Like the majority of people working in an organisation which employs people from around the world, I am used to conversing with people who have a strong accent when speaking English or make incessant grammar errors - 'feedbacks' is used so often it is almost being adopted in English itself. Unlike the character on 'The Fast Show' I do not pick up every error and I make an effort to comprehend the accent. This is because I am grateful that the person is speaking to me in English and not expecting me to know Thai, Turkish or even Spanish in order to have a conversation with them. This is a price British people have to pay for being so poor at learning foreign languages and indeed having a schooling system which increasingly does not even teach them. The 13-year old boy who lives in my house stopped learning any foreign languages at the end of Year 8 (12-13 year old class), having done French just for two years. He is an intelligent child going to a school of 1200 pupils but there is so little language teaching that it is a minority subject. Reports show a steady fall in language learning in the UK: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-31921979 with fewer pupils taking even European languages let alone Asian ones.
Now, I am constantly meeting Chinese people. I have no idea how many Chinese are currently visiting or working in the UK. The bulk of the ones I run across are students. However, of course, because of the UK have had a colony in Hong Kong, there are people with Chinese heritage, predominantly Cantonese rather than Mandarin speakers and generally thoroughly integrated into British society. I am not discussing Chinese assimilated in the past, but people from mainland China who are in the UK. Now I spent 18 months learning Mandarin.
I was poor at the writing but pretty good at the language to the extent that I could say where I came from, talk about my family, ask directions and order a complex meal. I honed my accent by using CDs and copying dialogue in movies. Thus, I would expect that I would speak Chinese with an English accent and probably sound quite a bit like the Chinese equivalent of those people I speak to regularly from a range of countries, who have a strong accent and make errors. However, every time I try please or thank you or excuse me, I get a blank expression from Chinese visitors as if rather than attempting their language I have gone into Ukrainian or Somali.
I used the common Chinese phrase 'shi bu shi' [pronounced 'shur boo shur'] it is a phrase attached to the end of a sentence to make it a question 'yes or no?'. Mandarin word order does not change, it is subject-verb-object all the time, so you need question suffixes to show you are asking a question rather than through moving the verb around as often happens in English. The quote was relevant to the setting but the Chinese man turned to me and said - 'what is that, something in English?'. He did not recognise it as a basic phrase from his own language.
I know that the Chinese are a proud people who value their culture. I know that they row with the Taiwanese over who speaks and writes 'proper' Chinese. However, I have yet to meet a Chinese person who is willing to put in the effort to comprehend other nationalities speaking their language in the way that English speakers often do on a daily basis. This runs contrary to the schemes to introduce Mandarin to schools and to open up Confucius Centres to promote the teaching of Mandarin.
If the efforts of people who have taken time to learn the language are simply dismissed then there is no incentive to learn let alone develop skills in the language. It seems I will never even reach a workable level in my lifetime. I know there is all this argument about the fact that an outsider can never be fluent, but I am not looking for fluency, I am looking to work at the level many people use English when speaking to me. It may not be perfect, but we can function.
Why does this matter? Well, the Chinese population is only 25% of the global population so they are going to meet a lot of people who speak something else. China has a public relations problem. It is both noted as being one of the only remaining Communist dictatorships yet is also operating as a neo-colonial power particularly in Africa and Central Asia. To be so frosty to those trying to speak the language is to put even more distance between the country and those others it has to deal with.
I do wonder if there is a delight in the exceptionality of the use of any Chinese language in a Western context and that Chinese visitors like the fact that their hosts cannot comprehend what they are saying. It seems that they worry that if they give a centimetre of recognition that someone else even knows a bit of their language, they will have lost that privileged position. It is like the Russian nobility speaking French when the servants were around. I have also noted a similar phenomenon with Afrikaans and Flemish speakers. They get very upset when you reflect back some of the details of their language to them. It is as if you have broken the 'code' they are using and thus are suspicious.
I have no idea whether Chinese visitors will change their attitudes. However, I am sure their government, given the money it has put into promoting Mandarin skills in the West, would wish that they were not so dismissive of the efforts of other countries to speak their language and at least be as accommodating as many British are when people speak to us regularly in 'bad' English.
Showing posts with label language learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language learning. Show all posts
Wednesday, 12 August 2015
Monday, 5 March 2012
When Knowing A Foreign Language Is Something To Be Ashamed Of
I think I have been rather beaten to this posting by Will Hutton writing in ‘The Guardian’: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/05/will-hutton-learn-foreign-languages However, I guess there is no harm in me adding my perspective too. As with Hutton, my thoughts were triggered by the fact that the two leading men aiming to be nominated to be the Republican candidate for the coming US Presidential elections, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were attacking each other on the simple basis of whether they spoke French or not. As the BBC noted last month, they probably both do: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16583813 Romney spent 30 months in Bordeaux and Paris as a Mormon missionary in the 1960s whilst Gingrich wrote a PhD on Belgian educational policy in the Congo 1945-60 and cites a number of French-language texts in the bibliography; he might not be able to speak French but we have to assume that he reads it. I guess Gingrich is also ‘Dr. Newt Gingrich’ something else he is keeping quiet. Gingrich has produced an advertisement which refers to Romney’s ability to speak French. The reason for such an attack comes from what Republican politicians associate with Europe – the euro and all its difficulties; a strong welfare budget and an unwillingness to engage in futile military conflicts. Like most Britons they do not seem to associate Britain with Europe.
It seems incredible that there is more to gain politically from disguising that you have intellectual skills and that the grasp of a foreign language is something to use as an insult to your opponent or at least something which you feel the electorate should be dubious about. However, it is probably worth noting that both former President George Bush Jr. (2001-9) and his father’s Vice-President Dan Quayle (1989-93) both demonstrated difficulties with English and yet seemed sufficiently popular. In Britain, Nick Clegg when he became deputy prime minister was viewed suspiciously by Conservatives less for his political views and more for the fact that his wife is Spanish, his mother Dutch, his father half-Russian and he speaks Dutch, French, German and Spanish; his children are English-Spanish bilingual. In a continental politician such abilities would be commended or at worst seen as normal. However, in the UK, as in the USA, learning can be seen as an electoral liability which is why I never saw reference to Dr. Gordon Brown or Dr. Mo Mowlem even though that was in fact the case.
This is in sharp contrast to countries like Germany or many states in the Arab World.
This is in sharp contrast to countries like Germany or many states in the Arab World.
Ironically Clegg is very much like the nobility and royal families of Europe of the 19th century. Queen Victoria (actual first name Alexandrina), born to a German family, married to a German prince, had children who married into the different royal families of Europe including those of Germany and Russia. Victoria spoke German with her children and presumably her husband too. At the time upper class people across Europe spoke French to the extent that you often cannot find copies of treaties Britain was party to actually in English (I have looked) as French was spoken so widely among the civil service and I imagine the entire diplomatic corps. Of course, there has always been one rule for the rich and another for the rest. Whilst the wealthy of the UK including many members of the Conservative Party may look in disdain at our European neighbours let alone nationalities further afield and voice this attitude, this does not actually stop them from taking expensive holidays in exotic countries and mixing with the 'right sort' of foreigner; wealth is a language all of its own.
I do not know when the attitude shifted, but to me it seems it came during the First World War as Britain looked on both its opponents and its allies with disdain and focused on things that looked 'unBritish'; even the royal family was compelled to drop the surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in favour of Windsor. Throughout the 20th century foreigners seem to have lost the sense of being worthy rivals to being people who should at best be patronised and at worst attacked. Perhaps it was the fact that Sir Anthony Eden, foreign secretary (1935-8; 1940-5; 1951-5) and prime minister (1955-7) did not reveal that he had a degree in Farsi (spoken in Iran) and Arabic and could speak reasonably good French in the documentary film, 'Le Chagrin et la Pitié' (1969) though he switches to English towards the end. I always note that Eden could have understood the broadcasts in Arabic by his great antagonist Egyptian leader Colonel Nasser without a translator. The fact that Eden had this knowledge yet it was effectively concealed probably shows the stage that knowing a foreign language in Britain was no longer seen as beneficial but suspicious.
I do not know when the attitude shifted, but to me it seems it came during the First World War as Britain looked on both its opponents and its allies with disdain and focused on things that looked 'unBritish'; even the royal family was compelled to drop the surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in favour of Windsor. Throughout the 20th century foreigners seem to have lost the sense of being worthy rivals to being people who should at best be patronised and at worst attacked. Perhaps it was the fact that Sir Anthony Eden, foreign secretary (1935-8; 1940-5; 1951-5) and prime minister (1955-7) did not reveal that he had a degree in Farsi (spoken in Iran) and Arabic and could speak reasonably good French in the documentary film, 'Le Chagrin et la Pitié' (1969) though he switches to English towards the end. I always note that Eden could have understood the broadcasts in Arabic by his great antagonist Egyptian leader Colonel Nasser without a translator. The fact that Eden had this knowledge yet it was effectively concealed probably shows the stage that knowing a foreign language in Britain was no longer seen as beneficial but suspicious.
I would argue that the criticism of people for having language skills is part of a broader anti-intellectualism that has been common in the UK since the 1970s and probably quite a bit longer. It is interesting that the website of the ‘Daily Mail’ has now just overtaken the ‘New York Times’ as the most often accessed English-language news site. The ‘Daily Mail’ is clearly nationalistic, anti-European Integration and generally right-wing. It tends to focus on glamour rather than intellectual issues and presents solutions to most of the world’s problems as based on getting foreigners to listen to British common sense. Hutton takes a more specific focus in his seeking for an answer.
Hutton notes that there has been a fall of 21% in students applying for university degree courses in non-European languages, exceeding the general fall of around 9% in all university applications, despite the fact that having such skills makes graduates highly employable. Part of the difficulty is the fall in the feed-through of students who speak any foreign languages, as only 43% of even GSCE level students study any language. At ‘A’ level in 2011 only just over 13,000 students took French down 5% from 2010; 7,600 took Spanish; 5,100 took German a fall of 7%; Chinese was taken by 3,100; Polish by 458 and Irish by 339. A key reason for not studying a language at university is that language degrees last 4 rather than 3 years so accruing more fees, though as with sandwich courses with industrial placements the fees may be reduced when the student is away from their home campus.
Hutton quotes translator Michael Hofmann who argues that only speaking one language traps you in a ‘cultural cage’ only able to perceive one position on issues. Consequently he sees an advantage in terms of getting employment not simply through being able to talk to people from a different country but because you develop a flexibility of mind which allows you to adapt to different circumstances even if that is shifting from one company to another simply within the UK. Hutton thinks that the lack of affinity for language learning stems from seeing foreigners as ‘invaders’, indeed some kind of benefit pillagers. Whilst we like the fact that English is so widely spoken in the world (but still by fewer people that Mandarin Chinese) we do not like the fact that it makes it easier for them to come to the UK to work or claim benefits. In addition, most British are not interested in going out to countries to assist in strengthening their economies to make even recession hit UK look less attractive. While we may not have shaken off the sense of imperial superiority we certainly have lost any sense of a patrician approach which once was an element of British colonialism.
Hutton feels the sense that foreigners are a threat is why those studying languages are so often ridiculed in the UK as if daring to learn the alien’s language makes you a source of suspicion, much as we see it doing in the USA. Putting in effort to learn a foreign language, apparently shows that you are focusing on the wrong priorities because you are putting at least some emphasis on a different culture from your own and somehow that wanting to know more about another culture suggests you lack pride in your own. As Hutton notes this cultural censuring of language learning runs counter to the best interests of those people choosing what subjects to study. I had a friend who learnt Korean. He seems to have been the first person ever to complete a Linguaphone course in that language as he noticed that tapes 3 and 4 in the set (this predated CDs let alone downloads) that he had bought were identical. The company had recorded tape 4 but had been dispatching the wrong one in its place. Anyway, he was so in demand that when travelling on public transport anyone in the UK or South Korea found he spoke Korean they would offer him a job. Anyone who speaks fluent English and can get a decent grasp of Mandarin or Arabic or Russian or even Portuguese is liable to be in high demand and yet young people cannot see that.
