5 hours ago by Mike Bellamy

[GMKAT7]

Good morning folks,

 

Timetable/subject clashes are nothing new.

 

At secondary school, in 1970s Coventry, I wanted to take Geography and History at O level.

However, the timetable said no.

 

So, I settled on Geography (for which I got an A) and instead of History had to fill out the timetable with semi-pointless 'options'.

The only one of which I actually enjoyed was photography.

 

My best friend at the time had the same problem, but he went down the History route.

 

Having learned French at junior school (years 5 & 6 in new money) my parents sent me to a secondary school that taught German as it's foreign language!

However, that stick and I still speak a little (ein bischen) now.

 

Cheers, Nigel.

[rockershovel]

14 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

I use linguistic diversity in the sense that young people should have access to a wider range of language options at school. The idea of French as a default with maybe German or Spanish as alternatives is far too narrow. Spanish is actually extremely useful globally but I think we should really ramp up languages such as Arabic,  Mandarin, Hindi, Russian,  Korean etc.

 

I am a total hypocrite as I am the archetypal British person when it comes to languages. However one of the things I am genuinely proud of about the offspring is that both are multi-lingual. Both are fluent in Indonesian, the boy is near native Spanish level and the girl very good while she is also getting pretty good at Mandarin.

Asian languages are hard  and need learning from primary school age. 

 

Arabic... well.... its a completely non-European language and again, needs starting early and with a high degree of immersion. I spent several years working in N Africa and my command of Arabic is non-existent, which in my experience is usually the case. 

 

It was always the case that European languages were necessary. How we spent forty years in the EU without developing an education system that imparted a working knowledge of two European languages defies explanation. 

 

Then again, it comes from the top. British politicians who expect to be favoured in Brussels for their self-abasement and betrayal of the nation, but are cast aside with trinkets are another national embarrassment. Cameron, again; even Blair couldn't pull it off. Heath's protracted sulk on the back-benches. John Major was brushed aside despite signing Maastricht. Yet STILL the delusion persists...

[Happy Hippo]

1 hour ago, Mike Bellamy said:

 

Our local 7mmNG group had a large exhibition layout with working signals - and a very observant layout supervisor with a fines tin. 10p for every error towards drinks in the pub. He refused my offer to put a fiver in at the start of the day rather than count up the number of my mistakes !

 

Since my layouts are generally minimalistic with turnouts and signals, I have considered using a Modratec lever frame with proper mechanical interlocking.

 

I could probably do it electrically if I thought about it carefully, but I don't think I've got that long left to live.🤣

 

For instance at the start of the operating sequence of Pantmawr North, both up and down homes are pulled off, which represents the signal box being switched out.

 

Shunting continues on the sidings by the NCB engine, and railcar(s) can shuttle along the main line between the cassette yards.  It's only when the engine and brake van arrives to pick up a full train from the sidings, and stops at the box to deposit signalman, that the active signalling begins.

 

Ideally, using three operators, there should be one for each fiddleyard, and one operating the signalling.  It isn't going to happen!

 

However, the real secret to smooth operation, is having the cassettes sorted about three moves ahead of when they are needed.

 

The empty/full shuffle is always entertaining to watch if the South end operator allows redundant stock to build up on the table, and not be put away on the storage shelf if not required!

 

 

 

 

Edited 4 hours ago by Happy Hippo

[PhilJ W]

11 hours ago, Tony_S said:

Does the wall have a bit of a list now?

Subsidence?

[jjb1970]

I don't think Asian languages are necessarily harder to learn, they just need to be taught. Asian language encompasses an awful lot of languages, from the Middle East through South, Central, Southeast and East Asia.  Many of which have no more in common with other Asian languages than they have with European languages.

 

I think there are two things which can add a layer of complexity/difficulty.  Some (though by no means all) require learning a new written script, and some are tonal meaning that how you say something is critical.  I find Vietnamese impossible to try and pick up as tone and pronunciation is so difficult,  like Mandarin x10.

 

However, it can be done. My daughter has been learning Mandarin for four years, for the first year and a half she found it dreadfully difficult but then pennies started to drop and now she's developing really quickly. The key to any language is immersion.  Learning Mandarin here is probably a lot easier than in Britain as it is widely spoken, signage includes Chinese script etc. And it probably helps her teachers are native Mandarin speakers so have a genuine mastery of the language.

