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Learn a language? What’s the point?

'Everyone speaks English now don't they?'

By Megan SchlankerPublished 4 years ago 4 min read
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Exploring Bucharest, Romania

I won’t lie to you, this is absolutely a reaction to Simon Jenkins’ Guardian article; “Ignore the panic: There’s little point to learning languages at school.”

I saw the title while scrolling through my Facebook feed and sighed, feeling sure that this article would just be a reflection of an embarrassing facet of British culture – that everyone will learn our language anyway, so what’s the point in learning theirs? To be fair, there is more to the article than that. At its root it’s simply asking people not to panic as the number of British students studying languages falls. Jenkins states that students will “take subjects relevant to their future lives”, which I can’t argue with. However, I feel that the issue lies with the idea that languages are only relevant to a select few, and that everyone else should simply remain stubbornly monolingual.

I went to a secondary school which had what I assumed was an official focus on languages and I was required to take French and another language for the first two years, and then continue at least one of these to GCSE. The language options I had were German, Spanish and Latin. Being the impractically minded history fanatic I have always been, 11 year old me decided that studying the dead language was the best idea. And then 13 year old me also decided that studying the dead language was the best idea. And now I’m at university, still studying the Romans but avoiding Latin like the plague.

As I got older, my love for travel and experiencing different cultures grew, but I still spoke no language other than English. I feel very lucky to have such a widely spoken mother tongue, but I have come to realise that I shouldn’t just rely on others to learn my language.

My first trip to Japan was as part of a school exchange almost three years ago. Our headteacher tagged along with us unexpectedly and gave a presentation, in heavily accented English, to the Japanese school. When we were over there we weren’t expected to know or use even a word of Japanese. It was a cultural exchange rather than a language exchange and the Japanese students had learned English while the British students were never offered Japanese at school. It made sense not to have us speak Japanese, a language we simply did not know. Still, it struck me just how much we, as English speakers, were expecting of our hosts. People were frustrated or even angry when a Japanese person spoke slowly or with broken English, despite not knowing another language themselves.

The more I travelled, the more the concept of being monolingual while travelling made me uncomfortable. It felt like relying on everyone else to do the hard work for me, which also meant that I was completely stuck in situations where the other person hadn’t put that work in. I felt like learning languages was a good decision for multiple reasons. I wanted to express my gratitude to people who had made the effort to learn my language and help me out, like my friends in Japan; I wanted to be able to communicate better with people who didn’t speak English fluently; and I wanted to be able to explore outside of traditionally tourist areas on occasion.

However, my language learning journey has been stop and start. I’ve often felt like I haven’t got the skills or confidence to learn a language, let alone communicate in it. I think I’ve found the motivation to continue studying and hopefully gain some level of fluency over the next couple of years, but I can’t help but wonder how much stronger my skills would be if I had taken languages seriously at school. Part of the issue was that, at school, languages were seen very much as an in-classroom subject, rather than a practical skill that could help you experience the world in a different way.

I wish that we took languages more seriously in the UK, and I hope that, despite the falling figures of students studying languages, we can start to realise that our own stubbornness is keeping a portion of the world closed off to us.

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