Euroasia: Language, Culture and Travel

If by some strange chance you think it’s hard to learn a language which is foreign to you… what’s it like for those who learn English when it’s foreign to them?

Most native speakers of English now deal at some point with people who are not native speakers of English, but how many of us ever think about what these learners might have struggled with in order to communicate with us?  Very often learning a new language gives us a greater appreciation of the kind of issues that people who’ve learnt English must have had to go through!

If you’ve been learning your new language for some time now, you will no doubt have acquired a feel for what is easy and what is difficult about it.  Of course, different people may react differently to the same situation, so your perceptions may not be quite the same as those of others learning the same language.  Generally, though, people tend to agree about what is difficult and what isn’t.

So what is difficult about learning English?

We should just mention that the perceived difficulty of a foreign language is usually linked quite closely to a learner’s previous linguistic experiences.  If you’ve learnt Spanish, either as your first language or as a second language, you shouldn’t find Italian too hard, because the two languages are closely related.   If you’re a monolingual speaker of Chinese, however, any European language is going to be quite a challenge, because they work in a very different way from your own.  Things which are unfamiliar tend to be harder to grasp.  When it comes to learning English, then, some people will be confronted with points which for them are really challenging, whereas for others they are quite straightforward.

Interestingly, though, English has certain characteristics which are tricky for pretty much everyone, and this is what we’re going to touch upon here.

Most of us are aware that our spelling system can be a minefield: surely any “system” in which “ough” is pronounced differently in “cough”, “rough”, “thorough”, “bough”, “ought” and “through” is going to fox any learner of the language!  Yes, our  insistence on spelling words the way they were pronounced in Chaucer’s day is a bit tedious.  And yet, oddly enough, spelling doesn’t seem to be the biggest problem that learners face.  First of all, it’s not totally erratic: if you suddenly saw the (non-existent) words “moggle” or “vebbit”, you’d know exactly how to pronounce them, and the reason is that we do have certain rules – lots of them -  which are pretty much inviolable.   Secondly, people tend just to learn the spelling of the words when they learn the meaning (much as people learning European languages try to remember the genders of nouns).  And thirdly, spelling is not crucial to communication anyway: it clearly doesn’t matter when we speak, and we do have spellcheckers on our computers when we write!

Pronunciation is perhaps another matter: it’s much more obvious.  Some of our sounds are found in pretty much every language, and shouldn’t be too hard; examples are “m” and “n”.  Overall, however, English pronunciation is quite distinct from that of all other languages, even those which are quite closely related, and any non-native speakers may have trouble with a good few unfamiliar sounds.   Some of the sounds which are not very common across the spectrum of languages are as follows:

Consonants

“r” – some sort of “r” is probably found in most languages, but both the British and American variants are quite rare

“h” – not a very unusual sound, but a lot of well-known languages don’t have it (e.g. French, Italian, Spanish, Russian…)

“v” – often absent from Asian languages

“th” – we have two sounds represented by these two letters (think “the” as opposed to “thing”), and neither of them is very common

Vowels

We have a big range of sounds, and many of them are quite unusual.  The vowel sounds we have in “and”, “up”, “caught”, “show” and “pure” are quite distinctive, and not often found in other languages.  Just to complicate things further, our own pronunciation of vowel sounds varies so much depending on where we come from: just think how people fromNew Zealand, southernEnglandand theUSAwould pronounce the word “car”.  Which model is the poor foreign learner to follow?

And yet, even if your pronunciation isn’t spot on, you can still make yourself understood very well.  If someone has a stereotypical French accent and says, “Eet’s quite ‘arhrd to speak weezout a Frhrench acceonn”, we can surely understand as well as sympathise…

When we look at English grammar, we can actually say that a lot of it is pretty straightforward.  It used to be more complicated, more like German or Russian today, but it has been greatly simplified over the centuries.  We don’t add many bits onto our words, and it’s not that hard to string a few of them together to make something which makes sense even if it’s not perfect.  But our grammar still presents its challenges!

The thing which nearly all learners have trouble getting to grips with is our excessive number of tenses.  Technically, a lot of what we tend to call “tenses” are not tenses at all, but rather a reflection of “aspect”, which deals with the way in which we look at an event rather than whether it’s set in the past, present or future.   Whatever we call these things, just sympathise for a moment with the poor learner who has to distinguish between “I went”, “I have gone”, “I have been going”, “I was going”, “I used to go”, “I did go”, “I had gone”, “I had been going” – all of them relating to some event in the past!  No other language has this pattern of tense forms.   Mandarin doesn’t have any tenses at all…  You can rest assured that learners of English will have spent many hours grappling with the tenses.  And yet, if they get them wrong, we still understand them, don’t we?  “I have seen him yesterday” may sound funny, but we know what is meant.

