Bilingualism

I don't think you should worry too much about this. Learning a new language will never be as easy again as it is when they're children, and I deeply regret the fact I was never exposed to any foreign language as a child. In my experience, this seems to be a fairly widespread opinion among English-speakers living on the continent, embarrased about how much better most of the rest of Europe is at foreign languages.I don't think being bilingual will hold anybody back in English - on the contrary I think it might be an advantage. English and Spanish are related languages, and knowing both and seeing the links between them can help you understand both better. The experience of learning a heavily inflected language has certainly increased my understanding of English. Many things, particularly archaic sentence formulations you come across in literature, suddenly started to make sense as the leftovers of when English was an inflected language.I do think I've lost some English vocabulary, but this has more to do with regularly simplifying my English for non-native speakers than it does with learning a second language. I've always wondered whether Utah had a big community of Czech speakers due to some oddity of migration history, or whether they taught all these Mormon missionaries Czech just in order to come and spread the Good Word here in the heart of heathenism. Now I know.Edited by caffeine, : Reworded to avoid redundant overuse of the same words, making it look like I'm not at all the right person to be discussing how to improve language skills.

That's right, I live in Prague. I thought I used to have a location listed, but never mind. I'm not Czech though - just another boring Brit instead.There seems to be a permanent Mormon mission here in Prague, and I saw them preaching to somebody in the nearby town of Plzen once, too. To be fair though, the last time one was preaching to me was a few years ago, and at the time I wouldn't have been able to distinguish Czech from Slovak. It would make sense to teach Slovak, as it's easier than Czech - the pronounciation is simpler (no '' sound for one - a bizarre noise that only exists in Czech. Try saying 'zh' like in fusion and a rolled 'r' simulatenously), and they have more words similar to other European languages than Czech (months are a great example - január, február and marec, as opposed to leden, nor and bezen).They're very similar languages though, so you can get by here fine speaking Slovak. I'd go so far as to say that they're different dialects of the same language with their own formalised writing systems, but this sort of talk doesn't go down too well with a lot of locals.

I'd agree with Straggler that the primary reason for the inability of the Brits to speak foreign languages is the same as for Americans - we speak the global lingua franca already. If you're brought up speaking Hungarian and only Hungarian, you can directly communicate with only 15 million other people. Anywhere too far from the borders of Hungary, you'd be surprised to find anything written in Hungarian, and if you try to get by anywhere else you will be forced to try and communicate in a different language.However, if you're brought up speaking English, then you can already talk to more than 1,000 million people - possibly as much as a fifth of the world's population, depending on who you ask. All over the world, English-language publications will be available, there'll be English-language television and multilingual signs will often be written in English (except for all the older trains in eastern and central Europe which, despite having signs in five or six languages, seem to avoid English as a matter of principle. This is probably because they were all brought from the French).This sort of thing is reinforced by feedback loops. When a native English-speaker encounters a foreigner abroad, the foreigner is usually more likely to speak some English than the English-speaker is to speak their language, so everything gets done in English. The foreigners can't do the same thing in England, so they emphasise the importance of langauge teaching - especially English - while it becomes devalued as inessential in English-speaking countries.The interesting thing about English now is that way it's used as the language of communication between non-native speakers of different languagues. Swedish and Japanese tourists here in Prague who speak not a jot of Czech will almost invariably ask for directions or order their food in English. All of which makes it easier and easier just not to bother learning foreign languages for us, and more and more important for foreigners to learn English, so more do, which makes it easier again for us to get by in English and so on and so forth.Incidentally, I'm not sure I agree with Straggler's impressions of Americans and Brits of various classes 'having a go' at the language. I don't think there's a significant class difference amongst British tourists (though maybe this is because they speak such an obscure language here that nobody knows enough to try), and Americans tend to be more likely to be offended that people don't know English (this could be due to the fact that I see a lot more American than British tourists, so I'm more likely to come across the ignorant minority).All of these attitudes are common across the English-speaking world though, in my experience. It's significant that my Czech is still awful after three years living here, yet I'm regarded by most of my native-English speaking friends as fluent, simply because most of them can say nothing apart from ordering beer (and they get their plurals wrong when they do that!).Edited by caffeine, : spelling mistake

Britain switched to a metric currency all the way back in 1971, you know, when most of our weights and measures were still imperial. Despite the general switch to metric measurements, many things are still commonly counted in the old imperial measurements - including some officially. Speed limits and distances on road signs, for example, are universally in miles, not kilometres.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

Our American clients do that all the time, but to be fair so do the English. I think it's because people aren't accustomed to reading their money - everyone knows the right colour/size/shape for the relevant coin or note, and so when you're shoved into a situation with different money it can be baffling. Especially if you're the sort of person who likes to pay for everything with a credt card and so isn't used to using any currency abroad.The habit I find much funnier when it comes to Americans and foreign currency is the widespread inability to refer to money as anything other than dollars. I regularly recieve emails asking to confirm that the price of something is '$1000 czk' (1000 dollar-crowns, maybe?), and to quote a client I spoke to on the phone recently 'Is that American dollars or Euro-dollars?'.ABE: You say 'even when that country had decimal currency'. Has anyone ever been to a country that doesn't have decimal currency?ABE2: Just wanted to mention something here in this thread quickly, as it contradicts what I was saying earlier. I just drew a total blank as to how 'assistant' was spelt in English, being now accustomed to writing the Czech 'asistent' at the end of emails. Maybe bilingualism can create a few spelling issues!Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

A lot depends on the language they're coming from I think - false friends can cause problems. Czechs speaking English regularly use 'sympathetic' (or sometimes 'sympatic') to mean 'nice', because that's what the etymologically linked word in Czech means.Incidentally, I looked up non-decimal currencies on Wikipedia. It seems the only two currently in use are the Mauritanian ouguiya and Madagascan ariary, both of which use a base-5 system.