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The love of all things English begins at a young age in non-English-speaking countries, promoted by pop culture, Hollywood movies, fast-food brands, sports events and TV shows.
Later, with English skills and international education qualifications from high school, the path is laid to prestigious international universities in the English-speaking world and employment opportunities at home and abroad.
But those opportunities aren't distributed equally across socioeconomic groups. Global education in English is largely reserved for middle-class students.
This is creating a divide between those inside the global English proficiency ecosystem and those relegated to parts of the education system where such opportunities don't exist.
[...] It's unfortunate so many schools view an English-speaking model as the gold standard and overlook their own local or regional wisdoms. We need to remember that encouraging young people to join a privileged English-speaking élite educated in foreign universities is only one of many possible educational options.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jelizondo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:04AM (28 children)
English is a wonderful language; very good for technical and scientific issues, but not expressive enough for other matters.
You can make rocketman out of “rocket” and “man” and the meaning is understood; but other languages are more expressive of feelings (German, schadenfreude and other words [umich.edu]), less ambiguous (Spanish & French) or more romantic (I vote for French).
In English you have to learn how each word is pronounced (tomato, tomato) whereas other languages (Spanish & French) are very strict: you learn the rules and you’re golden.
Should people study English? Of course. But other languages have their own beauty and can bring a better understanding of human nature.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NateMich on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:24AM (1 child)
That's nice, but like everything else in life, we chose the winner or loser based on things other than what is the most elegant or the most logical.
It's just how it is.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:18PM
"Better" is just an opinion, anyway. "Different" would be a better descriptor.
The Oksapmin have a base 27 counting system, for example [mentalfloss.com]
If the correct answer to a random question has a base 27 root you're a lot more likely to spot that pattern in a base 27 counting system. And, if the goal is to discover as much stuff as possible then having a person familiar with that base 27 system is probably going to give some unique insight compared to the rest of us base 10 folk.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:34AM (3 children)
As a German, I can say that "gloating" comes rather close to "Schadenfreude". For "verschlimmbessern", there is the Chinese phrase of "drawing legs on a snake", which is pretty expressive in English too.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:13PM (1 child)
Gloating is a perfectly cromulent word too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:31PM
Covfefe yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @04:25AM
Not to mention that schadenfreude is effectively an English word at this point, you use the word and people are likely to know what it means.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:39AM (9 children)
Based on a sample of 17 languages, it looks like human languages have optimized at a bit rate of around 39.15 bits per second [sciencemag.org]. Those with more complex syllables are used more slowly. Also, what those bits are used for is a different matter and much depends on what the language is using each of its 39.15 bits (per second) for. It has otherwise long been acknowledged that some languages are more precise [theatlantic.com], such as Ithkuil (not in that study), and others, such as Mandarin, less so and depend more on context.
What English has going for it, is that it is the language of ICT. Without ICT, you aren't going anywhere these days, so English comes along for the ride so to speak. If usage remained within the domain and the local languages were used for everything else, then it would not be much of an issue. However, that is not the case.
A problem there is that is because English then has an outsized influence on the way of thinking, younger generations start to speak a creole or pidgin instead of their own native language. The problem quickly becomes political when you look at the centralized control over the content and style of popular films [axios.com], music, and literature produced in English. Whichever interest controls the production and / or distribution of said works controls the behavior of coming generations. We've seen it for decades already. Look at the attitudes, values, and mores which have become mainstreamed over the last half century or so mostly through shoehorning into nearly every last US-produced television show or movie.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:20PM (4 children)
ICT?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:33PM (1 child)
Ice Cream.... no, I got nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @09:31PM
Toupe
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:10AM (1 child)
Information and COmmunications Technology. I googled it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @09:20AM
Good for admitting that instead of pretending to be a know-it-all like too many others would.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:59PM (3 children)
The theoretical bandwidth measurement doesn't take into account all the context, though. Japanese, for example, can in spoken form omit something like 2/3 of what you'd think would be a full sentence and still be perfectly understandable due to context and the previous sentence(s). The structure itself is a fairly simple SOV word-order one with particles (wa, o, e, ni) and the conjugation of verbs is agglutinative; pick a root and change the stem based on tense, negation, etc. It's all the more subtle things like tone of voice, choice of pronouns for speaker and recipient, politeness levels, and so on where things get seriously complicated.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @09:36PM (2 children)
You can do that in English too. There are many spoken conversations that would be very hard to render coherently in written form. Vernacular usage is unrelated to the ease of use a language has for international communication though - everyone there is going to be doing it "by the book".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @09:30AM (1 child)
Why use lot word few do trick? Sho' Eng. g'd 'nuff tokkin'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @03:40PM
Mostly for clarity and reliability. The fewer words you use the more you have to count on subtext and agreements in order to be understood and the less flexibility you have. Sure, we could ditch the word "the" in English and generally be understood, but there are times when the difference between "the Whitehouse" and "a white house is important. Simply uttering "Whitehouse" would not indicate which one and you'd have to make assumptions about which one it is. If you're in D.C. then it could be either one, you wouldn't really know without more information.