Weirdly the basic Chinese course from the Open University available on ITunesU is one of the top 3 downloaded courses but no-one seems to go beyond lesson one. Perhaps as I have argued before the British have no language ability: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/05/british-and-foreign-languages.html so the fall in students taking them suggests that they have stopped trying to learn the languages and humiliating themselves. I have forgotten all the foreign languages I ever learnt and as it was only got 10% in my Chinese test after 18 months study. However, I am not going to ridicule anyone who learns a foreign language or see them suspiciously. It seems ironic that those who are so much more nationalistic than me are so hostile to language learning not realising that if you are ignorant of someone else's language and yet they know yours, it is you who is at a disadvantage.
Friday, 5 August 2011
Student Inflow/Outflow
This is something I guess been aware of since when I first moved to southern England in 2005, but has come home more to me now that for much of my time I am living in West London. For some reason around where I am living are lots of educational institutions from primary school right up to universities and so simply travelling to work I see a cross-section of our being-educated public of all ages. Of course, for the moment all of them, even the university students are on their summer holidays (though universities seem to be all Americanised now with semesters rather than terms and they have always had vacations rather than holidays). However, I noticed that this did not seem to make the university campuses any quieter, in their place are literally thousands of young people who seem to range from about 12-16 years old. Saying that I have seen some Chinese students who look about 9-10 years old. That might be the case, I imagine a British mother would be loath to send their child 8,000 Km for the summer, but I might be wrong. Anyway, the bulk of them seem to be teenagers. The nationalities I can make out have included French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and some East Europeans, I am unfamiliar with East European languages so could not tell you whether they were Poles, Czechs or Russians, perhaps from the Baltic States. It is heartening that the immigration policies that threatened to kill the language school trade in the UK have been bent sufficiently not to choke off this important industry.
Anyway, each university seems to have been colonised by a one or more language schools run by energetic young staff in bright teeshirts for the summer. I guess this works well for all concerned. The school gets a purpose built teaching space and accommodation with a convenience store and cafes that all universities seem to have and the university presumably gets lots of fees at a time when the campus would normally be empty. It also seems to employ lots of young graduates as organisers and language teachers at a time when any jobs that can be created especially for people under 24, are desperately needed. Though I did not really notice it at the time, I now realise I have witnessed the same occurrence in Hampshire and Devon too. Madly I had forgotten the two students who lodged in my house last year, I somehow put them in a different box, perhaps because I was only seeing one of them rather than large clusters and generally I am not in areas where students or tourists go. I guess that it is simply the draw of London and the scale of the operations in the capital that make it more apparent, maybe simply my route to work. One point to note is how uniformly dressed so many of these students are, fitting in very much with what Niall Ferguson was saying in his series earlier in the year, that a teenager from Beijing now is a replica of one from Madrid in the clothing and electronic equipment that they have.
I have no idea how much it costs for a 14-year old to be sent from Beijing or Madrid to London for a number of weeks, I guess they come for a fortnight, perhaps it is more. From what I can ascertain and referencing the other examples I now recognise I have witnessed, they seem to get teaching in English all morning and then trips out to the standards of British tourism, everything from Bath and Stonehenge to Windsor Castle and the London Eye. Shepherded around I guess they never really encounter the London beyond the campus bounds. It is probably a good thing. Students are never particularly popular even with 42% of British 18-year olds attending university and these groups are certainly noisy as any cluster of teenagers is. What is apparent is their wealth. Sending anyone from China to the UK costs money and these students all seem to have the latest smartphones and fashions. I guess it is something that only the rich middle class parents of various European countries could afford and that is rather alarming, because it shows that even the UK's middle class is lagging behind its neighbours and the Chinese in what is affordable to do. This is of course no surprise given that the real incomes of 90% of the UK population have slid in the last 40 years. Perhaps it would have been affordable in 1975 but not now.
I would like to think that in western Paris or western Madrid there are hundreds of British teenagers there for a fortnight or a month and being drilled in French or Spanish (let alone western Beijing learning Mandarin) mixed in with some sports and some sight-seeing, but know it is not happening. How do I know? Well simply because I read 'The Guardian' newspaper. It is not the font of all knowledge but if you want to get inside the heads of what the Europeanised (and this is what marks 'The Guardian' out from 'The Times' and 'The Daily Telegraph' which are pretty Little England in attitude) middle class aspires to be doing you read 'The Guardian'. I can see no features on packing your 14-year old, let alone 10-year old off to Paris for the summer (unless it is to relatives) to learn a foreign language.
Partly, as I have intimated above, it is the cost: the fact that the British middle class is falling in terms of disposable incomes because very few in Britain are willing to insist on a greater share of the prosperity that heads of companies are clearly benefiting from and did not even before the credit crunch was allowed to happen. I know that these days the middle class holiday is camping in the UK, something once left to the unimaginative and those with no money to go abroad. The other factor seems to be the 'parent fear' that has taken parents by the throat and sends them into hysterics the moment they lose eyeline with their child let alone mobile phone contact. More examples of this were revealed to me this week with accounts of a colleague at a child's birthday party with mothers running around frantically the moment one of their children was lost in the crowd (given there were 50 children in attendance, that was no doubt easy). The middle class has never relished packing their children off to holiday camp the way that their US equivalents have always done, they have never trusted anyone to look after their children and even their trust in teachers has slumped, hence the terminal state of even term-time school trips. The upper class, of course, have been happy to bundle their children off into the care of others almost from the moment they are born and certainly once they turn 8. Even if somehow, middle class real incomes rose, you would never see the equivalent of what I witness with French children (France is nearer to where I am living now than Yorkshire) happening with their British counterparts. The woman in my house worries over the 5-minute walk it would take her 9-year old son to reach school and has already ruled out him going on any trips which involve him sleeping away from home, not that she or I could afford to pay for him to go.
Does it really matter if there is an imbalance in the flow of teenaged language students? Is it not better for the British economy that more are coming into the UK, spending money here, rather than it being balanced up by an outflow. The cost in my view is human. If we go back to Ian Duncan Smith's speech earlier in which he encouraged British employers to take on more British young people, the retort from the CBI was to ask why would any UK company want to do this when it could employ better qualified East Europeans with a real work ethic compared to ill-qualified British people with an attitude of looking out for what they can get from a company. I have no desire for British young people to be compelled to forelock-tugging lackeys, but it does seem that there are skills that they are not getting to compete with people from other parts of Europe. It is not only people from Eastern Europe, apparently around 300,000 French people live in London alone, more than the entire population of Southampton; 123,000 Poles over the age of 16 live in London with 398,000 in other parts of the UK.
Now, I know many people from other parts of the EU returned to their home countries when the recession kicked in and we have not returned to the figures of 2007, but it does suggest there is something that enables such migrants to get work in the UK. It may be that they are cheap labour, but even then 16 year olds have always tended to be cheaper to employ. One clear thing is that the migrants have the confidence to get up and come into the UK and find work in a language which is not their own. How many British 18-year olds or even 21-year olds with a degree in their backpack do that? A key challenge is that they do not speak the language, another is that often they have not ever been in another country, these days, not even on holiday let alone to study. It seems ironic that the Conservatives (and New Labour who are/were minimally different to them) with their occasional forays into attempts at discrimination, are in fact further reinforcing the conditions that hamstring British young people. They have pandered to the tabloid media which have hyped up the fear that a child out of your sight is being abused by a paedophile. They have allowed companies to distort the distribution of profits so whilst bosses' salaries have rocketed the real incomes of 90% of employees have continued to slump unabated. Thus, they have engineered and are sustaining a situation in which a 14-year old from France or Spain or even China is getting the intellectual and personal skills to find work across the world and yet their British counterpart is closeted at home learning nothing beyond the distance between their home and the park. Thus, when I see another coach disgorging a fifty or so teenagers ready for some weeks of language school, I do feel depressed knowing that if I was in one of the other capitals of Europe I would not be witnessing the equivalent with British students.
Anyway, each university seems to have been colonised by a one or more language schools run by energetic young staff in bright teeshirts for the summer. I guess this works well for all concerned. The school gets a purpose built teaching space and accommodation with a convenience store and cafes that all universities seem to have and the university presumably gets lots of fees at a time when the campus would normally be empty. It also seems to employ lots of young graduates as organisers and language teachers at a time when any jobs that can be created especially for people under 24, are desperately needed. Though I did not really notice it at the time, I now realise I have witnessed the same occurrence in Hampshire and Devon too. Madly I had forgotten the two students who lodged in my house last year, I somehow put them in a different box, perhaps because I was only seeing one of them rather than large clusters and generally I am not in areas where students or tourists go. I guess that it is simply the draw of London and the scale of the operations in the capital that make it more apparent, maybe simply my route to work. One point to note is how uniformly dressed so many of these students are, fitting in very much with what Niall Ferguson was saying in his series earlier in the year, that a teenager from Beijing now is a replica of one from Madrid in the clothing and electronic equipment that they have.
I have no idea how much it costs for a 14-year old to be sent from Beijing or Madrid to London for a number of weeks, I guess they come for a fortnight, perhaps it is more. From what I can ascertain and referencing the other examples I now recognise I have witnessed, they seem to get teaching in English all morning and then trips out to the standards of British tourism, everything from Bath and Stonehenge to Windsor Castle and the London Eye. Shepherded around I guess they never really encounter the London beyond the campus bounds. It is probably a good thing. Students are never particularly popular even with 42% of British 18-year olds attending university and these groups are certainly noisy as any cluster of teenagers is. What is apparent is their wealth. Sending anyone from China to the UK costs money and these students all seem to have the latest smartphones and fashions. I guess it is something that only the rich middle class parents of various European countries could afford and that is rather alarming, because it shows that even the UK's middle class is lagging behind its neighbours and the Chinese in what is affordable to do. This is of course no surprise given that the real incomes of 90% of the UK population have slid in the last 40 years. Perhaps it would have been affordable in 1975 but not now.
I would like to think that in western Paris or western Madrid there are hundreds of British teenagers there for a fortnight or a month and being drilled in French or Spanish (let alone western Beijing learning Mandarin) mixed in with some sports and some sight-seeing, but know it is not happening. How do I know? Well simply because I read 'The Guardian' newspaper. It is not the font of all knowledge but if you want to get inside the heads of what the Europeanised (and this is what marks 'The Guardian' out from 'The Times' and 'The Daily Telegraph' which are pretty Little England in attitude) middle class aspires to be doing you read 'The Guardian'. I can see no features on packing your 14-year old, let alone 10-year old off to Paris for the summer (unless it is to relatives) to learn a foreign language.
Partly, as I have intimated above, it is the cost: the fact that the British middle class is falling in terms of disposable incomes because very few in Britain are willing to insist on a greater share of the prosperity that heads of companies are clearly benefiting from and did not even before the credit crunch was allowed to happen. I know that these days the middle class holiday is camping in the UK, something once left to the unimaginative and those with no money to go abroad. The other factor seems to be the 'parent fear' that has taken parents by the throat and sends them into hysterics the moment they lose eyeline with their child let alone mobile phone contact. More examples of this were revealed to me this week with accounts of a colleague at a child's birthday party with mothers running around frantically the moment one of their children was lost in the crowd (given there were 50 children in attendance, that was no doubt easy). The middle class has never relished packing their children off to holiday camp the way that their US equivalents have always done, they have never trusted anyone to look after their children and even their trust in teachers has slumped, hence the terminal state of even term-time school trips. The upper class, of course, have been happy to bundle their children off into the care of others almost from the moment they are born and certainly once they turn 8. Even if somehow, middle class real incomes rose, you would never see the equivalent of what I witness with French children (France is nearer to where I am living now than Yorkshire) happening with their British counterparts. The woman in my house worries over the 5-minute walk it would take her 9-year old son to reach school and has already ruled out him going on any trips which involve him sleeping away from home, not that she or I could afford to pay for him to go.
