Why are pupils abandoning languages in the hundreds of thousands?

25 comments

1. Through Brexit we made it much much harder for young people to live and work in Europe.

   At lot of them are probably wondering what the point of learning German is, when it’s going to be a huge uphill battle for them to ever get sponsored for a job in Germany.

   There’s also no more Erasmus for British students, and machine translation has massively shrunk career prospects in translation.

2. Language teaching in this country has always been a joke. We weren’t taught any language until year 7 and then it’s only 2 hours a week. Far too little far too late.

   If we cared about teaching children languages we’d start them on it from year 1 with a significant amount of time dedicated to it.

   I would have loved to be fluent in a language. But even with a A level in Spanish I was conversationally terrible.

3. Maybe they think with future economy, they might never be able to travel.

4. Honestly… what’s the point?

   I’ve taken up learning another language as an adult. It’s not French, Spanish or German though, and those were the only options I had at secondary school. I had absolutely no interest in learning them and still don’t.

   It’s a waste of time when our first language is English. We don’t need to learn other people’s languages to do business, because they learn ours. Spend that extra time teaching programming or something else useful, and let those that want to learn a language learn outside of school

5. Fear not, humans. It’s the future.

   The future is babel fish.

6. Trying to convince English speakers to learn a foreign language is always uphill battle, the benefits are just much smaller than for basically any other group on earth.

7. I think language education could do with an overhaul. I studied German for 3 years and French for 5 in high school, didn’t really retain anything. It’s the same story for everyone I know.

8. At A-level it is also considerably more difficult to get top grades if you are not a native speaker – because you are up against many who are. At a time when so many top universities want to grades across the board, that means it represents a risk you don’t have to take.

9. Because language teaching in this country has always been shit. I can remember the German exchange visit when I was at school in the 90s. All the German kids were fluent in English, while we were still learning how o ask to go to the bank, the railway station or the Town Hall. From textbooks that still referred to East Germany and West Germany.

10. Because its taught at a primary level by people that cannot speak other languages, its taught for two hours a week in secondary by people that can speak other languages but you only learn enough to be able to ask where things are, some basic verbs and phrases.

    Then you go to another country and (depending where you go) they’ll tend to reply in English if you have an attempt at their language. English is the lingua franca of the majority of the world who have English languages products/shows/songs shoved into their face 24/7.

    Its also easy from what I understand to get by comparatively with functional English due to the lack of genderised nouns. People might use the wrong word or wrong pronunciation of something but the sentence still makes sense and you’ll usually know what someone means.

11. Likely the quality of instruction is poor and limited real world application for most people post Brexit.

12. If the teaching quality is anything like when I was in school, you’ll have better chances of holding a conversation if you listened to the green owl.

13. If I could have dropped French I would have. I do get that learning a language can be incredibly beneficial but I feel like I hit my limit after a year of it and the pace and content was just too much. Some kids don’t have an aptitude for foreign languages and French isn’t an easy language to learn.

    What’s weird is that as an adult I’ve learned Mandarin at my own pace and I found it much easier.

14. Primary school we had some French classes in year 3/4 after that nothing. Secondary school they decided to teach us German and we didn’t get a choice I would have happily continued French or chose japanese/Spanish/Arabic languages I wanted to learn but didn’t get that option

15. Because there’s no relevance. Why study a language at school that you won’t get to use? Unless your family travel often (which mine didnt). I poured every ounce of energy into STEM to get into my career

    That being said, as an adult I’m learning other languages – as I travel more and it’s quite useful. Plus keeps the brain engaged

16. i loved french gcse but as so many kids in my class hated it, our teacher spent more time trying to get them to behave than actually teaching us

    then, at a level, uptake was so poor that i had the choice of teaching myself (and seeing a teacher once a fortnight) or doing something else. i went and did geography and hated it!

17. Because we have decades of poor instruction and near zero support.
    Your likey to learn french from someone that doesnt really speak french, they parrot simple prases at you.

18. Why is this surprising….you make it ridiculously more difficult to utilize the language to move….what is the point?

    Brexit was just an event for unintelligent people to enact something they didn’t understand with consequences they could never fathom. They’re still to blame though…

19. It’s not surprising first of all the age is too late. Also it seems like if the purpose is to make kids bilingual having a choice between French, German and Spanish as opposed to concentrating our effort into one (probably Spanish given it’s got more utility).

20. Because their parents generation has signalled to them that you don’t need or should want to do it. When I was growing up there was a big push for it. It would open up job opportunities and different cultures. Completely discouraged now. More teachers as well are shuffled into doing more than one language when they may only be proficient in one, so their resources are stretched out to the benefit of neither. And to top it all off, the curriculum is subpar.

21. Its a shame I guess. Actually the most dedicated language learners I’ve known over the years have been those learning Korean and Japanese because they are otaku/anime/KPOP/K-Drama fans. But as long as we rigidly stick to the French/Spanish/German as the only foreign languages we won’t get these niche languages taught in schools.

22. I have a degree in German and I don’t fucking blame them.

    I’ve been trying to move to Germany for a year and a half in order to be with my girlfriend and no one will hire me out there. To be honest I’m now also getting therapy because I’m struggling with the fact that I don’t think I’m going to ever make it there now. Why would anyone want to learn a language just to not even have the chance to move somewhere different?

    Also doesn’t help that if you take it for GCSE or even A-Level you’re not actually getting anywhere near the level that someone taking the equivalent qualifications in an EU country for English would get to.

    I want language learning in the UK to be revived but there’s not much point until we actually grow up and start making moves to rejoin the EU again.

23. We should be teaching our kids different languages such as C, C++, Python, Rust etc. That will be the future and bring them more job security

24. As someone who spent a few years of my life studying languages pretty intensely as a hobby, I think I can answer this question.

    The rewards for learning a foreign language are relatively poor compared to the amount of effort required to reach fluency.

    Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed language learning. But, even the best paid jobs related to language learning aren’t really paid that well, and they’re very quickly being replaced by technology.

    Why spend years perfecting a foreign language when there is no chance of getting a job at the end of it? I hate to say this, but foreign language learning, from a financial perspective, is largely a fruitless activity. Simply put, your time is better spent doing something else.

25. If you are a native English speaker then for career purposes there really isn’t much chance of making a living out of learning another language. 
    Thousands of hours have to poured into Something that you might never get to use.

    I know lots of language graduates who are dispirited by the lack of opportunities.

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