foreign-language-schools

29-11-2007

 The Advantages of Learning Lots of Languages

The Advantages of Learning Lots of LanguagesHERE in Spain, there are lots of foreign language schools. They mostly cater to learning the English and the Danish languages here because there are simply lots of British, Irish, Scottish and Scandinavian tourists here. So learning English is simply an alternative thought here to boost the tourism industry. The rationale behind the many thriving tourists here is that they want to stay along the coastlines of the Mediterranean here in Spain because of its relatively temperate temperature as compared to the unruly weather back in their home countries.

Here in Spain, there are two kinds of English language schools. The first deals with British English which has the rhotic accent. The type of English that they teach here is typical to what you hear from the mouths of the Sky News or BBC broadcasters. On the other hand, there are also English schools here catering to American English culture, the ones you see on CNN. You don’t learn English twangs here like the ones practiced by the ghetto gangs in New York or the distinctive New England accent. English is a rather cool language to learn because it has lots of derivatives as far as pronunciations are concerned.

When you go to the Philippines, they practice American English there but there are people there who pronounce English words with a heavily-accented tone. When you go to Australia, the non-rhotic accent is rather more pronounced as compared to their counterparts from England. Irish English and Scottish English are relatively similar to the British English along with the English that is spoken in Wales. When you go to India, English speakers there use the non-rhotic accent which is associated with Britain. That is true because India is part of the Commonwealth of England. However, there is a member of the Commonwealth who still bows down before Queen Elizabeth II but whose people speak the rhotic accent the way Americans do it – Canada.

That is perhaps attributed to the proximity of the country with the United States. Anyway, there are still lots of interesting languages to learn here in Spain if you live here. There’s Portuguese. Portuguese has many similarities with the Spanish language. In fact, there are lots of words in Spanish that are also found in the Portuguese vocabulary. You know, learning a new language here in Spain is definitely encouraged. Aside from the influx of foreign tourists here, we are mandated with the European Union to learn a second language. That’s because despite its contiguity to each other, European countries do not speak a common language. We have already shared a common currency. It’s now high time for our language to be united.

But if you come to think of it, our languages have derived only from one language – Roman. The Roman language also has German and Frankish influences on it. Thus we can deduce that the current Italian language is also our cousin to the Spanish language. And there are lots of language schools not just in Madrid but also in the Balearic and the Canary Archipelagos.


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He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own. These words were penned by the great German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his work Kunst and Alterthum. Indeed, if we were to take a look into how much stock people put into learning a foreign language, it would seem that von Goethe had a special insight into the world of languages.

How important is learning a foreign language? For many people, it is as important as their career. This is especially so for those whose mother tongue is not the English language. Like it or not, English seems to be the "unofficial official" language in the world today. As such, many people, from universities to the corporate world place much importance in learning English as a foreign language.

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