Does it really matter if there is an imbalance in the flow of teenaged language students? Is it not better for the British economy that more are coming into the UK, spending money here, rather than it being balanced up by an outflow. The cost in my view is human. If we go back to Ian Duncan Smith's speech earlier in which he encouraged British employers to take on more British young people, the retort from the CBI was to ask why would any UK company want to do this when it could employ better qualified East Europeans with a real work ethic compared to ill-qualified British people with an attitude of looking out for what they can get from a company. I have no desire for British young people to be compelled to forelock-tugging lackeys, but it does seem that there are skills that they are not getting to compete with people from other parts of Europe. It is not only people from Eastern Europe, apparently around 300,000 French people live in London alone, more than the entire population of Southampton; 123,000 Poles over the age of 16 live in London with 398,000 in other parts of the UK.
Now, I know many people from other parts of the EU returned to their home countries when the recession kicked in and we have not returned to the figures of 2007, but it does suggest there is something that enables such migrants to get work in the UK. It may be that they are cheap labour, but even then 16 year olds have always tended to be cheaper to employ. One clear thing is that the migrants have the confidence to get up and come into the UK and find work in a language which is not their own. How many British 18-year olds or even 21-year olds with a degree in their backpack do that? A key challenge is that they do not speak the language, another is that often they have not ever been in another country, these days, not even on holiday let alone to study. It seems ironic that the Conservatives (and New Labour who are/were minimally different to them) with their occasional forays into attempts at discrimination, are in fact further reinforcing the conditions that hamstring British young people. They have pandered to the tabloid media which have hyped up the fear that a child out of your sight is being abused by a paedophile. They have allowed companies to distort the distribution of profits so whilst bosses' salaries have rocketed the real incomes of 90% of employees have continued to slump unabated. Thus, they have engineered and are sustaining a situation in which a 14-year old from France or Spain or even China is getting the intellectual and personal skills to find work across the world and yet their British counterpart is closeted at home learning nothing beyond the distance between their home and the park. Thus, when I see another coach disgorging a fifty or so teenagers ready for some weeks of language school, I do feel depressed knowing that if I was in one of the other capitals of Europe I would not be witnessing the equivalent with British students.
Monday, 10 January 2011
Things I Wish I Had Known When I Was 18
A few months back on the BBC website I came across an inteview with sociology professor Fred Furedi about five things he had felt he had learnt during his life (he is 63). His five were: 1. Listen - because you can learn from anybody; 2. Question everything; 3. Rely on your intuition; 4. Always reflect on your motives when you are dealing with your children and 5. Things are never as bad as they seem. Two things struck me about this. First I was interested that almost all the points were completely the opposite to his (with point 4. I am only occasionally a pseudo-parent so cannot really engage with that point) and second it reminded me of a similar column I used to see in one of the Sunday newspaper magazines when I did a paper-round in the early 1980s which was entitled as I have entitled this posting.
I am not as old as Furedi, but I have experienced quite a bit of life. I know that I came from a privileged background: my parents never divorced; we lived in the same house all through my youth; we lived in a middle class town in southern England not hit by unemployment and social problems as much of England was; I was not sexually abused (though I was physically bullied by peers and constantly humiliated by my parents who portrayed me as looking like someone mentally disabled); I had friends (though fewer than I realised); I had a room of my own to sleep in; I was well fed but not obese and when I went to bed it was not wet or cold. I must say, however, that I have been incredibly disappointed with my life. If I had written this posting some months or years ago, I might be more positive, but facing losing my house and having no work for months is clearly going to alter my view of things and make a lot of what I have done in recent years seem entirely wasted.
I will start with Furedi's five points and then add some of my own. In terms of listening, I agree up to a point, but the more I have heard the more I have heard the same. I have been struck by how small minded and bigoted the average person is. I have lost count of how many times I have been told that the problems of the country are down to immigrants with absolutely no evidence. Such things are repeated so often that they are no longer challenged. The same with stuff around the Thatcherite agenda, such as deregulation and privatisation; that large numbers of people are defrauding the state and millions are getting more than their fair share. I am sick of this stuff being repeated to me as if it is acceptable and beyond challenging. I do not know how I would have reacted if at 18 I would have known this, I guess I would have terminated conversations with many people much sooner, simply walked away. It would be better to be thought peculiar than to listen to hours and hours of this rubbish which I must have heard in my life, simply wasting time I could have spent reading a book.
In terms of Furedi's question everything, I think there is no point. I thought this was the case when I was a child, but I think I was misled by the lingering radical lecturers at my university who had been students in the 1960s and had not thrown off such attitudes even with their prosperity and success (more likely because of them). Basically, unless you are a member of the ultra-rich in our society, you are never going to be able to change anything. There is no point questioning what happens. Often it will be unfair and irrational, but whether it is how your company does things or how you are taught or how the country is run, you are in a position which means you can do absolutely nothing about it. Even if you question it, the answer will usually be irrational and refer to habit or tradition and you cannot break that down. This particularly applies in the workplace. Most offices, factories, warehouses, shops, etc. have methods which are wasteful in terms of time and resources but never try to challenge these and suggest a better way, it will simply cause you to be complained about as a troublemaker or naive and certainly not being wortwhile employing. An episode of the US series 'Malcolm in the Middle' (2000-06 in USA). Teenager Malcolm gets a job working in a warehouse where his mother works. He is charged with squashing up empty cardboard boxes and then taking them to the refuse. The pattern is that the boxes are loaded into a lift taken down a floor, taken into the box-squashing area, squashed, loaded back into the lift, taken back up a floor and then to the refuse container. To speed things up Malcolm squashes them on the floor they start off on and then takes them over to the refuse container, so saving time and electricity. He receives an official report against him for not complying to procedure. This kind of thing happens in every warehouse in the UK and in every office or shop or factory there is similar behaviour, but unless you want to lose your job do not challenge it. In terms of wrongs in our world, complain about things, shout and protest about how wrong they are, but do not waste your effort questioning most things as you simply irritate people and generally they can give you no answer which makes any sense. Save your effort.
Intuition is useless, you might as well toss a coin or throw a dice to decide the step to take in any situation. Even when you have lived life it is impossible to know enough to make a judgement that will save you from harm or discomfort. The best you can do is learn as much as you can about a situation and at least dodge some but certainly not all of the unpleasant consequences, e.g. use a condom when having sex should spare you from a pregnancy developing or getting a STI, but you are unlikely to avoid your partner's ex-boyfriend/girlfriend attacking you jealously, unless you have researched your partner's background and choose a different location or time to have sex with the person. Intuition is far too often affected by superstition and prejudice and so often blinds you to the full range of options and in fact can channel you down fixed, bad paths and leave you with no alternatives that you might otherwise have seen.
As I say I cannot comment on dealing with 'my' children. I certainly think it is worthwhile checking your motives when engaging with anyone not on any moral basis but because it will allow you to see why you are truly doing something and whether that motivation is liable to alter or more likely flag as time passes. A clear example is joining a club or activity because you know someone you are attracted to is a member/participant. That is a bad motive. The likely outcome is that you will be stuck doing something you do not enjoy and they will not be interested in you anyway. You will endure doing something you do not like and wasting time that could be spent on more enjoyable things for you. I am not saying just be a hedonist, but that your focus should be on the central activity not ulterior motives or possible by-products of doing that thing.
Things are always far worse than they seem. As I grow older I adhere to the phrase 'it is later than you think', as used in a religious context, i.e. you must change your life and seek salvation as soon as possible because you are going to be judged sooner than you believe. I do not see it in that particular way, but I think it is a good attitude when thinking about your life. Often minor things happen, such as something goes wrong with your car or your house or there is trouble in your workplace. Too many people, myself included, think, 'it is only minor, I have time to get it sorted'. No, not only is it already too late when the problem becomes apparent, it is going to get worse, because one problem triggers a whole series. You will find the repair to the car costs more than you think so you have less money or you get to work late and steps begin to remove you from your job. In the current economic climate, no job is safe, even teachers and nurses could lose their jobs very quickly. You constantly need to be looking ahead for potential problems. You constantly need to be saving what you can to prepare for the dire situations that come up in your life. Even then you have to recognise you cannot foresee everything and will get caught out unexpectedly. Unfortunately there is nothing that you can do about that, it is part of life. I know now that when I was teenager I was not cautious enough and rather than think I could survive in the business I dreamt of going into, I should have trained as an accountant or a lawyer and right throughout my life I would have avoided things like living in an unheated room above a chipshop sharing a bathroom with seven other people and losing the house I bought now. Always be prepared for the worst that you can imagine, because, in reality, life will be even worse than that. Anyone who tries to follow dreams, especially in their careers, will suffer badly. Find the most secure occupation you can and cling to it; keep retraining constantly to widen your options and even then be prepared for not getting even a fraction of what you want.
Moving on from Furedi's points there are a few others of my own. The first is that most people quickly forget when you have said something in passing that upset them. I often believed I had offended people by what I had said and worried about it greatly and assumed they would hold a grudge against me. Perhaps this stemmed from childhood experiences when people in my district constantly referred to mistakes of the past. I was once at a party and turned down a dessert saying I was not allowed by my parents to have 'packet food' (I had assumed wrongly that it was 'Angel Delight' a very popular, very sweet dessert in a packet of the time) as they were into self-sufficiency and homegrown stuff at the time, the mid-1970s. This offended my friend's mother who had put a lot of effort into the dessert. Running into the woman more than 12 years later she immediately challenged me on what I had said at the age of 8 and was clearly still unhappy about it. However, as life has gone on, I have found that people generally forget faux pas and inadvertently insulting comments incredibly quickly. Not everyone, of course, but the bulk. I do have a concern that in the age of social networking, we are all now experiencing longer duration of anger at such faux pas. I blame this on the hyper-emotionalism being brought from the USA to the UK in which all friendships have to be the greatest ever with constant contact and all groups gather and fall apart like girls in a US high school playground with snubs seem as some heinous insult, even simply not acknowledging immediately or daily is seen in this way. Such attitudes, spill into the workplace. Thus, at 18, I wish I knew that most people do not take faux pas to heart and let them fester for days let alone years, but at 42, I would warn myself that perhaps my childhood experiences are more mainstream now.
People do not want the truth they want a quick answer. Being interested in many topics it took me many years to learn that even if people ask you a complex question they want a quick, simple answer with no context. I have to rein myself in sharply these days because somehow a lengthy answer is now taken as 'improper' especially in the workplace where it seems to be insulting to the 'time poor' staff. You have to keep thorough answers to your diary or your blog, most people want nothing lasting more than 3 sentences, you have to stick to simple concepts, generally engaging their prejudices, whether you are emailing or speaking to them. Challenging someone's view of something unless done very subtly is seen as an insult. At 18 I loved the complexity of ideas and events and assumed everyone else did and wanted to discuss them: they do not and will become irritated, even insulted, if you try.
