Junge Iren in der Europäischen Union haben am ehesten Schwierigkeiten mit Fremdsprachen

English is basically the international language, there’s just not the same incentive to learn a different language that there is for other countries to teach English tbh, which is by far the main language taught in other European countries.

You can get around basically anywhere in Europe with English, but you couldn’t do that with Swedish, Polish, Hungarian etc.

Like if Ireland was still a 100% Irish speaking country, we probably all would’ve just learned English as 2nd language like the Scandinavian countries, but because we already speak it, it just means the incentive isn’t there as much to learn another one as we already speak the main international one.

Like on holidays you literally hear other Europeans speaking English to communicate with each other as they’ll not understand each other languages, but they will understand English’s

It’s obviously different if someone is moving to another country, then you need to know the language. But even then most Irish people just go to Australia, UK, Canada or the US which themselves are English speaking countries.

I would’ve loved to known Spanish, a lot of the world speaks Spanish too.

Anecdotally I found Spanish and subsequently Catalan quite easy and logical to learn. I’ve gone back to learning Irish now. Irish is hard. No two ways about it. If you are learning in a strictly English to Irish translation way, Irish is super difficult.

We start foreign languages late and there is almost no media pushed into our lives. Check out basic pop radio even in France where they have rules about local content. There is a tendency to be lazy about learning because we speak English and we hear very little foreign languages on a day to day basis.

It is in our interests to rectify this. We are members of the EU and people who want to be officials in those institutions need at least two languages on day 1 and cannot be promoted until they reach a reasonable standard of a third. The willingness to learn a language beyond Irish and English opens up easier job markets, viz the rhetoric in the US looks to make that more difficult over coming years where as you have the right to work in any EU country.

The argument of it not being necessary because English is laziness.

No surprise. I had a French teacher who never went to France. She was constantly making mistakes and had terrible vocabulary and accent. French is pretty easy except for the negative conjugation but she made it more complicated. The German teacher was good but I only did it for a couple of years and wasn’t very interested, there was even East Germany on the curriculum back then.

A lot of it is motivation. I live abroad and I’m terrible at reading and writing, I don’t need to study it much besides understanding the bills and menus (Japanese). When I meet European people they are pretty good at English so we switch to English. Even if I can speak the language, usually their English is better so it’s easier for conversation. As for the Japanese, they’re crap at English mainly, but they don’t usually need it.

Haven’t seen it mentioned here yet but we’re going to start teaching younger kids a second language in the next few years

Think they’re starting from third class and doing an hour a week

It’s a start

We have been struggling with English for 800 years.

Sure we can barely speak the foreign language we grew at home

/s