Facts about foreign languages - Culture

Imagine you’re in a city like Paris or Tokyo, looking for a local restaurant. You attempt to talk to locals, but to no avail. What do you do? Do you attempt to look for one yourself, or be safe and just go to McDonalds? This is why students should learn a foreign language, to make a trip much easier. Foreign languages can be beneficial for directions to tourist destinations, getting around using public transportation, making transactions and much more. Foreign languages are languages that are different from your native language. There are thousands of languages in each continent with different pronunciation, vocabulary and even characters. Foreign languages are important, yet students don’t have the motivation to learn one. Here are some reasons why it is useful, and potentially profitable, to learn one. This essay will present the facts, benefits, and how you can start learning a language.

There are many facts about foreign languages. For example, learning a language could be much easier depending on what language you already speak. To illustrate, let’s use a native English speaker as an example. If an English speaker wishes to learn a new language, they would find it easier to learn the Romance languages. The Romance languages are a group of languages most commonly found in Europe. The major Romance languages are French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.

So why is it straightforward to learn these languages? The answer would be due to geography and history. Due to the fact that the United Kingdom (the country of origin for English) is close to these countries, it would make sense that both languages would impact each other. Another reason is due to things such as commerce. In some cases, some words were taken from English and incorporated into the Romance languages.

It’s not only commerce that could cause some changes to a word in a language. For instance, Southeast Asia. The whole region (with the exception of Thailand) has been colonized by European countries (being the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, the Netherlands and Spain). These countries have affected the languages of the native people. In this instance, I will be using Tagalog as an example. Tagalog is the most used language in the Philippines. Due to the colonization from Spain, and later the United States, there are many loanwords used in Tagalog. Some examples would be “mansanas” and “oras”. Translated, it would mean apple and hour. The

Spanish way of saying these words would be “manzana” and “horas”. While it may be different in spelling, in general it’s very similar.

Another example is English. After the Spanish-American war, the Philippines was ceded to America. This also affected the language. The word “basketbol” may seem like a grammar mistake to many, however, it’s a loanword as well. This impact of colonization is prevalent in most parts of the world. Even in Canada, where colonization by the French and British caused English and French to be official languages.

Accéder à l'échantillon complet