Women do not like to have sex with virgins. I was never very successful with women, but realise that at 18 I should have been far less picky and simply have had sex with any woman who offered it. As a man, if you have not had sex by the time you are 21 then it is unlikely you ever will have sex. Women, no matter what their age, do not want to be a man's 'first'. The woman who was mine was incredibly angry when she found out and ended the relationship as she weirdly thought I would somehow be obsessed with her. Given her attitude I was clearly quite happy to be rid of her. Women expect a man to know precisely what he is doing, not matter how young he is. You need to read up as much as you can, get to know all the current jargon and never, ever admit to your first partner that she was the first, not even years later, because even then she will turn strange and may spurn you, even if you have had lots of sex with her by then. After 21, women will guess that you are a virgin anyway, it seems impossible to hide. So, whilst taking precautions, I certainly recommend all men, who want to have sex in their 20s and beyond, having sex with a woman before they turn 21 otherwise your chances of ever having it drop to almost zero.
Women are very complex anyway and the input of all the media means they are often not making decisions for themselves but making decisions selected by others. On one hand I wish I knew at 18 that some women will be gravely offended if you even dare to ask them out and you must be ready for how cutting they will be and how indignant that you dare ask. Conversely, I would say, it is amazing who women will be attracted to and you may feel that you are incredibly gawky and ugly but there is at least one, if not many more women you will meet who would at least like to sleep with you and perhaps have a long-term relationship. Certainly if a woman asks you out, it is usually genuine. I often thought I was being played with, but with hindsight, I see that whilst some women might want you simply to get them pregnant, the vast majority simply would not bother asking you if they did not feel that there was something good about being with you even short-term. I was always chasing women who had no interest in me and never knew how to handle those who actually had asked me out, thinking it had to be some kind of trick. In this still too heavily male-focused society, any woman who has made the effort to ask you out is worth going out with. The vast bulk of women of your age have no interest in you, so one who expresses an interest is to be treasured. The other thing I would say to my 18-year old self, is that the most unexpected girlfriends are often the most successful ones. We all have an ideal, but actually real happiness is found in the least expected place, in terms of a woman's interests, appearance, nationality, background, even age. If you really want happiness have an open mind.
Do not reveal anything much about yourself to work colleagues, it will be used against you. Never tell anyone if you are married or single or who your parents or siblings are or where you used to work, even where you holiday or what books or movies or food you like. All of these things will be taken and used by someone in your workplace to disadvantage you. Do not have family pictures on your desk or talk about your wife or parents, keep all of this secret. If you have to, fabricate a life that fits with your colleagues' prejudices about what a 'normal' person of your age and position has. Obviously, I would advise anyone to keep details available online about them to a minimum.
One thing I am glad I did adhere to when 18 is not to disrespect anyone, even if you disagree with their views, they are worthy of respect as being humans. Certainly if you run into a dictator or a torturer challenge them as far as you can (without endangering yourself or others), but almost all people you meet in normal life think they are doing right and are doing it for worthwhile motives. Even if what they are doing is wrong, do not lower yourself to become like them. You are unlikely to change them by disparaging them, but your mean-spiritedness is going to put other people who could be your allies, off you. As far as possible avoid unpleasant people and console yourself that they will pay a price whether you believe as a result of karma, being judged in the afterlife or by being left friendless because of their behaviour.
I would tell my 18-year old to go and visit more people. Even if it means lengthy journeys, actually visiting friends is a rare commodity which will become rarer as you get older and you will look back at missed opportunities to spend time with friends. It is important for your wellbeing to get out and see people. There will be ample time for sitting at home in the future. Travelling with people is a whole much harder thing, far more difficult than you could ever imagine and only worthwhile doing with individuals who can tolerate their life while travelling to be entirely different to everything they had at home, even if going camping in the UK or to a hotel in France, and who do not get frustrated when things turn out differently to what is expected. Do not plan too much, people jam holidays full of stuff, just absorbing the place is often enough, do not try to adhere to a rigid, packed itinerary, it will simply raise the chances for frustration and problems. Enjoying being away from home and with friends and family should be a far greater priority than seeing or doing everything you had considered doing. Only travel with sexual partners if married to them, no other set-up will stand a holiday. It is better for you to have short breaks and to holiday separately with same-sex friends or family until you have effectively become family to each other. So many good relationships are broken by holidays and I am far from being the only person to note this.
In terms of myself at 18 in terms of travel, I would see be less afraid than your mother about me travelling to places. I miss out a great deal in 1989 by not seeing the Berlin Wall before it fell and in 1995 in not going to Prague and Budapest, for fear that I would be robbed or not find someone to stay. My holidays cycling in France would have been better if I had not been terrified of not finding anything to eat on a Sunday. Whilst caution while travelling is sensible, fear actually reduces the experience and means it fails what the basic principle is of travelling, which is to have fun. I certainly wish I had had the courage to do things at university such as 'rag hitch hike' and gone on more random trips because succeeding at them would have built up my courage to travel more.
Another personal thing which would not be broadly applicable, would be to tell my 18-year old self not to be deluded into thinking that I could learn foreign languages or learn any martial art. I wasted a lot of time and money doing both, ultimately for absolutely no personal gain, and, a long the way a lot of stress and disappointment. Despite what you are told by the people wanting to market their courses or their club, not everyone can achieve success in these areas. It is certain I am an utter failure at trying to grasp foreign languages or do a martial art and yet I continued to delude myself that 'this time it will be different', it never has been. Finally giving up on Mandarin for the second time two years ago and chucking in fencing back in 2005 were long overdue admissions that I would never be good at not only these specifics but at these things in general. When I was younger I wondered if I should not have taken up the chance to study Japanese in Japan, but now know that was the correct decision. I certainly should not have gone to live in West Germany in 1989 as my grasp of the language was just as bad when I came back as when I went and all the good things I experienced there I could have experienced just as well as a tourist.
I would tell my 18-year old self that I would never be published. Though it was not as severe a situation then as now, I should have realised that there was never any chance that anyone would pay any attention to what I had written to want to publish it. There are tens of thousands of full-length books being written in the UK now and the vast majority of these will never be published. Before wordprocessors were common they were probably fewer in number, but certainly I wasted a lot of my life writing and editing stuff that no-one beyond myself is ever going to read and it is clear it will never be published. It was a massive delusion on my part and I should have spent my time doing something else and saving my cash. People do not get published because they have an ability to write good work, just look at the quantity of appalling books. They get published either because of luck or most commonly because of who they know.
One thing that I would have told my 18-year old self to do is to attend more public appearances by people, particularly politicians, historians, scientists and authors. I often could not stir myself to go to these things, but I severely regret that now. Despite our television, and now internet age, there is nothing like actually being in a room with someone you admire or, conversely, strongly disagree with and I wish I had taken up far more of the opportunities that were presented to me to do this.
I would also tell my 18-year old self that whilst hard work is vital, it never guarantees anything. Working until 9 p.m. most evenings of the week studying in the library does not get you a 1st class degree. If I had stopped at 5 p.m., I probably would have still got a 2.1, but been able to do more of the things above. I certainly warn my 18-year old self at 21 not to take the advice of what turned out to be a very foolish lecturer, and take time every day to read the newspaper. Following that suggestion in my final year at university caused immense difficulties. I lost hours of time which I should have been spending on my work, for absolutely no personal gain. I knew more about day-to-day events of those months but they have given me no benefit then or since.
Anyway, these are the things that I wish I had known at 18. I am a person who, when anything goes wrong, always analyses how better it might have turned out if I had made different choices. In most cases, living in the UK in the times I have done, there is little change I could have made. Getting some slightly different jobs would have made a huge difference, but if this recent glut of interviews has shown me, I have minimal control over which job I get, and the same applies for where I have lived, too often it has been Hobson's Choice. However, if I had been able to get these thoughts back to my 18-year old self, I think a lot of the time between the difficult times would have been a lot happier and certainly satisfying than it turned out to be. I think this is because unlike, perhaps Fred Furedi, there are very few parts of my life that if I had the chance to change them in some way, I would want to leave them just as I experienced them.
I am not as old as Furedi, but I have experienced quite a bit of life. I know that I came from a privileged background: my parents never divorced; we lived in the same house all through my youth; we lived in a middle class town in southern England not hit by unemployment and social problems as much of England was; I was not sexually abused (though I was physically bullied by peers and constantly humiliated by my parents who portrayed me as looking like someone mentally disabled); I had friends (though fewer than I realised); I had a room of my own to sleep in; I was well fed but not obese and when I went to bed it was not wet or cold. I must say, however, that I have been incredibly disappointed with my life. If I had written this posting some months or years ago, I might be more positive, but facing losing my house and having no work for months is clearly going to alter my view of things and make a lot of what I have done in recent years seem entirely wasted.
I will start with Furedi's five points and then add some of my own. In terms of listening, I agree up to a point, but the more I have heard the more I have heard the same. I have been struck by how small minded and bigoted the average person is. I have lost count of how many times I have been told that the problems of the country are down to immigrants with absolutely no evidence. Such things are repeated so often that they are no longer challenged. The same with stuff around the Thatcherite agenda, such as deregulation and privatisation; that large numbers of people are defrauding the state and millions are getting more than their fair share. I am sick of this stuff being repeated to me as if it is acceptable and beyond challenging. I do not know how I would have reacted if at 18 I would have known this, I guess I would have terminated conversations with many people much sooner, simply walked away. It would be better to be thought peculiar than to listen to hours and hours of this rubbish which I must have heard in my life, simply wasting time I could have spent reading a book.
In terms of Furedi's question everything, I think there is no point. I thought this was the case when I was a child, but I think I was misled by the lingering radical lecturers at my university who had been students in the 1960s and had not thrown off such attitudes even with their prosperity and success (more likely because of them). Basically, unless you are a member of the ultra-rich in our society, you are never going to be able to change anything. There is no point questioning what happens. Often it will be unfair and irrational, but whether it is how your company does things or how you are taught or how the country is run, you are in a position which means you can do absolutely nothing about it. Even if you question it, the answer will usually be irrational and refer to habit or tradition and you cannot break that down. This particularly applies in the workplace. Most offices, factories, warehouses, shops, etc. have methods which are wasteful in terms of time and resources but never try to challenge these and suggest a better way, it will simply cause you to be complained about as a troublemaker or naive and certainly not being wortwhile employing. An episode of the US series 'Malcolm in the Middle' (2000-06 in USA). Teenager Malcolm gets a job working in a warehouse where his mother works. He is charged with squashing up empty cardboard boxes and then taking them to the refuse. The pattern is that the boxes are loaded into a lift taken down a floor, taken into the box-squashing area, squashed, loaded back into the lift, taken back up a floor and then to the refuse container. To speed things up Malcolm squashes them on the floor they start off on and then takes them over to the refuse container, so saving time and electricity. He receives an official report against him for not complying to procedure. This kind of thing happens in every warehouse in the UK and in every office or shop or factory there is similar behaviour, but unless you want to lose your job do not challenge it. In terms of wrongs in our world, complain about things, shout and protest about how wrong they are, but do not waste your effort questioning most things as you simply irritate people and generally they can give you no answer which makes any sense. Save your effort.
Intuition is useless, you might as well toss a coin or throw a dice to decide the step to take in any situation. Even when you have lived life it is impossible to know enough to make a judgement that will save you from harm or discomfort. The best you can do is learn as much as you can about a situation and at least dodge some but certainly not all of the unpleasant consequences, e.g. use a condom when having sex should spare you from a pregnancy developing or getting a STI, but you are unlikely to avoid your partner's ex-boyfriend/girlfriend attacking you jealously, unless you have researched your partner's background and choose a different location or time to have sex with the person. Intuition is far too often affected by superstition and prejudice and so often blinds you to the full range of options and in fact can channel you down fixed, bad paths and leave you with no alternatives that you might otherwise have seen.