The last area to mention is vocabulary.  English is fortunate in that it has a lot of short words – hundreds just have one syllable, and you can go quite a long way with simple words which are not that hard to learn.  So what’s tricky about the vocabulary?

Well, take the word “get”.  In itself, it has quite a lot of meanings, but look what happens when it’s combined with other little words: “get on”, “get up”, “get in”, “get through”, “get by” – not to mention “get out of”, “get with it” and “get off with”, and (literally) dozens more.  Just to add to the complexity, sometimes there are literal and more figurative meanings – “get on the bus” is not the same use of “get on” as in “get on in the world”.

These structures are called “phrasal verbs”, and they’re hard!  There’s no avoiding them if you want to master English, and the only thing you can really do is learn them when you come across them.  And don’t think it’s just “get” which has all these variants – most of our other common verbs can also be used with little words like “up” and “down” and turned into phrasal verbs.

The thing is, though, no one sits down and learns a list of hundreds of phrasal verbs.  You may start off with some really common examples like “stand up” and “sit down”, and actually before you know it you’ve learnt dozens of them.  Sometimes there are alternatives: you may feel that “I descended the mountain” sounds awkward compared to “I went down the mountain”, but when you think that in French this is “J’ai descendu la montagne”, you can see which of the English variants might have greater appeal!

A rather sweeping, but perhaps not unreasonable conclusion about learning English as a foreign language is perhaps this: it’s not that hard to make yourself understood, but if you want to speak it well, it still needs a fair bit of effort.  But then if you think about it, we could probably say something similar about most languages.  So don’t be put off if you get something wrong.  OK, you won’t sound like a native, but everyone knows you’re not a native anyway!

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Multilingual language expert Peter Chapple has spent many years studying English-speakers learning foreign languages, as well as non-English speakers learning English.

It’s almost a truism that liberally-minded, progressive people of the world make an effort to understand and appreciate other people’s cultures, no matter how different they might be from our own.  We might find practices ranging from arranged marriages to initiation ceremonies among Papuan tribes people a little strange, but we would not, heaven forbid, stand up and denounce them as “wrong”.  To do this would smack of cultural arrogance, imperialist hangovers or worse.

Does this mean, then, that everything deemed to be part and parcel of any culture is acceptable?

I think we have to distinguish between cultural practices and cultures in their entirety. No, we should not dismiss any culture in its entirety as “wrong”. There may be certain aspects of the culture which we find distasteful, but that does not justify our dismissing it out of hand; anthropologists have taught us to see that people with cultures which seem quite alien to us may actually lead happier lives than we do. When it comes to cultural practices, however, I would suggest that we might take a different point of view.

Culture is not static: very few cultures in the world are exactly the same as they were 200 years ago. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it would have seemed entirely normal to most people within our western culture that children would labour in factories, that people would be sent to the other side of the world for stealing a loaf of bread, or hanged for poaching. Our culture has moved on from that, and most of us are happy to see that it has. Closer to home, cannibalism was once part and parcel of the culture of certain Pacific nations, including New Zealand – it no longer is; the culture has moved on.

Undesirable practices can be eliminated from cultures without the culture in its entirety turning to dust. And perhaps there are today still certain cultural practices which we really should not be tolerating. The problem, though, is how we determine what is “undesirable”.

We come back to cultural arrogance. We might well denounce some “primitive” initiation ceremony, yet perhaps the practitioners of such ceremonies might well denounce certain aspects of our culture, possibly the materialism and greed which threaten the stability of the earth. Which of the two cultural phenomena represents more of a threat?

I think there are criteria which might help us to determine whether we can, and perhaps should, denounce certain cultural practices with a clean conscience. For example, if the practice clearly results in permanent physical harm, if it is inflicted upon children or anyone against their will – then I think there is a clear case for condemning it. A case in point is female genital mutilation, practised in certain African cultures. In this instance, the criteria just mentioned clearly apply, and I think we can say this practice is wrong and should be stopped. That does not mean that we condemn lock, stock and barrel the cultures espousing it, but it does mean that this one aspect of their culture should disappear.

This is fine, but what actually do we say in response if we asked to change one of our cultural practices and stop destroying the planet?

What does it mean to say that you “speak a language”? That you speak like a native, that you speak fluently, that you can to some extent get by? There are many different interpretations of what this phrase could mean.

