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In my experience Brits are like American in that regard. Then again, I think the claims of the monolingualism of English speakers is a little bit hyperbolic. I work in an environment with a lot of monolingual Spanish speakers (mostly Mexican and Cuban) and the Americans speak more Spanish than the Spanish speakers are able in English.
That's my experience as well. Brits are like Americans in that regard.
Yet, met a significant number of Americans that'll completely surprise someone.
I think it's more difficult to learn another language in the States, but at the same time, there seems to be quite a few Americans who go out of their way to do that as well.
True.. Scandinavians refer to Europe as 'the Continent' despite being on the same continent, possibly due to Sweden, Norway and Finland being separate from other EU nations
Yeah, I remember on travel guides seeing the term "continental Europe" which seems to exclude the British Isles and Scandinavia.
Not really. It's only like that for pronouns (me, him, you, it etc.).
For everything else, it's just plainly subject-verb-object.
What about "en" and "y"?
Many sentences use a structure with pronouns, it's almost impossible not to use them esp. in conversation but it's not very difficult. But you're right, there are also cases where it's just subject-verb-object like in English, I forgot to mention that.
Many sentences use a structure with pronouns, it's almost impossible not to use them esp. in conversation but it's not very difficult. But you're right, there are also cases where it's just subject-verb-object like in English, I forgot to mention that.
Yeah, no doubt that sentences with pronouns make up a lot of speech; I was just mentioning it's not really just a "language with subject-object-verb order", since for nouns that refer to people, places, things (eg. J'ai vu le film/I saw the film), it's still the subject-verb-object.
I guess we just have to be careful when we refer to languages as just one word order type or the other (one order might be most common or dominant, or used in one situation vs. another).
Last edited by Stumbler.; 01-18-2012 at 03:38 PM..
Another big problems we have in Austrlalia is we dont share a border with anyone or have a big dominant second language like the USA has with its spanish speakers. Over 20% of aussies speak a language other than english at home, but the second most spoken language (mandarin) is only spoken by 2.5% of the population.
That sounds like a lot to say that over 20% speak a non-English language, and it seems surprising.
By that description it seems like Australia is more cosmopolitan and linguistically diverse than the United States.
So you believe that English will always be the language of business, no matter what? And that Russia or China will adapt to that perennial truth?
Good luck with that
Yes, Russia is no longer a major player. Chinese is handicapped by their non-phonetic alphabet, and that is an insoluble problem, because converting to a phonetic writing will shut off the ability of nearly half the Chinese to read. So, Chinese speaking a lot of different languages represented in an impossible but unifying writing system will gradually adopt English as language understood and written by all Chinese. But, like in Iceland, where everyone can speak English, they'll keep on speakng Chinese among themselves. And Paraguay, where everyone can speak Spanish, they keep on speaking Guarani among themselves.
China will become functionally bilingual over several generations, just by teaching English in all schools, and then it will be a done deal, and English will be the universal language. But it is quite possible that Americans will not understand it anymore, because it will become a patois used for international commerce and technology. Just as we have difficulty understanding Indians speaking perfect grammatical and syntactical English, because they learned to speak it in a vacuum and have let their pronunciation drift.
I once heard a recording of an English telephone conversation between an exporter in Thailand and an importer in Poland. They understood each other perfectly, but I didn't understand a single word of it. They just used standardized English business-talk, using an internationalized pronunciation system that sounded like the words were spelled,, and they didn't use any idioms at all.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Stumbler.
That sounds like a lot to say that over 20% speak a non-English language, and it seems surprising.
By that description it seems like Australia is more cosmopolitan and linguistically diverse than the United States.
27% of all Australians were born overseas - that's more than one in a quarter. Only 10% of Americans were. High by international standards because we're migrant nations, but Australia has a more recent history of migration, in part thanks to restrictive immigration laws.
Go to Cabramatta and you'll hear more Vietnamese than English, not long ago you'd hear a lot of Italian all throughout Italian communities in Australia.
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