As I say I cannot comment on dealing with 'my' children. I certainly think it is worthwhile checking your motives when engaging with anyone not on any moral basis but because it will allow you to see why you are truly doing something and whether that motivation is liable to alter or more likely flag as time passes. A clear example is joining a club or activity because you know someone you are attracted to is a member/participant. That is a bad motive. The likely outcome is that you will be stuck doing something you do not enjoy and they will not be interested in you anyway. You will endure doing something you do not like and wasting time that could be spent on more enjoyable things for you. I am not saying just be a hedonist, but that your focus should be on the central activity not ulterior motives or possible by-products of doing that thing.
Things are always far worse than they seem. As I grow older I adhere to the phrase 'it is later than you think', as used in a religious context, i.e. you must change your life and seek salvation as soon as possible because you are going to be judged sooner than you believe. I do not see it in that particular way, but I think it is a good attitude when thinking about your life. Often minor things happen, such as something goes wrong with your car or your house or there is trouble in your workplace. Too many people, myself included, think, 'it is only minor, I have time to get it sorted'. No, not only is it already too late when the problem becomes apparent, it is going to get worse, because one problem triggers a whole series. You will find the repair to the car costs more than you think so you have less money or you get to work late and steps begin to remove you from your job. In the current economic climate, no job is safe, even teachers and nurses could lose their jobs very quickly. You constantly need to be looking ahead for potential problems. You constantly need to be saving what you can to prepare for the dire situations that come up in your life. Even then you have to recognise you cannot foresee everything and will get caught out unexpectedly. Unfortunately there is nothing that you can do about that, it is part of life. I know now that when I was teenager I was not cautious enough and rather than think I could survive in the business I dreamt of going into, I should have trained as an accountant or a lawyer and right throughout my life I would have avoided things like living in an unheated room above a chipshop sharing a bathroom with seven other people and losing the house I bought now. Always be prepared for the worst that you can imagine, because, in reality, life will be even worse than that. Anyone who tries to follow dreams, especially in their careers, will suffer badly. Find the most secure occupation you can and cling to it; keep retraining constantly to widen your options and even then be prepared for not getting even a fraction of what you want.
Moving on from Furedi's points there are a few others of my own. The first is that most people quickly forget when you have said something in passing that upset them. I often believed I had offended people by what I had said and worried about it greatly and assumed they would hold a grudge against me. Perhaps this stemmed from childhood experiences when people in my district constantly referred to mistakes of the past. I was once at a party and turned down a dessert saying I was not allowed by my parents to have 'packet food' (I had assumed wrongly that it was 'Angel Delight' a very popular, very sweet dessert in a packet of the time) as they were into self-sufficiency and homegrown stuff at the time, the mid-1970s. This offended my friend's mother who had put a lot of effort into the dessert. Running into the woman more than 12 years later she immediately challenged me on what I had said at the age of 8 and was clearly still unhappy about it. However, as life has gone on, I have found that people generally forget faux pas and inadvertently insulting comments incredibly quickly. Not everyone, of course, but the bulk. I do have a concern that in the age of social networking, we are all now experiencing longer duration of anger at such faux pas. I blame this on the hyper-emotionalism being brought from the USA to the UK in which all friendships have to be the greatest ever with constant contact and all groups gather and fall apart like girls in a US high school playground with snubs seem as some heinous insult, even simply not acknowledging immediately or daily is seen in this way. Such attitudes, spill into the workplace. Thus, at 18, I wish I knew that most people do not take faux pas to heart and let them fester for days let alone years, but at 42, I would warn myself that perhaps my childhood experiences are more mainstream now.
People do not want the truth they want a quick answer. Being interested in many topics it took me many years to learn that even if people ask you a complex question they want a quick, simple answer with no context. I have to rein myself in sharply these days because somehow a lengthy answer is now taken as 'improper' especially in the workplace where it seems to be insulting to the 'time poor' staff. You have to keep thorough answers to your diary or your blog, most people want nothing lasting more than 3 sentences, you have to stick to simple concepts, generally engaging their prejudices, whether you are emailing or speaking to them. Challenging someone's view of something unless done very subtly is seen as an insult. At 18 I loved the complexity of ideas and events and assumed everyone else did and wanted to discuss them: they do not and will become irritated, even insulted, if you try.
Women do not like to have sex with virgins. I was never very successful with women, but realise that at 18 I should have been far less picky and simply have had sex with any woman who offered it. As a man, if you have not had sex by the time you are 21 then it is unlikely you ever will have sex. Women, no matter what their age, do not want to be a man's 'first'. The woman who was mine was incredibly angry when she found out and ended the relationship as she weirdly thought I would somehow be obsessed with her. Given her attitude I was clearly quite happy to be rid of her. Women expect a man to know precisely what he is doing, not matter how young he is. You need to read up as much as you can, get to know all the current jargon and never, ever admit to your first partner that she was the first, not even years later, because even then she will turn strange and may spurn you, even if you have had lots of sex with her by then. After 21, women will guess that you are a virgin anyway, it seems impossible to hide. So, whilst taking precautions, I certainly recommend all men, who want to have sex in their 20s and beyond, having sex with a woman before they turn 21 otherwise your chances of ever having it drop to almost zero.
Women are very complex anyway and the input of all the media means they are often not making decisions for themselves but making decisions selected by others. On one hand I wish I knew at 18 that some women will be gravely offended if you even dare to ask them out and you must be ready for how cutting they will be and how indignant that you dare ask. Conversely, I would say, it is amazing who women will be attracted to and you may feel that you are incredibly gawky and ugly but there is at least one, if not many more women you will meet who would at least like to sleep with you and perhaps have a long-term relationship. Certainly if a woman asks you out, it is usually genuine. I often thought I was being played with, but with hindsight, I see that whilst some women might want you simply to get them pregnant, the vast majority simply would not bother asking you if they did not feel that there was something good about being with you even short-term. I was always chasing women who had no interest in me and never knew how to handle those who actually had asked me out, thinking it had to be some kind of trick. In this still too heavily male-focused society, any woman who has made the effort to ask you out is worth going out with. The vast bulk of women of your age have no interest in you, so one who expresses an interest is to be treasured. The other thing I would say to my 18-year old self, is that the most unexpected girlfriends are often the most successful ones. We all have an ideal, but actually real happiness is found in the least expected place, in terms of a woman's interests, appearance, nationality, background, even age. If you really want happiness have an open mind.
Do not reveal anything much about yourself to work colleagues, it will be used against you. Never tell anyone if you are married or single or who your parents or siblings are or where you used to work, even where you holiday or what books or movies or food you like. All of these things will be taken and used by someone in your workplace to disadvantage you. Do not have family pictures on your desk or talk about your wife or parents, keep all of this secret. If you have to, fabricate a life that fits with your colleagues' prejudices about what a 'normal' person of your age and position has. Obviously, I would advise anyone to keep details available online about them to a minimum.
One thing I am glad I did adhere to when 18 is not to disrespect anyone, even if you disagree with their views, they are worthy of respect as being humans. Certainly if you run into a dictator or a torturer challenge them as far as you can (without endangering yourself or others), but almost all people you meet in normal life think they are doing right and are doing it for worthwhile motives. Even if what they are doing is wrong, do not lower yourself to become like them. You are unlikely to change them by disparaging them, but your mean-spiritedness is going to put other people who could be your allies, off you. As far as possible avoid unpleasant people and console yourself that they will pay a price whether you believe as a result of karma, being judged in the afterlife or by being left friendless because of their behaviour.
I would tell my 18-year old to go and visit more people. Even if it means lengthy journeys, actually visiting friends is a rare commodity which will become rarer as you get older and you will look back at missed opportunities to spend time with friends. It is important for your wellbeing to get out and see people. There will be ample time for sitting at home in the future. Travelling with people is a whole much harder thing, far more difficult than you could ever imagine and only worthwhile doing with individuals who can tolerate their life while travelling to be entirely different to everything they had at home, even if going camping in the UK or to a hotel in France, and who do not get frustrated when things turn out differently to what is expected. Do not plan too much, people jam holidays full of stuff, just absorbing the place is often enough, do not try to adhere to a rigid, packed itinerary, it will simply raise the chances for frustration and problems. Enjoying being away from home and with friends and family should be a far greater priority than seeing or doing everything you had considered doing. Only travel with sexual partners if married to them, no other set-up will stand a holiday. It is better for you to have short breaks and to holiday separately with same-sex friends or family until you have effectively become family to each other. So many good relationships are broken by holidays and I am far from being the only person to note this.
In terms of myself at 18 in terms of travel, I would see be less afraid than your mother about me travelling to places. I miss out a great deal in 1989 by not seeing the Berlin Wall before it fell and in 1995 in not going to Prague and Budapest, for fear that I would be robbed or not find someone to stay. My holidays cycling in France would have been better if I had not been terrified of not finding anything to eat on a Sunday. Whilst caution while travelling is sensible, fear actually reduces the experience and means it fails what the basic principle is of travelling, which is to have fun. I certainly wish I had had the courage to do things at university such as 'rag hitch hike' and gone on more random trips because succeeding at them would have built up my courage to travel more.
Another personal thing which would not be broadly applicable, would be to tell my 18-year old self not to be deluded into thinking that I could learn foreign languages or learn any martial art. I wasted a lot of time and money doing both, ultimately for absolutely no personal gain, and, a long the way a lot of stress and disappointment. Despite what you are told by the people wanting to market their courses or their club, not everyone can achieve success in these areas. It is certain I am an utter failure at trying to grasp foreign languages or do a martial art and yet I continued to delude myself that 'this time it will be different', it never has been. Finally giving up on Mandarin for the second time two years ago and chucking in fencing back in 2005 were long overdue admissions that I would never be good at not only these specifics but at these things in general. When I was younger I wondered if I should not have taken up the chance to study Japanese in Japan, but now know that was the correct decision. I certainly should not have gone to live in West Germany in 1989 as my grasp of the language was just as bad when I came back as when I went and all the good things I experienced there I could have experienced just as well as a tourist.
I would tell my 18-year old self that I would never be published. Though it was not as severe a situation then as now, I should have realised that there was never any chance that anyone would pay any attention to what I had written to want to publish it. There are tens of thousands of full-length books being written in the UK now and the vast majority of these will never be published. Before wordprocessors were common they were probably fewer in number, but certainly I wasted a lot of my life writing and editing stuff that no-one beyond myself is ever going to read and it is clear it will never be published. It was a massive delusion on my part and I should have spent my time doing something else and saving my cash. People do not get published because they have an ability to write good work, just look at the quantity of appalling books. They get published either because of luck or most commonly because of who they know.
One thing that I would have told my 18-year old self to do is to attend more public appearances by people, particularly politicians, historians, scientists and authors. I often could not stir myself to go to these things, but I severely regret that now. Despite our television, and now internet age, there is nothing like actually being in a room with someone you admire or, conversely, strongly disagree with and I wish I had taken up far more of the opportunities that were presented to me to do this.
I would also tell my 18-year old self that whilst hard work is vital, it never guarantees anything. Working until 9 p.m. most evenings of the week studying in the library does not get you a 1st class degree. If I had stopped at 5 p.m., I probably would have still got a 2.1, but been able to do more of the things above. I certainly warn my 18-year old self at 21 not to take the advice of what turned out to be a very foolish lecturer, and take time every day to read the newspaper. Following that suggestion in my final year at university caused immense difficulties. I lost hours of time which I should have been spending on my work, for absolutely no personal gain. I knew more about day-to-day events of those months but they have given me no benefit then or since.
Anyway, these are the things that I wish I had known at 18. I am a person who, when anything goes wrong, always analyses how better it might have turned out if I had made different choices. In most cases, living in the UK in the times I have done, there is little change I could have made. Getting some slightly different jobs would have made a huge difference, but if this recent glut of interviews has shown me, I have minimal control over which job I get, and the same applies for where I have lived, too often it has been Hobson's Choice. However, if I had been able to get these thoughts back to my 18-year old self, I think a lot of the time between the difficult times would have been a lot happier and certainly satisfying than it turned out to be. I think this is because unlike, perhaps Fred Furedi, there are very few parts of my life that if I had the chance to change them in some way, I would want to leave them just as I experienced them.
