What are your attitudes toward the English language? What is your reaction to how it is growing all around the world? -Mike
I think English is new Lingua franca. Universal language for the world. Someone, who is English native speaker could think it's advantage for his country, but it isn't so simple. If you are, let's say American, you already know English and I have to learn it. But at the end I know two languages and American only one. So I have advantage It's double-edged sword. Now, if language spreads over the world, like English does, it will stop be under control of original "owners" With internet, American or British English maybe will became minority English dialects soon
I agree with eso. I like English being so widespread. Lot of the research nowadays (in computers and electronic engineering field) is done exclusively only in English and for example lot of professors at my university publish books and researches only in English. It's easier, it reaches broader audience, ...
My wife is ESL and she know Italian, French, and a bit of German too. She says English was the easiest to learn for her. The structure is simple. There is a lot of slang, but the regular language isn't so bad. Me learning Czech on the other hand... I really wish I could pronounce that accented "r"! :-] Her friends and her used to speak English with eachother in the Czech Republic. She says many of her friends learned English to use the English versions of Windows and to game online with others. Interesting that!
When I came to the US, I found the language hard to learn. I studied german and russian, but the english language is very different. Too many exceptions to grammar rules.
I studied German and it seems a harder language to learn... For instance: I have Ich habe You have Du hast He/She has Er/Sie hat We have Wir haben You (formal) have Sie haben The abnormal verbs and reflexives are killer . Plus all the adjectives Mein Vater Meine Mutter Mein Auto It all changes with the sentence structure too. In English, it is all simply my father, mother, or car.
I have Ich habe Thou hast Du hast He/She/It has (hath) Er/Sie/Es hat We have Wir haben You have Ihr habt They have Sie haben You (formal) have Sie haben Sorry, I don't see any substantial difference between English and German in this case. And the reflexive verbs are common in nearly all European IE languages (jmenovat se, s'appeller, clamarse, etc.), English is maybe the only exception. On the other side the word forming is more logical in German (as well as in many other languages). English collects words from too many sources. For example: king - royal, book - library, to live - to survive, ...
Eso, good point about the double-edged sword. I am a lover of languages and often find myself wishing I'd grown up in a bi-lingual household, or at least had the opportunity to learn another language at an early age. Later in life, you can never really learn it the way you could have as a child. Especially since there are so many latino-Americans who already know Spanish and English; I am slightly jealous. As to the difficulty of languages, I speak pretty good German (studied at Freiburg Uni. for a semester), and very introductory Russian, Spanish, and Czech. Czech is certainly the most difficult of those 4. Sure German has it's word order business, but on the whole, it isn't too bad (especially for me, since English is a Germanic language);I can certainly see where people could find English more difficult to learn (helping verbs, for one)...but Czech....*shakes head*
Although it obviously helps people communicate (thank goodness for the Czechs who speak English!), I think that the spread of English has its drawbacks. Not only does it push aside other languages in which native speakers can express themselves most freely and eloquently and thus push aside the ideas and outlook which are inherent in a culture and can be best expressed in the language of that culture but it encourages the development of a stilted and unnatural type of English that does the language and the people speaking it a disservice.
I think as the world becomes a more global community with a more global economy that it will naturally lead to the use of a common language. If that language is English, all the easier for me. We saw the same thing when the Greeks ruled the mediterainian or the Romans the West.
