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How long until everyone just speaks English?

dalamon said:
The level of the English speakers in India far exceeds China.


Side note: Japan is probably the last developed nation of the world that hasn't really given a particular **** for the English-boom. Chinese and Korean citizens speak far superior English to the Japanese.
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I believe it like I said my frien may very well have some biases.
 
Most germans speak some english, but by no stretch all. Especially here in the east where they taught russian in schoo up until the reunification. I meet a lot of people my age that do not speak any, or maybe a tiny bit, of english, but they speak some or even really good russian. In the west you get more english speakers. The phenomenon I see here goes beyond what they learned in school or adopting words from other languages. It is straight-on english words being taken into the german language, without any attempt to "german-ify" the word. Take the word computer. The german word for that is rechner, which is also the word for calculator. But most germans say computer and mostly exactly as an american would. cuhm-pyoo-ter. But if it were an adopted word they wold pronounce it closer to comb-poot-eh. I hear these words all the time. We have some very dear friend here who speak nearly no german. The husband does pretty good, and he really wants to learn, but the wife almost none. Except when some eingedeutscht word pops out in conversation as if it is entirely normal. I find it really interesting and that kind of thing was what made me wonder.
 
Darkwing Duck said:
Been taking a class at one of the Layton Korean churches for many years now. I'm not a lost cause, per se, but I just don't use it that much, so it's hard to improve.
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That's the problem with languages. Not only is it difficult to improve without continuous usage, it is pretty much impossible to retain. I took 7 years of French at school, and I became pretty fluent at it. A few years after I graduated, I visited France, only to find out I forgot all of it! :(
 
Darkwing Duck said:
Been taking a class at one of the Layton Korean churches for many years now. I'm not a lost cause, per se, but I just don't use it that much, so it's hard to improve.
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I bet it is hard to improve unless you use it everyday. It should be fine as long as you are proficient. :cool:
 
Siro said:
That's the problem with languages. Not only is it difficult to improve without continuous usage, it is pretty much impossible to retain. I took 7 years of French at school, and I became pretty fluent at it. A few years after I graduated, I visited France, only to find out I forgot all of it! :(
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Realizing this first-hand in German. I took an exam in high school that certified I could read/write/speak German well enough to attend any university in Germany, kinda analogous to completing a TOEFL exam to attend an English-speaking school.


Now I probably speak at a 3rd grade fluency. It's brutal. And it's only been like 6 years since I spoke it regularly!
 
Siro said:
Welp, I speak a category 5 language. :p
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Albanian is a category 4, and it looks like Japanese is the hardest language for native english speakers to learn in the world-- scares me, seeing as I'm preparing to travel to Japan for six months starting this September (potentially).
 
In college I studied German and Business. I ended up taking both the American Certified Test for Foreign Language, and the Common European Framework of Reference for Foreign Language. I am pretty sure the scale has changed somewhat since then but I scored at a Superior level (the highest was Distinction or Distinguished, basically native proficiency/fluency). I also took the CERF testing then and tested at a C2 level. Upon returning to Germany now nearly 20 years after college and 25 years after my mission I took a CERF placement test as I wanted to do a few courses, and I tested at B2, but at the top end of the scale. So I retained quite a bit, but lost a lot of fluency (the difference between C1 and C2 is basically fluency not really understanding). I am hoping to get back to at least C1 relatively soon.
 
Anyone ever watch Forensic Files (I think that's the one) and the narrator pronounces computer, kom-pute-torr and he says it like it's advanced alien technology.

I also thought it was really weird hearing people pronounce Zion outside of Utah. Here we say Zy-uhn. Pretty much anywhere else they say Zy-On, but they really emphasize each syllable, again, like their saying an alien word or something.

To just keep going with it, when I was learning electronics in the Navy I figured that when people said zener diode they were just pronouncing it weird like they do Zion. They say zee-ner. I would call it a zenn-er diode. I checked with my dad though and he called it a zee-ner diode, so I figured I was just wrong on that one...but I still say zenn-er because it sounds silly to me the other way.
 
Gameface said:
Anyone ever watch Forensic Files (I think that's the one) and the narrator pronounces computer, kom-pute-torr and he says it like it's advanced alien technology.

I also thought it was really weird hearing people pronounce Zion outside of Utah. Here we say Zy-uhn. Pretty much anywhere else they say Zy-On, but they really emphasize each syllable, again, like their saying an alien word or something.

To just keep going with it, when I was learning electronics in the Navy I figured that when people said zener diode they were just pronouncing it weird like they do Zion. They say zee-ner. I would call it a zenn-er diode. I checked with my dad though and he called it a zee-ner diode, so I figured I was just wrong on that one...but I still say zenn-er because it sounds silly to me the other way.
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Most of this kind of thing is dialect. Like coo-pon vs cyoo-pon for coupon or ad-ver-tyz-ment vs ad-vertiss-munt for advertisement. Really they just put the em-PHAS-sis on the wrong syl-AH-bul. This has been very evident to me dealing with lots of people of other languages speaking English on my current project, or dealing with folks from the UK. To them we sound very harsh in our use of language, all the hard R sounds and such. It is really interesting stuff to me.

I am also hearing this in German, where on our project we have people working here from all over the country, and you can really tell the various regions apart (Saxony - sächsisch, Bavaria - bayerisch, Swabia - schwäbisch, etc.). They have distinct ways of pronouncing words and in some cases even use different words entirely. I think it's cool and have a lot of fun talking to the people from different regions. Even here in the Leipzig-Halle region it is different north to south in what is really a fairly small area.

For anyone who speaks German I recommend you google the youtube video "Rambo der beste Koch der Welt". It is a comedy group from this region and they really hit the accent from the Halle area. "Eier esse ma jerne".

For those who don't here is an example:

To say you like something you use the word gern, pronounced g-air-n, with a hard G at the start, like grain. But in this region they soften the G and make it like a german J, or an english y, so they pronounce it y-air-n.

Another is the word good, in german that is gut. It is pronounced g-oo-t. Here they pronounce it y-oo-d.

And they tend to do that with all the hard G sounds. It takes a bit to get used to it, and for most part the Germans here are split on it. Some just speak that way and it is fine for them. Others think it sounds very lower-class and make fun of it or look down on it a bit.

Again, I find it really interesting. And of course I speak as much as I can like that to bug my friends that look down on it. Cracks me up.
 
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Think if that happened in English with the hard g to y.

What would happen to the threat "Your *** is grass?"

Wouldn't it just sound like "your *** is your ***."
 
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