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
British People: Don't Be Foolish in Moving Abroad
It must be fifteen years or so since programmes about British people moving abroad predominantly to France, Spain or the USA began appearing on televisions over here. These programmes were matched by numerous newspaper articles too. For some reason in the 1990s, probably when UK house prices got so out of step with the equivalent properties in continental Europe it seemed that there was a flurry of Britons uprooting and moving abroad. In the bulk of cases this was a failure as programme after programme has shown. Of course wealthy people have always had properties in many countries but they rarely live in them all year round and with their independent wealth they have had no need to find a job or to use the local health or education facilities they can buy all of this in. The British middle classes, however, who make up the people who have tried to relocate since the 1990s do not have the wealth to make themselves immune from these things and so have suffered. I was still surprised to read of a family this weekend still make the same errors which I thought had become common knowledge over a decade ago.
What are the common mistakes that middle class families keep making? The first is work. The economies of France, Spain and the USA have had higher unemployment than the UK through the past decade. In addition, there are particular rules, which especially in France almost lock you into a career from the time you are at school. It is not a flexible labour market in the way the UK was forced to become in the 1980s which has resulted in 160,000 French people working in London alone even in the 1990s and probably far more now. If French or Spanish people who know the local market, have the appropriate qualifications and can speak the language cannot find work, then why do you think you are any different? Why do you not accept you are in a worse position? Of course people have always moved to countries to find work, but as British people should be aware but seemed to turn a blind-eye to, immigrants are always in worse jobs than their qualifications and skills would permit them (if the work was there) in their home countries. I have met qualified Czech nurses working as care assistants, women with economics degrees from Sri Lanka working as clerks, how many qualified Polish men are currently simply labourers on British building sites? So if you are going to behave like a migrant you are going to have to take the work of a migrant which means casual manual labour. Your income will fall sharply and you will not get the benefits of paid office work that would do in the UK.
British people of all classes despise migrants and yet they seem to be expect to be welcomed into a foreign country as great friends. Why do not they expect to be treated the same was as they treat Poles coming to the UK? When they go to France or Spain or elsewhere they of course are making themselves (and possibly their children) as additional economic burdens/competition on the country. Australia which is probably the most bigoted English-speaking country, makes this very explicit and wants no-one no matter their national or ethnic background, unless they can support themselves entirely or fill specific labour shortages in the economy. Canada is more flexible because it keeps haemorraging people of all kinds to the USA. France and Spain do not need British people entering their economies. Due to the rules of the EU they cannot stop them, but Britons should not expect to prosper in their economies, though, surprisingly the French and Spanish do not seem as hostile to the British as they should be. The British somehow never think themselves as immigrants and never do the things that immigrants sensibly do such as first move to an area where there are already people from your country and contacts back home. This is because the British, unlike most other nationalities on the planet, actually despise other people from their own nation. This, however, makes it even tougher for the British as migrants than it is for other nationalities. I do not know any other country's people who behave the same way, though I have seen Germans arguing among themselves and Americans too. Partly I think it is because in big populations there are actually many nations and Bavarians should mix with Bavarians and Mid-Westerners with Mid-Westerners rather than Germans or Americans per se. The British should be aware of the same and so not only head to an area with Britons but head to an area with people from the West Midlands or from the Home Counties or from Yorkshire or face as much culture clash as between themselves and the local population.
People complain that it takes 5 years of living in a community in a foreign country before they get to know anyone. Is that at all surprising? I have lived in a range of cities across the UK and I find it equally as difficult to get to know people even when they have the same language and culture as me. Societies are incredibly atomised these days with no-one feeling they owe anything to the local community. In the UK it is typical never to learn the name of your neighbour until they die. You are far more likely to be emailing with someone you know in Australia with the same interests than to actually talk with your next door neighbour. So why would you expect it to be any different when you move to another country? Think how you and your neighbours treat the Polish family or the Somali family who have moved in at the end of your street in the UK. Not only do you not talk to them but you complain that they smell, have too many children and imply they are the cause of a rise in crime in your neighbourhood. In fact they are no different to what you are going to be when you move to France, Spain or the USA, ordinary people trying to get by. So think yourself into their shoes when you move abroad and then do not wonder why you have not got to know any of the locals.
One huge error Britons moving abroad make is to change too much. If you have no experience at running a bed-and-breakfast in the UK why do you think you will be able to do it in France? Very few people in the UK have any experience at working a vineyard so again why do they think they can do it in France? It is quite likely if they moved to Blackpool to over a B&B or to Sussex to run a farm or to Kent to run an orchard they would equally fail. Why suddenly think if you have been a civil servant for the past thirty years that you are suddenly capable of becoming a farmer or a bed-and-breakfast landlord/lady? You would fail in the UK you are going to fail even faster doing those things in a foreign country. Be realistic. The other thing is the Britons do not move from a British suburb to a French suburb, they almost always move to some remote rural area and then find it difficult when they do not have the local facilities they had back home. They would find exactly the same difficulty if they moved to the Scottish Highlands or the Yorkshire Moors or the Brecon Beacons of Wales. These are rural areas with all the difficulties of rural areas. That is why people have been leaving them for urban areas for the past 200 years. It is no different in France and Spain. Most French and Spanish people want to get out of those areas. The houses the Britons buy, similarly need a lot of work. It would be difficult to do them up in the UK and again twice as hard in a foreign country where ignorant of the rules and regulations as you are, they are in foreign languages. Think about it. It would be tough to go to such a house in such an area in the UK, why do you delude yourself it will be any easier in another country? If you must do this, go first to an area like the one you come from, move to a suburb and then buy a weekend house in the country, not make the huge leap all at once. Also a dump of a house is a dump of house no matter what country it is located in. It is clear that many French and Spanish know they can foist dumps on deluded Britons, places that would otherwise be demolished (I know I have stayed in some of them!). It is funny that whilst not happy to live like immigrants Britons are happy to live like poor peasants of the 19th century. Have we not shaken off the delusions of the 18th Arcadian Idyll thinking? It was nasty enough living as a peasant then, it is no different now. Shun rundown farmhouses, go for the kind of house you would live in back in the UK.
British people move abroad because they think they like the culture, the food, the different attitude to life. That is probably fine for a holiday but living it day-to-day is very different. British people yearn for the brands they had back home. In particular they whine about the short opening hours and everything being closed on a Sunday and everyone going to church. They want to be queuing at the DIY stores and being able to browse round the DVD stores or buy their groceries on Sunday morning. Britain has become a 24-hour consumer culture in a way that no other country in Europe has become. We are addicted to shopping and it is the main hobby in the UK. Whereas French men will go fishing and French women will sit and do some embroidery and the young people go out on bikes or camp or hang around ice cream cafes, both sexes and all ages in the UK simply want to shop. They often lack any hobby skills or any desire to acquire them. British people consume alone and get hostile to other people in their ways. We have shed any community for personal consumption. The British do not go to church, so though the Americans are big consumers they have not also opted out of the church policing of their behaviour though also they have not shaken off its communal aspects. British people do not do politics either, so whereas a French person or a Spaniard will find community in the political parties they follow the British do not do that either. Britons struggle hard to be remote from each other, so why are they surprised when they are isolated in other settings. If you want to be able to shop all day on Sunday, do not leave the UK. Do not move to a small French village and whine that it looks like the UK in the 1970s with all the shops shut. You cannot shop on demand as you are used to in the UK. Talk to Australians and people from Persian Gulf states living in the UK, both of whom have longer opening hours than the UK and you will experience how you will feel when you move abroad. If you find it difficult to adapt to the culture do not expect a whole country to change its ways to suit you. If you like France and its ways then fine, but if you do not then why are you thinking of going to live there and also probably in an area where it is at its most extreme? There are not loads of facilities open on a Sunday in rural England why should it be any different in rural Spain? To some degree what British people envisage when they think of living in another country is a kind of theme park version of that country which bears as little relevance to the country as it really is as visiting a version of Britain where people either are cockneys in flat caps or gentlemen in top hats and people take tea at four and we all drive minis or ride in red London buses. Many foreigners expect the UK to be like that, of course it is not and so neither is France or Spain or the USA the way we envisage it. Either tolerate the differences or stay at home.
Children. This is the worst aspect of Britons moving abroad. The standard pattern of immigration is for a young man to go ahead and once established for them to bring over a female partner and then other family members. It can take decades before the whole family is relocated. Is this how the British do it when they emigrate? No, they take school-aged children with them from the start and wonder why they are so bitter. Again, look at the experience when you move within the UK and then anticipate that magnified when you move abroad. Children find it very difficult to make friends especially these days when parents are so picky about the people they associate with and also no-one lets their children go anywhere not least to the park or into the street without them being closely monitored. Children making friends these days is as complicated as arranging a marriage. If you move just a few miles away or your child fails to get into the school that their friends get into then there is major trauma and they feel cut off and ostracised. Imagine how much harder it is for them to be dumped into a school where people speak a different language, watch different television programmes, have a different set of assumptions and values? British people complain about the immigrants who are unaware of British culture and do not speak English and then proceed to go and do exactly the same by dumping their children into French or Spanish or US schools and expecting the child and their teachers to coach (and US culture is very different from UK culture, especially in terms of education, than most US and UK people think). This is cruelty to your child. It also means that they have no chance of ever getting a good job. By moving abroad you are effectively condemning them to years working at a remedial level. They will be blocked out of a good job and they will always be an outside in the country you have made their home. It is tough enough growing up in the modern world, but you are handicapping them right from the beginning. Most Britons move abroad when they have young children partly this is because it is the best time financially and when they have mad dreams. The UK government should ban it and people should only be allowed to go abroad either before they have children or when they have retired. They should at least be compelled to leave their children with relatives until the parents have work and a habitable house in the country of destination. The children should be barred from joining their parents until they are skilled in the language and culture of the destination country.
Middle class parents superficially put a lot of effort into getting a good start for their children then throw them into circumstances which means they will never achieve the income or success that they have achieved. I met a South African woman who had come to the UK to do a PhD bringing her school-aged children with her. She might be improving her situation but you know because they have been thrust into the UK system and will then be snatched back out again three years later that they will never get the chance to reach PhD level in their studies and probably will not even get a degree. All countries now have such integrated education systems that not having the child follow through condemns them to second-rate education and lacking the qualifications or skills to either thrive back in their original country or in the one they have been dumped into. Parents sacrifice their children for their ill-informed dreams of a better (in fact usually far worse) life abroad. Possibly the best people to emigrate anywhere are the retired. Their children have gone and they do not need to find work in the country they are moving to. They may have a challenge in finding friends, so again they should not remove to remote areas. Remember that their partner might die and leave them alone (France and Spain are probably better for widowed women than the UK is, Australia is far worse given how male-orientated a society it is). Remember also that health care can be very different to back home and you will need the vocabulary to work with it.
Language skills. Well, I have already spoken about how poor the British are at speaking foreign languages and those moving abroad seem to make no effort to gain those skills before going. Their children have no opportunity to do so because British schools are so poor at teaching languages and start so late. Apparently 70% of British school pupils, according to the BBC aged 11-18 want to live work and live abroad, 55% of these want to go to USA and 52% want Australia (clearly they could opt for more than one destination), but 47% wanted to go to Spain and 35% each to France and Italy. The reasons given are pathetic, 62% wanted to move for better weather and 53% for a lower cost of living and yet since 2004 there has been a fall of 30% in the number of pupils taking GCSE (taken at 16) French to around 200,000 and less than 80,000 do German GCSE compared to 120,000 back in 2004. Spanish is rising but only to 67,000 students taking it this year. These figures compare to the 750,000 pupils who took GCSEs this year in England, Wales and Northern Ireland with 150,000 doing the equivalent Standard at SCE exams in Scotland. So whilst 70% of pupils want to work abroad about 40% are studying a foreign language even at basic level. British people entirely lack the skills to learn and speak foreign languages, so why do so many of them kid themselves (200,000 have moved to France now) that they can function abroad? They struggle when dealing with being there on holiday so why do they think they can deal with buying a house, taxation, work, education?
