There seem to be fashions in which languages people choose to learn and in which languages are in demand by employers. Some languages, notably French, German and Spanish, are perennial favorites, at least in English-speaking countries. Other languages may enjoy popularity for a while, then are displaced by different ones. In the UK there are increasing numbers of people learning Chinese and Japanese, and Spanish is also gaining more followers, particularly among adult learners. In the USA there is currently a significant demand for people with Arabic language skills.

During the Cold War, many of the inhabitants of Eastern European had to learn Russian at school, a language few of them felt much affection for. Since the collapse of the USSR, other languages have become popular, particuarly English and German. And according to Radio Polonia, Russian has been making a come back in Poland recently.

Which languages are popular in your country?

Sources: www.cilt.org.uk, www.vistawide.com

Continuing yesterday’s theme, sort of (not all posts on blog are completely random), my question for you today is at what stage can you claim that you ‘speak’ a language, are ‘fluent’ or ‘proficient’ in a language or ‘know’ a language? And when you make such claims, what do you mean by them?

My English dictionary defines ‘fluent’ as “able to speak or write a specified foreign language with facility”. By this definition, I’m fluent in Mandarin Chinese, and nearly fluent in French, Welsh and Irish. I can read and understand a number of other languages fairly well, but can’t speak or write them nearly as well.

Unless you grow up speaking two or more languages, it’s very difficult, though not impossible, to be as proficient in a foreign language as you are in your mother tongue. If you immerse yourself completely in a language, you will probably eventually acquire native or near-native proficiency, but at the same time you might loose some of your proficiency in your mother tongue. This certainly happened to me to some extent when I was in Taiwan – my Mandarin became fluent, but I was not keeping up with all the latest developments in English.

When learning a language it’s sometimes helpful and useful to get an idea of how well you’re progressing. There are a number of ways to do this, including taking language proficiency tests, setting yourself a task to complete using only the language you’re learning, or seeing how much you understand when you listen to or read the language.

When I read things in a foreign language, I try to understand as much as possible without using a dictionary. Any words I don’t know I try to guess from the context. At first I can understand very little, but as my knowledge of the language improves I start to understand a lot more. One way I gauge my progress is to count how many words I have to look up per sentence, paragraph or page. When I can read whole pages or even chapters of books without reaching for a dictionary, I know I’m making good progress. There may be a few words I’m not sure about, but I tend to leave them, as long as they’re not key to my understand of the text.

When listening to a foreign language, on the radio for example, I try to get the gist of what they’re talking about from the words I understand. If I know more of the language in question, I can fill in more of the details. Understanding the news in a foreign language is relatively easy as I’ve usually heard or read the news in English beforehand and know what to expect. Understanding other material can be more of a challenge.