 

I picked up verbal Japanese and felt comfortable talking and listening,  but Japanese isn't really tonal and doesn't really use alien sounds. Malay/Indonesian is probably a good one as it uses the Roman alphabet, is non tonal and doesn't use alien sounds like Chinese languages and Vietnamese. 

[iL Dottore]

11 hours ago, Chris Snowdon said:

Yes: facility with, or the ability to learn, a language is great, but I fail to see how it is relevant to a native English-speaker embarking upon a career in an branch of science or engineering. 

English is certainly the lingua franca of the medical world; in fact, I once had the rather interesting experience of taking a team of colleagues (variously Swiss, German and Austrian) to meet with a professor of medicine in Frankfurt and his team. We held the meeting in English!

 

Having said that, having some facility in a foreign language is helpful for two reasons: firstly it helps grease the wheels of interpersonal interaction (even if it is only a few polite phrases), and secondly, it also helps understand local colloquialisms that often creep into official documents.

 

A great example of this was in a cardiovascular study I was running: one of the rare adverse events we were concerned about was cardiac chest pain. Imagine our consternation when, during the winter months all our German and Austrian sites were reporting numerous cases of “angina“. Our first thought was “oh, bu99er, we have a cardiotoxic drug“.

 

It turns out, that the German doctors were not referring to “angina pectoris”, but rather “angina“ which is a German medical colloquialism for an extremely sore throat with associated respiratory symptoms. This explained, by one of our German-speaking colleagues (this was before I learnt German), was welcome news.

 

9 hours ago, jjb1970 said:

That said, to be sort of serious I do think languages should have a higher priority in British education and be more diverse.  The schools my children attended in England offered French with a more limited capacity for German and one offered Spanish. Like so many things attitudes to language seem to reflect a world of 50 or 60 years ago when world affairs and finance were dominated by a handful of countries in the western bubble (West as a political concept). 

I would certainly agree with the last premise. In fact it seems to be a matter of pride too many British and Americans (including a number here on RMWeb) that all you have to do when you are abroad is SPEAKA DA ENGLISH LOUDLY AND V E R Y  S  L  O   W   L   Y. (and let’s not even get into the topic of learning local customs so that your behaviour does not upset or offend the locals).

 

I speak English, Italian, German, French (basic), can get by in Spanish, can understand Portuguese and I have a smattering of Japanese. I don’t consider myself anything particularly exceptional, (and my wife is most annoyed at me that my Swiss German is very rudimentary indeed [I can swear in it]).

 

I reckon that to be a modern polyglot you need to be able to speak English, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin, Portuguese and Arabic. With these you’ve covered the biggest population groups and the most important countries Geopolitically.

 

Edited 3 hours ago by iL Dottore
Forgot language. Getting round the linguistic “naughty step”

[jamie92208]

@Happy Hippo, feel free to PM me or  have a chat.  I've got a Modratec frame and love it. It's actually been relocked from Long Preston to LGAas needed the same number of levers. I do have my electrical sections aligned with the signals so if necessary one switch will stop an errant train.

 

As to languages, I hated them at school. I was bottom of the class in French and Latin throughout my secondary school.  The saving grace for me was being sent, by my dispsring parents, to live with a family in Paris for three weeks aged 14.  I didn't hear a word of English and had total immersion.  At the end of it I could speak grammatically poor French without thinking.  Somehow that has remained hard wired in what passes for a brain.  I did get my O level, grade 6, the lowest pass, but gave up Latin before I sat the exam.  As life has turned out this has been very useful to me.  In Spanish speaking countries I fou d that I could slowly read Spanish and of course the French is now rather useful to this immigrant family. 

 

Jamie

[rockershovel]

11 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

I don't think Asian languages are necessarily harder to learn, they just need to be taught. Asian language encompasses an awful lot of languages, from the Middle East through South, Central, Southeast and East Asia.  Many of which have no more in common with other Asian languages than they have with European languages.

 

I think there are two things which can add a layer of complexity/difficulty.  Some (though by no means all) require learning a new written script, and some are tonal meaning that how you say something is critical.  I find Vietnamese impossible to try and pick up as tone and pronunciation is so difficult,  like Mandarin x10.

