Report: Learning foreign languages
Introduction
The aim of this report is to comment on foreign language learning in your country. Explaining
which are the difficulties of learning a language in another country compared to learning it in a
country where everybody is talking that language.
Difficulties
The majority of the people who are learning a new language are from their own country. The
problem is that there aren’t many people teaching a language in their native language. This
can cause a wrong pronunciation and so if a teacher is teaching the children in a wrong way at
a young age, it will cost them a lot to get rid of this wrong pronunciation.
Difficulties also depend on the language they learn. For someone out of Europe it won’t be the
same learning a language like Spanish like learning Chinese. Chinese doesn’t have syntax,
which means it will be a lot more difficult to learn that language as a European being used to
have a syntax. This brings us to the main point which is that it’s easier to learn a foreign
language within the so called “basic groups” like Roman or Germanic. So for me as a Dutch
person it’s easier to learn German.
Possible solution
A solution can be that there will come more people of their native-speaking country to a
country to give classes of their languages. And so be able to explain things better than
someone who maybe studied for 4 years. This will certainly, improve language learning.
Another thing that can help improving language learning is to watch TV-shows or Series in that
language you want to learn. This will help you above all to improve your pronunciation. Taking,
for example, a country like Holland where they are used to watch everything in English but
with Dutch subtitles. Compared to a country like Spain where everything is dubbed. Here you
can see a clear difference in pronunciation.
Of course, the best way is to go to the country which language you want to learn. But of
course, this depends on age and financial means.
Recommend changes
As I said before, I think it is necessary to get over more people from other countries to teach
us. And thereby, if we manage to see series without dubbing. We will have less problems at
the time of learning foreign languages.