And, in fact, sometimes the standard of English of foreign PhD students and postdocs in US universities is appalling. This leads to regrettably xenophobic attitudes by American undergraduates, but one has to understand their frustration at having barely intelligible teaching assistants. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
Otherwise, Martin is quite right that languages are part of the European problem, in research or in other fields. Not insuperable, however. When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
... {muttering} I got your lingwa franca right here ... Utsukushikereba sore de ii
I live in a country that has 4 official languages. Traditions, customs, culture and language in Switzerland
No less than four languages are spoken in Switzerland: German, French, Italian and Rhaeto-Romanic. Swiss people working in tourism usually speak English as well.
The government websites are usually in German, French, Italian, Rumantsch and English.
There is very little discussion about the language situation, it just is.
I school we usually start out with out mother tongue, then the first foreign language is one of the official languages and the second foreign language (often one of choice) is mostly English. The only question that is discussed here is at what age a foreign language should be learned in school. However, this does not mean all Swiss are well versed in those foreign laguages. :-)
So, maybe it is time for the EU contries to integrate foreign (especially other EU languages) into their educational system.
T
However in the meantime we have to live with people who can speak only one foreign language well (and maybe Latin, what usually doesn't help too much). And the way to do this is using English. I don't like that, I think English is a very ugly language. But even here on ET, you probably will exclude a majority by using any other language. Gemach, gemach
We have had battles on ET over language. One idea was to create a multi-lingual site, or a cluster of blogs in different languages, but these schemes come up against major software problems (not feasible with Scoop) and would also create extra workload in terms of admin and translation. Yet using only English probably excludes a majority of Europeans, even though it's the most common second language...
PS: Don't say Latin's no use, or PerClupi will deal with you ;-) When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
(source: Eurobarometer 243: Europeans and Their Languages - last debated here) When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
The real issue is that being a graduate teaching assistant in the US is a form of cheap immigrant labour. Now that the post-9/11 security situation has all but ground the "brain drain" to a halt, and even reversed it, the situation might be different. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