 

However, it can be done. My daughter has been learning Mandarin for four years, for the first year and a half she found it dreadfully difficult but then pennies started to drop and now she's developing really quickly. The key to any language is immersion.  Learning Mandarin here is probably a lot easier than in Britain as it is widely spoken, signage includes Chinese script etc. And it probably helps her teachers are native Mandarin speakers so have a genuine mastery of the language.

 

I picked up verbal Japanese and felt comfortable talking and listening,  but Japanese isn't really tonal and doesn't really use alien sounds. Malay/Indonesian is probably a good one as it uses the Roman alphabet, is non tonal and doesn't use alien sounds like Chinese languages and Vietnamese. 

I had a colleague who spent a number of years in Hong Kong and had an Asian wife (there was some sort of subtext there but I never worked it out). They had a daughter aged about 5 when they came to England, she was bilingual having been brought up that way. 

[jamie92208]

1 minute ago, rockershovel said:

I had a colleague who spent a number of years in Hong Kong and had an Asian wife (there was some sort of subtext there but I never worked it out). They had a daughter aged about 5 when they came to England, she was bilingual having been brought up that way. 

We have an English friend (a monkey hanger no less), whose husband left her and went back to the UK leaving her with a three year old.  She has now met and married a French an and you g Oliver, now 7,is completely bilingual.  She actually has to work hard to maintain his English.  He had some problems when he was learning to read as the pronunciation is so different, but seems to have mastered that now. He now regularly corrects his mum's grammar.  I delight in teaching Seb, her newvhusnand, bits of colloquial English.  I taught him thevphrase'it's way above my salary grade" last week and am expecting some comeback from Jo in due course. 

 

Jamie

[PhilJ W]

The South Asian languages such as Urdu and Hindi have links with English that go way back well before colonisation. The reason is that it has been discovered through DNA analysis that northern Europeans came from north west India about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. This is why Cheddar man has a brown skin.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/cheddar-man-mesolithic-britain-blue-eyed-boy.html

[iL Dottore]

Surprisingly, I haven’t found Japanese to be a difficult language to learn; certainly the language structure and the sentence structure are much simpler than English (and often rely on inference). It’s also NOT an inflected language - which helps a lot)

 

Take for example 素敵な犬ですね (Sutekina inudesu ne) which means nice dog OR nice dogs, depending on context. And creating an interrogative is very simple それは犬です(Sore wa inudesu): “it’s a dog” (or dogs, remember, contextual) and the interrogative “is it a dog?” is simply それは犬ですか (Sore wa inudesu ka)

 

Hiragana (e.g. か)  and Katakana (e.g. ト) are pretty straightforward to learn, Kanji is another matter (I’ve mastered about 5). Japanese need to have learnt 3000 Kanji before leaving secondary school and it is estimated they may be as many as 60,000 Kanji (much of which being either obsolete Japanese or “Court Japanese” [what the Emperors used to speak]).

 

My biggest problem in learning Japanese is that my memory is now as porous as a sieve and if I don’t use it, I loose it*

 

* as the Bishop said to the actress…

[jjb1970]

The main reason native English speakers tend to be terrible at learning foreign languages is because we don't need to be, I think. The fact that English is the global lingua france is both a blessing and a curse, a blessing in that it makes life an awful lot easier for us and a curse in that we don't really feel a need to learn another language.

 

At UN agencies, plenary sessions have simultaneous translation in the 6 UN languages but if that is interrupted people drop into English and non-plenary meetings and working groups are in English. Ditto in Europe, if no translation is available most EU meetings are in English for the simple reason it's the common language that allows people to communicate. Aviation and shipping are global industries in which English dominates and is the second language of non-native speakers. Until fairly recently US culture in terms of TV, movies and popular music was pretty much unique in having near global reach in a way others didn't. A lot of multinational corporations use English as their corporate language regardless of location. I spent a few years working for a Danish multinational and the language in their Copenhagen office and their Svendborg training centre is English (they're not so unusual). English is the common language across Asia, I attend a lot of conferences and meetings with government regulators across Asia and the language is generally English.

 

An indication of the effect it has on people can be seen in Singapore. English is the language of Administration and common language here, the result is an awful lot of Singaporean Chinese have a grasp of Mandarin only marginally better than mine despite schools being required to teach the 'mother tongue' to the Malay, Chinese and Indian Singaporeans. Oddly, the Malay and Indian people tend to take their mother tongue more seriously, but that may be linked to their sense of identity in a country where the Chinese are dominant.