Hehe.
What's the most useful thing you learnt at school Page 5
Quote: zooo @ December 1 2011, 7:18 PM GMTTo be fair, all the foreign language I know I learned as a kid at school. I cannot get a word of it to stick now as an adult. So, although I only know a bit of French, without having been taught it at school I'd know bugger all.
After five years though you ought to be fluent!
The teaching of foreign languages is, and always has been, atrocious. Jerome K Jerome wrote this in 1900:
For they have a way of teaching languages in Germany that is not our way, and the consequence is that when the German youth or maiden leaves the gymnasium or high school at fifteen, "it" (as in Germany one conveniently may say) can understand and speak the tongue it has been learning. In England we have a method that for obtaining the least possible result at the greatest possible expenditure of time and money is perhaps unequalled. An English boy who has been through a good middle-class school in England can talk to a Frenchman, slowly and with difficulty, about female gardeners and aunts; conversation which, to a man possessed perhaps of neither, is liable to pall. Possibly, if he be a bright exception, he may be able to tell the time, or make a few guarded observations concerning the weather. No doubt he could repeat a goodly number of irregular verbs by heart; only, as a matter of fact, few foreigners care to listen to their own irregular verbs, recited by young Englishmen. Likewise he might be able to remember a choice selection of grotesquely involved French idioms, such as no modern Frenchman has ever heard or understands when he does hear.
Yup. That was my experience of languages. I recollect one of my German teachers spending a whole ten minutes one lesson telling us, not teaching, how to pronounce letters in German. The rationale for this was he said because he hadn't never been taught how to say the letters and when on his year abroad during his degree was asked by some border official to spell his name he couldn't because he didn't know the correct pronunication. That said I never quite worked out why he only did this once with us but we didn't need to know it for our O levels so he never checked that we had retained this knowledge.
It is shameful how great at English the ordinary European teenager is. You often see them on the news or TV, being perfectly understandable.
Embarrassing when you think how clueless the average UK kid would be, faced with speaking French or German.
i still think we teach our children the wrong languages. There won't be a European economy left to trade with soon but we still plod on with French, which is useless because the French will always ignore you and shrug no matter how good you are because you're a rosbif, and German, which is limited. Spanish, Mandarin or Urdu would make much more sense from a business perspective.
I always wanted to learn Japanese.
Quote: zooo @ December 1 2011, 8:21 PM GMTI always wanted to learn Japanese.
What's stopping you?
I don't want to learn it anymore.
Quote: zooo @ December 1 2011, 8:29 PM GMTI don't want to learn it anymore.
That is a totally brilliant reason.
Quote: youngian @ November 28 2011, 1:43 PM GMTI've never been to any other country that has pub quizzes, which must say something about the amount of useless but quite interesting stuff we learn at school.
Says more about your limited travel or your lack of enthusiasm for finding pub quizzes abroad. I recently bought an MP3 disc of the top dance/trance/techno/r&b/auto-tune/shite songs of the past five years so I can cope in Music rounds presented by youthful quizmasters. Playing the damn thing now and can now recognise songs by Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Pitbull, Chris Brown, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and other such shite that I was never taught in school.
Quote: Tim Walker @ November 26 2011, 2:09 PM GMTAt my primary school, there was one of those teachers who insisted on being addressed as 'Ms'. If a boy misbehaved, it was not uncommon for her to make the poor kid stand on a desk, with his trousers and pants pulled down around his ankles, for the rest of the lesson.
She'd probably be sacked now, but this was in the late 70s/early 80s, so no doubt she was considered as striking a blow for the sisterhood.
Around that time, at a small primary school in Australia, we had a headmaster who, upon being advised to introduce sex education to the curriculum, brought in a porn movie and played it for the students. There were a few complaints and he was later sacked. I was not among those dolts who had told their parents about the film.
Quote: KLRiley @ December 1 2011, 8:10 PM GMTSpanish, Mandarin or Urdu would make much more sense from a business perspective.
I recently began learning Mandarin for nefarious motives. Not the easiest of languages.
Quote: rwayne @ December 1 2011, 8:32 PM GMTThat is a totally brilliant reason.
Thank you kindly!
Quote: zooo @ December 1 2011, 8:29 PM GMTI don't want to learn it anymore.
Ha, so.
I learnt Mandarin for 3 years in Pimary School. I can't remember anything now apart from hello/goodbye. I wanted to learn Spanish a few years ago, but I have no reason to use it, so decided it was kinda pointless.
Quote: zooo @ December 1 2011, 8:04 PM GMTEmbarrassing when you think how clueless the average UK kid would be, faced with speaking French or German.
Or even English!