We could also ditch some of our color words as well, some languages don't have a word to describe the color of the ocean and English lacks a few color words that other languages have as well. We've added a crapton of them for paint, but they're not really used by people that aren't involved in painting and probably just as widely available in other languages.
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:25AM (1 child)
I am agree.
English pretty good.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:29AM
All our words are belong to you. We share you long time.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:30PM (6 children)
English is quite flexible and broadly distributed. I rather wish it would adopt the default adjective/adverb positioning from Spanish, etc. though. Ever since learning Spanish I've thought it improves clarity having the core concept expressed first and then described, rather than listing the description and then the concept - "The apple big, round, red fell from the tree..." rather than "The big, round, red apple fell from the tree".
The bigger issue though I think isn't whether English should be studied, but whether English should be the language in which education on unrelated topics takes place. It certainly seems to have an advantage over many, particularly in technical topics, since if has the Germanic word-combining feature (rather watered down, but still there). However, educating in English seems to also tend to involve the English/American _style_ of education, whose design was explicitly based on the German(?) schools whose primary purpose was political indoctrination. As a result it comes with a heaping helping of "This is Truth. Believe it." A.k.a. rigid memorization and regurgitation, rather than how to think on your own. Not that we're anywhere near the the worst in that regard, but I think we benefit greatly from a certain level of American cultural anarchy as a counterpoint, which other cultures that borrow our educational design often lack.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jelizondo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @06:54PM (5 children)
“Del árbol cayó una roja manzana” or “Una roja manzana del árbol cayó” are both proper Spanish, even if the first form would be qualified as poetic. (Don’t ask me, that’s the way the dice rolls.)
As far as my limited experience allows me to say, I think that education systems are quite similar the world over, except perhaps for Montesori schools [wikipedia.org], so I don’t see English or German as the cause of repetition, memorization and regurgitation.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:12PM (4 children)
The language isn't the cause - it's that the school systems that were created by those who speak those languages were originally designed specifically for indoctrination. Those systems have since been copied by many others as well, because they are very good at turning children into useful cogs in the economy. But there are lots of other options as well, especially if you look at the traditional educational systems where British and American influence hasn't had much impact yet.
But if you're specifically talking about schools teaching in English, then you're _almost_certainly_ talking about schools that are designed for a particular kind of indoctrination.
Basically, English-style schools have spread far beyond those who use the English language - but those which use the English language are almost certainly English-style.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday August 11 2020, @09:01PM
IIRC (from a class way back in college for an elective) this is referred to as "social efficiency curriculum" and was popularized by Durkheim. It's kind of frightening to think about it...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @09:40PM (2 children)
Are there school systems which are NOT designed for indoctrination? I can't think of any, even historically.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday August 12 2020, @03:36AM
For starters think... pretty much every "tribal" education system, ever.
The apprenticeship system is another good example.
There's lots of examples of education systems that are not even school systems, much less indoctrination systems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @04:32AM
Pretty much all of them prior to the Prussians observing that they couldn't find good soldiers. As prevalent as that style of education has been, the reality is that school systems using it are a modern invention. Before there you wouldn't have enough students learning the same things to make use of it anyways.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:17PM
I have a Finnish friend who speaks Finnish, Swedish, Russian, German and English and he reckons english was the most annoying to learn, because "You have all these rules, then you just ignore them".
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday August 12 2020, @03:30AM (1 child)
>other languages are more expressive of feelings (German, schadenfreude
But shadenfreude is *also* a word in English.
I hypothesize that that is one of English's strengths, both as a language and culture (American English anyway), to integrate/steal other words without a care.
>In English you have to learn how each word is pronounced
That's because words in English came from all sorts of different languages. It'd be interesting to see a study, but I'd guess that the top few thousand words used by the average American English speaker comes from at least a dozen other languages.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @04:36AM
It is now an English word. It's arguably the reason why English will likely continue being a language of interchange permanently. There may come a time where some other language eclipses it, but it's likely to always be a language of utility in international settings just because of the ease with which you can incorporate foreign words and the fact that the language itself is arguably the most popular creole language out there. The language demands that foreign words be slipped into it whenever needed and it has a massive vocabularly of words as a result. Estimates put the number north of 500k and possibly as high as a million words that are technically English words. The Oxford English Dictionary unabridged version takes up an entire wall and is so large that it can't be revised in it's entirety with any regularity, they have to focus on individual letters at a time.
On top of that, it has strong relationships with several other top 10 languages in terms of vocabulary and grammar making it that much more likely to remain a language of interchange well into the future.