Over the years, I’ve had a go at learning quite a few languages. I started off at school with French and German (with Latin thrown in for good measure), and I then went off to university and studied these further. Somewhere along the line, I got some teach-yourself books and duly taught myself some Italian and Spanish. A period spent in Wales prompted me to tackle Welsh. Later on, I had a go at Russian, Dutch and finally Japanese. Whereupon I decided enough was enough, so, no, I have no intention of learning Zulu or Icelandic.

I have sometimes been asked how many languages I speak, and I really have no idea how to answer this question. The reason is that I have achieved greatly varying degrees of proficiency in these various languages. My French and German are reasonably competent, but I am definitely not a native speaker, and if I were to write this article in either of those languages, I would take a lot longer and still want a native speaker to check it through. At the other end of the scale, I can’t say very much at all in Russian, but I still have a certain feel for the language.

The point, perhaps, is not so much how many languages I speak, but what do I know of these languages, and what use is what I know.

When we start learning a foreign language, we would of course love to reach a high level of competence in a short period. However, there is no getting away from the fact that there is a lot involved in language learning; even if you have a gift for grammar, and an intuitive feel for the way languages work, you still have to memorise vocabulary, and that takes time. Not everyone can devote years to the study of a foreign language and so, realistically, not everyone who tries it will achieve a high level of competence.

I’d like to go back to my own experience and compare my rudimentary knowledge of Japanese with my non-existent knowledge of, say, Korean.

I can’t say very much in Japanese, I can’t really follow a conversation, and I certainly can’t read a newspaper. However, I do have a feel for the way the language works. I know the sound patterns, and how these are put together to make words. I can easily identify nouns and verbs. I know something about levels of politeness, and how these important aspects of Japanese culture are reflected in the language. On the purely practical level, if I go to Japan, I know enough to get myself around without support. Most important of all, if I meet Japanese people, I can say something in their language, and show them that I have made the effort to match in some small way the effort they have probably made to learn my language.

In Korean, I can’t do any of this: to me the language is just a jumble of sounds, I have no idea what people are talking about, and if I go to Korea I have to really on support from others, sign language, or the classic “Does anyone here speak English?”

The level of knowledge I have achieved in Japanese is probably on a par with what people might hope to achieve after one or two courses with Euroasia. I am certainly not fluent in the language, and yet the knowledge I have is knowledge I really appreciate having: it’s of practical use, it helps me to relate to people, plus it contributes to my general understanding of the world around me.

And this, I would say, is the value of learning a little.

Not an issue you normally think about, is it? From LA to NY, it’s all pretty much the same, and not vastly different from ours!

This is certainly true – to a degree. But one thing I discovered on a recent trip is this: outside the main tourist spots, a lot of people are totally unfamiliar with varieties of English other than the range on offer within the United States. When people in small communities in Utah were suddenly confronted by a question asked in my strange dialect, there was often a moment when they looked as though they’d been confronted by some alien who’d just landed, as aliens always do, in the desert down the road. Even after that initial moment had passed, there was still often a longer period of incomprehension, and I was sometimes obliged to translate what I said into something more familiar to American ears (I know they call the toilet the “restroom”, but you’d think they’d at least recognise other ways of saying it…)

And this was just the native speakers! The USA is now home to more than 40,000,000 people with Spanish as their first language; there will soon be more Spanish speakers in the USA than there are in Spain. Although most of these people also speak English to varying degrees, they are even less familiar with non-American varieties of English than the Anglos. When I told the Hispanic car hire guy that I wanted the car until “the seventh of May”, he didn’t get it until I managed to come up with “May seven”!

When it comes to potential for linguistic crises, the USA may not be the most worrying of destinations, but there is in any case an easy way round some of the problems: when the people you are speaking to are obviously Hispanic… just speak Spanish! Not only will you be understood much more readily, but you will instantly win new friends. Just a few cheerful words in Spanish can set you apart from the majority who don’t really want to know, and it’s almost guaranteed that a little conversation will follow on.

The USA is a great place in which to practise your Spanish. You can watch Spanish-speaking TV wherever you go, and even be amused by their version of Desperate Housewives (“Amas de casa desesperadas”) if you’re finding the original is getting just too improbable for words. Pick up a Spanish newspaper to catch the Hispanic line on Hillary Clinton. Read the bilingual notices that you see around the place. When speaking, you do also have a safety net, in that if you do get stuck, the chances are that your English, however strange its tones, will be generally understood as well!

Buen viaje, amigos, en los Estados Unidos…

Business trip to Asia? Of course, they’ll have someone there who speaks English. Holiday in Europe? Well, they all learn English at school, don’t they? And all the signs will be in English. And even if they don’t want to speak English, at least they’ll understand… I say, does anyone here speak English?

