On language learning

This entry was inspired by an article in 'The observer".

Generally speaking, the article is about the downsides of not learning a foreign language. But before I'll move on to the article itself, I'll try to look at it from a more personal perspective, by answering a question: "imagine what your life would be like if you didn't know any foreign language"

To say that its quality would decrease is  an understatement, as not knowing English would quite severely limit... pretty much everything that I experience.

To begin with, no English would mean that I would be unable read practically any Internet website that I regularly access. No BBC, no forums, no English Wikipedia, no gaming news sites, no Equestria Daily, no YouTube. Sure, most of these sites have their Polish equivalents. But Polish Wikipedia is not only underdeveloped, but also biased beyond all recognition (example: article about homosexuality written by homophobes); a significant portion of Polish media tend to support one political party or the other; and Polish gaming news sites... well, they take their news from  the English-speaking sites, so basically it's second-hand information. And, as far as YT is concerned: all my favourite video blogs are in English, and all the videos that I like to browse are also in English. And I seriously doubt that there are Polish equivalents of users such as Thunderf00t, TheraminTrees or all these fan-made Pony-related videos.

And then there are the movies and TV shows and all that other similar... products. For me it's simply necessary to watch them in English for several reasons. One: Polish translations are often terrible: they can't even get the title translation right ("Prison Break" was translated as "Skazany na śmierć", which in Polish means... "Sentenced to death."). Two: Polish movies in TV often use the voice-over (Gavrilov's) technique, which basically kills all the voice acting and gives all the characters the same voice. And if they use dubbing... then it's even worse. Polish voice actors can suck the life out of a character, making a very well-fitting voice something terrible to listen to. And while there are exceptions to this rule... well, it's just the minority of voice acting.

And now to the point, which is related the arguments used in aforementioned article to support the idea that it is absolutely necessary to learn foreign languages.

First of all, for a significant number of people the pragmatic argument behind learning a foreign language is more than enough. The knowledge of foreign languages makes it easier to find a job in virtually any field. Furthermore, learning a language that is a lingua franca (be it local or global) provides a lot of benefits, such as the ability to become friends with people living abroad and being able to use more sources of knowledge.

Second of all, there's the question of using language learning to combat xenophobia. This, however, may prove to be problematic. The amount of evidence against racism is simply overwhelming: this means that if someone is racist, their racism is based not on reason and evidence, but on some deeply rooted, subconscious convictions, or rather: issues. It may, therefore, prove to be almost impossible to root out their racism without dealing with the issues that are the true reason of their hatemongering attitude. And learning language, and thus learning, at least to some extent, about different cultures, may be counted as rational evidence. Therefore, the conclusion is that a racist person does not need education (as it has already been provided), but rather a therapy.

The third argument supporting FLL is the fact that a lot of foreign literature should be read in the original. Translations, as good as the sometimes may be, usually are not able to convey the exact same impression in a way the original does.

And, finally, you may find it interesting that being bilingual actually decreases the chances of several degenerative neurological diseases, such as Alzcheimer's or multiple sclerosis.

By the way, I'm quite surprised by the fact that it was the Labour party that removed foreign languages from "core curriculum". Cutting education budget and removing something that, is supposed to strengthen multiculturalism isn't what I would expect after the political left.