I am British myself so i am allowed to say this

The British are on a whole really bad at wanting to or being able to speak any other language than English (and even that is going down hill).

Why is this

A number of things may be the cause of our lack of interest to learn or feel the need to have a second language under our belts.

1. We all seem to assume that as the majority of other countries we visit are able to speak English then we need not bother.
2. At a young age we are not given the benefit of learning a language whilst our minds are still able to take on lots of information and  learn easily.
3. Schools do not encourage other languages or only give a few options as to which language you can learn

I lived in Spain for 2 years, and the number of British people that lived there and seemed to think that they were getting along fine without speaking Spanish was shocking.

I felt embarrassed and felt that i had to learn the language, as many of the local Spanish people in this area were probably fed up of all these Brits doing sign language at them and speaking to them as if they were stupid.

I wanted to integrate with Spanish not just hang out with expats.

I started learning a course called synergy Spanish which was excellent (look it up on google) Whilst i was not amazing at it, it gave me the confidence to at least attempt to speak the language of the country i was living in.

You could see that even if they did not have a clue what i was saying they at least appreciated that i had tried, and here is the funny bit, they would give me a break and let on that infact they did know a little English.

Image via Wikipedia

Unfortunately we moved back to the Uk before i had a chance to improve my skills, my children were in local Spanish nursery,which i have to say are excellent and far better than English school.

They start to learn days of the week, reading, writing and some maths from three years, and what do our children do here play with paint, there is no structure at this young age in the Uk. They also start to learn English ah ha so that is why other countries can all speak English they start to learn it at three. Why can we not do this for our children.

My eldest son learnt to say a few things and seemed to understand his teachers and get on fine when at nursery, I think he may forget some of it, we try to do little bits here and there, but at the moment he is learning his fathers mother tounge which is Bengali (so am I) .

Once again because he is young he is picking it up easily without much effort, in a few years we are going to get our children to learn Arabic and they should also pick up Hindi too, so that will be four languages learnt outside of this countries School system.

So maybe this is the easiest thing in the world to put right, let our children learn languages i think they find it fascinating and do it with such ease that it makes me marvel at the human brain and how us adults minds just turns to mush because we know what we need to know and if we manage to get by and live our life why bother to learn anything more.

Image via Wikipedia