People will always want to emigrate. Britain is in a deteriorating position and so I can understand why many British people want to get out. However, the bulk of Britons who leave do so with a terribly inaccurate view of the life they are going to have. They are mistaken in so much, mistaken about things they are going to do which would come unstuck even if they remained in the UK. They do not realise that all immigrants have a tough life and have poorer opportunities than the circumstance they have often left behind, but are driven by more powerful motives such as mass unemployment, poverty or persecution. If you are going to emigrate your life is going to be very hard, it is not a holiday, it is tearing up your whole life and falling into a less amenable position. However, Britons moving abroad can reduce the challenges. Be aware things will be very different from back home. Be aware you will be isolated for many years. Do not try to change too many things, move into work and an area similar to what you are leaving behind in the UK. Do not buy a dump of a house in a remote area that you would not think twice about buying in the UK. Move to an area where there are other Britons like yourselves who can support you a little. Do not take children with you, you are condemning them to a terrible life if you do. Do start learning the language and culture 3-5 years before you consider leaving. I do hope we stop seeing and reading about British families who have wrecked their lives and particularly those of their children by chasing after some totally unrealistic fantasy in a foreign country. If you must do it, do not be so brainless or unrealistic as most of these people. The better option is to buy a holiday home that you can come back from.
What are the common mistakes that middle class families keep making? The first is work. The economies of France, Spain and the USA have had higher unemployment than the UK through the past decade. In addition, there are particular rules, which especially in France almost lock you into a career from the time you are at school. It is not a flexible labour market in the way the UK was forced to become in the 1980s which has resulted in 160,000 French people working in London alone even in the 1990s and probably far more now. If French or Spanish people who know the local market, have the appropriate qualifications and can speak the language cannot find work, then why do you think you are any different? Why do you not accept you are in a worse position? Of course people have always moved to countries to find work, but as British people should be aware but seemed to turn a blind-eye to, immigrants are always in worse jobs than their qualifications and skills would permit them (if the work was there) in their home countries. I have met qualified Czech nurses working as care assistants, women with economics degrees from Sri Lanka working as clerks, how many qualified Polish men are currently simply labourers on British building sites? So if you are going to behave like a migrant you are going to have to take the work of a migrant which means casual manual labour. Your income will fall sharply and you will not get the benefits of paid office work that would do in the UK.
British people of all classes despise migrants and yet they seem to be expect to be welcomed into a foreign country as great friends. Why do not they expect to be treated the same was as they treat Poles coming to the UK? When they go to France or Spain or elsewhere they of course are making themselves (and possibly their children) as additional economic burdens/competition on the country. Australia which is probably the most bigoted English-speaking country, makes this very explicit and wants no-one no matter their national or ethnic background, unless they can support themselves entirely or fill specific labour shortages in the economy. Canada is more flexible because it keeps haemorraging people of all kinds to the USA. France and Spain do not need British people entering their economies. Due to the rules of the EU they cannot stop them, but Britons should not expect to prosper in their economies, though, surprisingly the French and Spanish do not seem as hostile to the British as they should be. The British somehow never think themselves as immigrants and never do the things that immigrants sensibly do such as first move to an area where there are already people from your country and contacts back home. This is because the British, unlike most other nationalities on the planet, actually despise other people from their own nation. This, however, makes it even tougher for the British as migrants than it is for other nationalities. I do not know any other country's people who behave the same way, though I have seen Germans arguing among themselves and Americans too. Partly I think it is because in big populations there are actually many nations and Bavarians should mix with Bavarians and Mid-Westerners with Mid-Westerners rather than Germans or Americans per se. The British should be aware of the same and so not only head to an area with Britons but head to an area with people from the West Midlands or from the Home Counties or from Yorkshire or face as much culture clash as between themselves and the local population.
People complain that it takes 5 years of living in a community in a foreign country before they get to know anyone. Is that at all surprising? I have lived in a range of cities across the UK and I find it equally as difficult to get to know people even when they have the same language and culture as me. Societies are incredibly atomised these days with no-one feeling they owe anything to the local community. In the UK it is typical never to learn the name of your neighbour until they die. You are far more likely to be emailing with someone you know in Australia with the same interests than to actually talk with your next door neighbour. So why would you expect it to be any different when you move to another country? Think how you and your neighbours treat the Polish family or the Somali family who have moved in at the end of your street in the UK. Not only do you not talk to them but you complain that they smell, have too many children and imply they are the cause of a rise in crime in your neighbourhood. In fact they are no different to what you are going to be when you move to France, Spain or the USA, ordinary people trying to get by. So think yourself into their shoes when you move abroad and then do not wonder why you have not got to know any of the locals.
One huge error Britons moving abroad make is to change too much. If you have no experience at running a bed-and-breakfast in the UK why do you think you will be able to do it in France? Very few people in the UK have any experience at working a vineyard so again why do they think they can do it in France? It is quite likely if they moved to Blackpool to over a B&B or to Sussex to run a farm or to Kent to run an orchard they would equally fail. Why suddenly think if you have been a civil servant for the past thirty years that you are suddenly capable of becoming a farmer or a bed-and-breakfast landlord/lady? You would fail in the UK you are going to fail even faster doing those things in a foreign country. Be realistic. The other thing is the Britons do not move from a British suburb to a French suburb, they almost always move to some remote rural area and then find it difficult when they do not have the local facilities they had back home. They would find exactly the same difficulty if they moved to the Scottish Highlands or the Yorkshire Moors or the Brecon Beacons of Wales. These are rural areas with all the difficulties of rural areas. That is why people have been leaving them for urban areas for the past 200 years. It is no different in France and Spain. Most French and Spanish people want to get out of those areas. The houses the Britons buy, similarly need a lot of work. It would be difficult to do them up in the UK and again twice as hard in a foreign country where ignorant of the rules and regulations as you are, they are in foreign languages. Think about it. It would be tough to go to such a house in such an area in the UK, why do you delude yourself it will be any easier in another country? If you must do this, go first to an area like the one you come from, move to a suburb and then buy a weekend house in the country, not make the huge leap all at once. Also a dump of a house is a dump of house no matter what country it is located in. It is clear that many French and Spanish know they can foist dumps on deluded Britons, places that would otherwise be demolished (I know I have stayed in some of them!). It is funny that whilst not happy to live like immigrants Britons are happy to live like poor peasants of the 19th century. Have we not shaken off the delusions of the 18th Arcadian Idyll thinking? It was nasty enough living as a peasant then, it is no different now. Shun rundown farmhouses, go for the kind of house you would live in back in the UK.
British people move abroad because they think they like the culture, the food, the different attitude to life. That is probably fine for a holiday but living it day-to-day is very different. British people yearn for the brands they had back home. In particular they whine about the short opening hours and everything being closed on a Sunday and everyone going to church. They want to be queuing at the DIY stores and being able to browse round the DVD stores or buy their groceries on Sunday morning. Britain has become a 24-hour consumer culture in a way that no other country in Europe has become. We are addicted to shopping and it is the main hobby in the UK. Whereas French men will go fishing and French women will sit and do some embroidery and the young people go out on bikes or camp or hang around ice cream cafes, both sexes and all ages in the UK simply want to shop. They often lack any hobby skills or any desire to acquire them. British people consume alone and get hostile to other people in their ways. We have shed any community for personal consumption. The British do not go to church, so though the Americans are big consumers they have not also opted out of the church policing of their behaviour though also they have not shaken off its communal aspects. British people do not do politics either, so whereas a French person or a Spaniard will find community in the political parties they follow the British do not do that either. Britons struggle hard to be remote from each other, so why are they surprised when they are isolated in other settings. If you want to be able to shop all day on Sunday, do not leave the UK. Do not move to a small French village and whine that it looks like the UK in the 1970s with all the shops shut. You cannot shop on demand as you are used to in the UK. Talk to Australians and people from Persian Gulf states living in the UK, both of whom have longer opening hours than the UK and you will experience how you will feel when you move abroad. If you find it difficult to adapt to the culture do not expect a whole country to change its ways to suit you. If you like France and its ways then fine, but if you do not then why are you thinking of going to live there and also probably in an area where it is at its most extreme? There are not loads of facilities open on a Sunday in rural England why should it be any different in rural Spain? To some degree what British people envisage when they think of living in another country is a kind of theme park version of that country which bears as little relevance to the country as it really is as visiting a version of Britain where people either are cockneys in flat caps or gentlemen in top hats and people take tea at four and we all drive minis or ride in red London buses. Many foreigners expect the UK to be like that, of course it is not and so neither is France or Spain or the USA the way we envisage it. Either tolerate the differences or stay at home.
Children. This is the worst aspect of Britons moving abroad. The standard pattern of immigration is for a young man to go ahead and once established for them to bring over a female partner and then other family members. It can take decades before the whole family is relocated. Is this how the British do it when they emigrate? No, they take school-aged children with them from the start and wonder why they are so bitter. Again, look at the experience when you move within the UK and then anticipate that magnified when you move abroad. Children find it very difficult to make friends especially these days when parents are so picky about the people they associate with and also no-one lets their children go anywhere not least to the park or into the street without them being closely monitored. Children making friends these days is as complicated as arranging a marriage. If you move just a few miles away or your child fails to get into the school that their friends get into then there is major trauma and they feel cut off and ostracised. Imagine how much harder it is for them to be dumped into a school where people speak a different language, watch different television programmes, have a different set of assumptions and values? British people complain about the immigrants who are unaware of British culture and do not speak English and then proceed to go and do exactly the same by dumping their children into French or Spanish or US schools and expecting the child and their teachers to coach (and US culture is very different from UK culture, especially in terms of education, than most US and UK people think). This is cruelty to your child. It also means that they have no chance of ever getting a good job. By moving abroad you are effectively condemning them to years working at a remedial level. They will be blocked out of a good job and they will always be an outside in the country you have made their home. It is tough enough growing up in the modern world, but you are handicapping them right from the beginning. Most Britons move abroad when they have young children partly this is because it is the best time financially and when they have mad dreams. The UK government should ban it and people should only be allowed to go abroad either before they have children or when they have retired. They should at least be compelled to leave their children with relatives until the parents have work and a habitable house in the country of destination. The children should be barred from joining their parents until they are skilled in the language and culture of the destination country.
Middle class parents superficially put a lot of effort into getting a good start for their children then throw them into circumstances which means they will never achieve the income or success that they have achieved. I met a South African woman who had come to the UK to do a PhD bringing her school-aged children with her. She might be improving her situation but you know because they have been thrust into the UK system and will then be snatched back out again three years later that they will never get the chance to reach PhD level in their studies and probably will not even get a degree. All countries now have such integrated education systems that not having the child follow through condemns them to second-rate education and lacking the qualifications or skills to either thrive back in their original country or in the one they have been dumped into. Parents sacrifice their children for their ill-informed dreams of a better (in fact usually far worse) life abroad. Possibly the best people to emigrate anywhere are the retired. Their children have gone and they do not need to find work in the country they are moving to. They may have a challenge in finding friends, so again they should not remove to remote areas. Remember that their partner might die and leave them alone (France and Spain are probably better for widowed women than the UK is, Australia is far worse given how male-orientated a society it is). Remember also that health care can be very different to back home and you will need the vocabulary to work with it.
