Comment on ESL homework
wieson@feddit.org 17 hours ago
Sometimes, I think it’s funny that in Anglo countries it’s referred to as ESL, English as a second language.
For us (and I guess many others) it was always English as a foreign language. Could be first foreign language, second foreign language…
Majority of the world speaks a single language or two at most. Shit half the people I see online can’t even speak one.
It makes sense you when you look at it like that. most people in ESL programs only speak a single language, if you speak more than two you probably don’t need ESL classes and can learn on your own.
half the people I see online can’t even speak one
It makes sense you when you look at it like that.
Proving your own point, nice.
Languages come in tiers. English is the global lingua franca. People use it to speak to anyone, no matter whether English native speaker or not. If someone from Norway wants to talk to someone from Japan, they’ll most likely use English since both of them likely speak it.
Then there’s regional lingua francas, languages like Spanish, Russian or Mandarin. These languages are popular in specific parts of the world and often used to get around there. Someone from Ukraine can speak to someone from Belarus using Russian.
Lastly, there’s local languages that are spoken only in a country (or even only a part of a country). People speak them because that’s what they were grown up with.
So in general, there’s 4 “language slots” of languages people speak:
One language can fill multiple slots.
So for example, if you grew up in Ukraine and moved to Germany, you might speak the following languages, according to the slots above:
If you are born in Wales and never moved away, it might look like this:
If you spent your life in the US, it would be like this:
This is the reason why people living in countries with lower-tier languages frequently speak 3-4 languages, while English native speakers really struggle to even learn the basics of one additional language. Because the former group has an actual use for more than one language, while the latter one don’t.
Or maybe french is the lingua franca…?
Source? I think speaking one language is pretty rare. Most Europeans speak at least two, most Africans I’ve met speak 3, lots of Indians speak 3 as well…
sorry I was wrong, it’s not a majority. It’s roughly 40% of the world’s population.
Fair enough.
Bit of confirmation bias in that, no?
Very possible, that’s why I would love to have a source.
I think anyone in India and Africa speaks 4 languages easily.
I think many Chinese people are also bilingual (i.e. Wu+ always mandarin). They often learn another language in school (English or something geographically closer, like Korean).
I think many Chinese people are also bilingual
Yes… some are even tri-lingual because of village dialect (eg: Taishanese) + province dialect (eg: Cantonese) + national dialect (Mandarin)
Unfortunately, the PRC government is heavily pushing Mandarin and some of the local variants (aka: “dialects”) are slowly dying… some kids in Guangzhou don’t even speak Cantonese anymore…
(i.e. Wu+ always mandarin)
Shanghaiese is semi-dead… from what I heard
Cantonese is slowly limping its way forward only because they have Hong Kong TV, I don’t think there are many TV shows in Shanghaiese.
If Hong Kong falls… Cantonese is gonna die… :(
Well, if you add up the number of speakers of second languages according to this page, and assume anybody speaks at least one language as their first one, you’ll end up with almost exactly 1.4 as the average number of languages any given human speaks.
That’s the lower bound, though, as I only added up second languages where the number of speakers is at least one million, and Wikipedia doesn’t list many more anyway.
English as 4th (Spoken) Language Speaker here…
Before English I have:
Cantonese
Mandarin
Taishanese (well… for Taishanese, I mostly only understand but not speak because parents never spoke it to us, only when talking to the older generations and I overhear it)
Sorry for the low-key brag but since nobody here speak these languages so I just wanna mention it xD
They don’t mean like a hot list for girls you like or your favorite songs, every one after native is “second”
For me English is my 3rd language.
My mother tongue is Tamil, Malay is my 2nd. I do understand a bit of Hokkien but rarely practice it.
English is my 5th language.
Viewing it as primary/secondary makes more sense of it.
Remember it’s faster to change to your secondary language than it is stumble over your words in primary.
If you’re learning in an English speaking country, they’re not going to call English a foreign language.
Yeah, I think in all countries with universal Education, at highschool level and even earlier there are classes for native speaking kids covering readind and writting in and later knowledge of things like formal grammatical structure and such for the local language, so it makes sense to distinguish classes aimed at foreigners to learn the local language from the ground up from classes aimed at local kids who already know how instinctivelly how to speak it.
So “<Local-Language> as a Second Language” is a valid name, if a bit presumptuous sounding (it makes it sound as if that’s the second most important language one speaks). In other countries I’ve more often seen “<Local-Language> for Non-Native Speakers” or similar, never calling it a second language.
Its ESL in English Speaking countries, and EFL in non- English speaking countries
Because English as an Nth language doesn’t quite have the same ring.
It’s not a foreign language in English speaking countries…
nialv7@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
second language just means any languages that aren’t your first language. not the second language you learn.