This must be the way we think. How else could we explain the fact that 85-90% of people living in New Zealand can communicate in one or more of our official languages, but nothing else? Also, if you look more closely at the census results for 2006, you can reasonably assume that a high proportion of those who do speak a foreign language do so because they brought it with them as migrants; not many Kiwis will have learnt Hindi or Hungarian at school.

It would be interesting to know how many native-born New Zealanders or Anglo-Saxon migrants have some mastery of another tongue. The number is likely to be pretty low, and incredibly low compared to figures for non-English-speaking OECD countries.

Nor are things likely to change in the near future. In 2006, only 23% of students taking NCEA at Level Three included a foreign language in their options. In most developed countries, that figure would be 100%; in fact, you wouldn’t be able to secure university entry without a satisfactory result in a foreign language.

New Zealanders are not alone in their lethargy. People are pretty much the same in the other English-speaking countries. The UK has invested vast amounts of money in foreign language teaching over the decades, but the result is still a largely monolingual society.

It’s not hard to see why English speakers are linguistically lazy. The reality is that many of the assumptions we make about other people’s ability to speak English are often correct. Yes, someone here probably does speak English. And even if we do make an effort, their English usually seems so much better than our French or Japanese or whatever that you wonder why you bother. English is the language of travel, of the Internet, of business meetings, in short, the international language.

So why worry? There are many reasons, perhaps three main ones.

The first is simply one of equity. English has become the international language through a combination of historical circumstances, not because it is inherently easier than other languages, still less because it is in some way better than the others. Learning another language is not an easy business, and the people we meet at home or abroad who have mastered English did not do so overnight. In many cases, they will have devoted hundreds of hours of study, and possibly large amounts of money, to get where they are. Isn’t it just a little arrogant, then, simply to expect that they should have done this? And while we take their efforts for granted, we think we’re doing well and deserving of praise if we’ve learnt to say “bonjour”!

The second reason is economic. All other things being equal, will the Chinese trader prefer to negotiate with the monolingual Anglophone or the foreigner who has made the effort to speak the language and become familiar with the culture? Which of the two has the better understanding of the way things work in China? Who gets the deal?

The third reason is cultural. Learning a foreign language opens up a new way of thinking. Languages are not just different words for the same ideas; in many cases, they encapsulate new ideas, or new ways of looking at old ones. Language is a key component of culture, and an appreciation of different cultures is fundamental to understanding the world we live in. You also realise that the way we express concepts in English is just one of many possible ways. In fact, you really begin to understand your own language only when you start comparing it with others.

If learning a language helps you to learn more from other countries, maybe we should look at how others approach the learning of languages.

In most European countries, for example, school students not only have to take a language, they also have to achieve a certain standard in that language. If they don’t, they can’t proceed to the next class. The idea of doing a language for a few years and then dropping it if you don’t like it is quite alien. Interestingly, the aim is not to produce a huge number of graduates in foreign languages – they simply wouldn’t get jobs. Instead, mastery of another language is regarded as a standard adjunct to other skills. At university, you may study law or computing or physics: your foreign language skills were acquired at school, and are largely taken for granted.

Clearly, in a country like New Zealand, our circumstances are not entirely the same as those, say, of Sweden. First of all, we can’t identify one language that we absolutely must learn: we might study Japanese only to end up working for a company that does business exclusively in China. Then we can’t pretend that we depend for our very survival on mastery of another language – much of the world is learning English, and that fact is unlikely to change.

But that does not mean that New Zealanders should continue to be largely monolingual.

First of all, there is a strong case for as many school students as possible to have an experience of learning a foreign language. Every one of them will interact with many people who have learnt English as a second language, probably on a daily basis. They need to understand what it’s like to learn another language, and should also have enough understanding of their own language to help the people they are speaking to.

On the other hand, there is little point in requiring all school students in English-speaking countries to take a language throughout their school careers. This has been tried, for example, in the UK, and the results were hardly an unqualified success. At lower levels, learning a language can be fun. However, it’s pretty hard to sustain the fun for years if there is no real obligation to achieve. And there probably comes a point when you also need to apply mental discipline: you have to work hard to fit things together and to exercise powers of memory to learn the vocabulary. This is a very valuable exercise, but realistically it is not for everyone.

What we really need to do is to look at ways of encouraging language study up to university entrance, and at raising the levels of achievement. The idea of a German doctor not being able to speak English is quite odd. Why don’t Kiwi doctors speak German? Or Japanese, or Arabic? We don’t know which language people are going to need later on, but once you have mastered one, you will find it much easier to learn another, even if it is unrelated. In essence, you acquire a feel for language, and that is what we need to be teaching.