Language skills. Well, I have already spoken about how poor the British are at speaking foreign languages and those moving abroad seem to make no effort to gain those skills before going. Their children have no opportunity to do so because British schools are so poor at teaching languages and start so late. Apparently 70% of British school pupils, according to the BBC aged 11-18 want to live work and live abroad, 55% of these want to go to USA and 52% want Australia (clearly they could opt for more than one destination), but 47% wanted to go to Spain and 35% each to France and Italy. The reasons given are pathetic, 62% wanted to move for better weather and 53% for a lower cost of living and yet since 2004 there has been a fall of 30% in the number of pupils taking GCSE (taken at 16) French to around 200,000 and less than 80,000 do German GCSE compared to 120,000 back in 2004. Spanish is rising but only to 67,000 students taking it this year. These figures compare to the 750,000 pupils who took GCSEs this year in England, Wales and Northern Ireland with 150,000 doing the equivalent Standard at SCE exams in Scotland. So whilst 70% of pupils want to work abroad about 40% are studying a foreign language even at basic level. British people entirely lack the skills to learn and speak foreign languages, so why do so many of them kid themselves (200,000 have moved to France now) that they can function abroad? They struggle when dealing with being there on holiday so why do they think they can deal with buying a house, taxation, work, education?
People will always want to emigrate. Britain is in a deteriorating position and so I can understand why many British people want to get out. However, the bulk of Britons who leave do so with a terribly inaccurate view of the life they are going to have. They are mistaken in so much, mistaken about things they are going to do which would come unstuck even if they remained in the UK. They do not realise that all immigrants have a tough life and have poorer opportunities than the circumstance they have often left behind, but are driven by more powerful motives such as mass unemployment, poverty or persecution. If you are going to emigrate your life is going to be very hard, it is not a holiday, it is tearing up your whole life and falling into a less amenable position. However, Britons moving abroad can reduce the challenges. Be aware things will be very different from back home. Be aware you will be isolated for many years. Do not try to change too many things, move into work and an area similar to what you are leaving behind in the UK. Do not buy a dump of a house in a remote area that you would not think twice about buying in the UK. Move to an area where there are other Britons like yourselves who can support you a little. Do not take children with you, you are condemning them to a terrible life if you do. Do start learning the language and culture 3-5 years before you consider leaving. I do hope we stop seeing and reading about British families who have wrecked their lives and particularly those of their children by chasing after some totally unrealistic fantasy in a foreign country. If you must do it, do not be so brainless or unrealistic as most of these people. The better option is to buy a holiday home that you can come back from.
Sunday, 20 January 2008
Countering the View that We All Have the Potential to Learn Everything
At this time of year when people are trying to carry out new year's resolutions you often see advertisments for foreign language courses saying something like 'in just x months you can be speaking y confidently'. The implication is that anyone who buys the course will be able to develop a reasonable grasp of the language. My experiences suggests that that is not at all the case and everyone should tread a little carefully before parting with their money. I have just abandoned my evening classes in Chinese which I have been doing since September. My company has increasing links with various parts of China and it seemed sensible that I learn the language so I could be polite to visitors and not be completely lost if the company sends me out there. I find it challenging to learn alone so signed up for a face-to-face class with an enthusiastic teacher and students. A couple of them were older than me but most were in their 20s and I should have realised I was going to be facing problems when all the older students left throughout the early weeks. However, I will always give things ago and not abandon them quickly.
The reason I have abandoned the course is that a week before the exam my grades have slipped very badly. At first I was getting over 70% which I thought was reasonable given this was a beginners' course. Even when I did the listening comprehension with flu I scored 64%. However, I realise this was just a 'honeymoon period' and this week I was unable to scrape more than 5% in two written exercises (despite having spent hours over last weekend revising this particular aspect) and only got 48% for the oral part (40% is the pass mark). It is clear that I have the capacity for a few words and phrases of Chinese but nothing more. The teacher of course, in line with the usual attitude that if you try hard enough you can succeed. No, that is not true, each of us has mental and physical capacities which we cannot exceed and these deteriorate rapidly after we turn 30. I remember reading a comment in which a man said (bizarrely) that you know when you are still young when if someone wiped out your family you could go to a remote monastery, train in martial arts and come back and avenge them. By the time you pass 30 you are the one who stands on the sidelines as some hero comes in and does the avenging. Unfortunately for me that is what is likely to happen in my company environment now that I know I will never have even a child's grasp of Chinese.
I am not a person to give up easily, but as I look back on my life, it is not so much with a sense of shame, as with growing humility (and maybe a more realistic outlook on my abilities). When my father was at school in the 1950s, if a child was no good at something s/he was told outright. Being educated in the more woolly 1970s there was a step away from that, I think partly with the general move in the UK of schools away from the so-called 11-Plus exam which segregated children for life by ability at the age of 11 (ability was not the only factor, the number of children who got to the higher class 'grammar schools' depended on how many places there were in the district so in one area with many grammar schools you could get in with a much lower mark than you would need in an area with only one grammar school. Given that these schools were often single-sex, there was often also an imbalance for boys and girls) towards the comprehensive school system (which covers the bulk of the country, bar Kent and Buckinghamshire, but is now under attack from more school selection processes). As a result we were all told that we could all achieve anything we wanted. Having that lesson pressed into us from the age of 5 through to even 21 at university, it is difficult to shake, but my life has proven that it was a lie.
So what have I signed up to, to find that I was incapable of getting anywhere:
Aikido, I studied this for 12 years at 4 different clubs each with a different approach because I moved around the country. I saw people achieving black belts after 3 years and for my 12 years of effort what was I? A yellow belt, the one just off the bottom and I have the suspicion that one club just gave that to me because I turned up every week and they felt sorry for me.
Canoeing, I tried canoeing and embarrassment there was quicker as they would not permit me to join the club as I did so badly in the lessons. Again it was portrayed as a sport that all can do and after 6 weeks of almost drowning as I could not lift my head from the water one week and legs covered with bruises it was deemed that I was too much of a hazard (I almost ran over a scuba diver training in the same location) which did not help.
Fencing, I thought well, if I cannot do the intricacies of Aikido maybe something a little more straightforward would be better. I did fencing for 2 years and had reached the level of ability when a woman 20 years older than me could hit me in the same precise spot 6 times out of 10 (causing a very painful bruise on that spot). Again, even people older than me passed me into competing in competitions. Again the sport had suggested that it could be done by anyone with average fitness and I was not seeking to be world champion or even just district champion, but as with Aikido it became apparent that I could not attain a level good enough to function effectively at the club (this is effectively what happened in Chinese, I was so below the ability of the other students that I could not do conversation or pair work exercises with them).
Go, you can see an Oriental theme developing here. I have always been interested by games from around the world, but despite reading about them, generally I am poor at them (the 6-year old son of my housemate is almost at the level he can beat me at chess; he develops his structures too slowly, otherwise he would win, given how easily he puts pins and forks on my pieces). I thought Go would be an interesting, elegant game. One trouble was that in the club most of the members were of high level, one was also a Master (the level below the better-known Grandmaster rank) in chess already and the other players competed at national level. However, you would think that this meant some of them would be good teachers, especially as at least one of them worked for a local university. One week (by fluke it seems) I almost defeated the head of the club, so I was confident that for once I was actually improving. I had been playing at the club for 2 years by then. When I commented to another of the skilled players that I felt that I was actually improving, he said I was deluded, it was just that they had stopped beating me so comprehensively so that I continued to come and pay my club fee, and that in fact I was not better then than when I had first started. Of course, I left.
So, physically and mentally it is clear that I should be very suspicious when anyone advertises anything as being something that anyone can learn. I know that it is in their interests not to be honest about the fact that most people will get nowhere as they need members/students and the money they bring. There are people out there who can do these things. As I have said, I have seen people in a matter of months get to a national level. However, I think these people are rare. I have known people who can grasp languages quickly. In the 1980s I met a (British) man who spoke every language in Eastern Europe and said his Hungarian was poor but them demonstrated his knowledge of poetry rhythms in that language, something the bulk of us could not do even in our own language let alone one were are 'poor' at. He went off to lecture in China. In the 1990s I knew for a time a man (again British which counters my point made in an earlier posting that the British cannot do languages, but maybe these exceptions prove the rule) who taught himself Korean. He bought one of these book-and-CD (in those days it might have still been cassette) kits through the post and proceeded to teach himself Korean. It was interesting that when he got to the cassette for Part 4 (the final section of the course) he found it was identical to the cassette for Part 3 and it was clear that the company had been sending out the wrong cassette for quite a while but clearly no-one had ever got to the final stage to find out the error. He ended up keeping his diary in Korean and the last I heard he had moved to Seoul, had married and had two daughters.
So, there are people out there who can achieve these things, but I think they are a tiny fraction of the UK population. Whilst I would never want to dim the dreams of young people, and I know from friends that poor performance at school does not bar you from success or from picking up subjects later (one issue about sending children to school so early in the UK and making them choose which pathways they want to take at 14 or even 11, is that some people have no idea of their strengths at that age and only find them when they become adults) and the UK is good for adult learning, I do think we need to present a realistic picture of people's abilities to them. It is not healthy to keep saying to people, in a very American way 'you can achieve anything you want to achieve', just look at the USA to see how that is not the case even in the 'Land of Opportunity'.
In particular as is becoming apparent to me, abilities do deteriorate quickly and even if it is accurate to say to a 20-year old that they can achieve big things if they try, this is no longer true at 40, let alone 50 or 60. By the time you reach stage you have to be given the attitude of a woman I worked with who joined a gymnastics club in her mid-20s and they told her bluntly that she would never achieve anything more than she had achieved as a child doing gymnastics. That principle should be emblazoned on every club or course brochure.
Why is it important to have a realistic appreciation of our capabilities and the level they have deteriorated to? It is because 'humility' and 'humiliation' come from the same source. I have learnt that humility this week, that I cannot achieve what a 20-year old student can achieve, but it comes at the price of humiliation and I feel completely useless this week. That is one reason why I blog, to cast off the bits of lead from my life and also hopefully this will be a warning to myself when I am tempted to sign up to a course promising me a new skill.
The reason I have abandoned the course is that a week before the exam my grades have slipped very badly. At first I was getting over 70% which I thought was reasonable given this was a beginners' course. Even when I did the listening comprehension with flu I scored 64%. However, I realise this was just a 'honeymoon period' and this week I was unable to scrape more than 5% in two written exercises (despite having spent hours over last weekend revising this particular aspect) and only got 48% for the oral part (40% is the pass mark). It is clear that I have the capacity for a few words and phrases of Chinese but nothing more. The teacher of course, in line with the usual attitude that if you try hard enough you can succeed. No, that is not true, each of us has mental and physical capacities which we cannot exceed and these deteriorate rapidly after we turn 30. I remember reading a comment in which a man said (bizarrely) that you know when you are still young when if someone wiped out your family you could go to a remote monastery, train in martial arts and come back and avenge them. By the time you pass 30 you are the one who stands on the sidelines as some hero comes in and does the avenging. Unfortunately for me that is what is likely to happen in my company environment now that I know I will never have even a child's grasp of Chinese.
I am not a person to give up easily, but as I look back on my life, it is not so much with a sense of shame, as with growing humility (and maybe a more realistic outlook on my abilities). When my father was at school in the 1950s, if a child was no good at something s/he was told outright. Being educated in the more woolly 1970s there was a step away from that, I think partly with the general move in the UK of schools away from the so-called 11-Plus exam which segregated children for life by ability at the age of 11 (ability was not the only factor, the number of children who got to the higher class 'grammar schools' depended on how many places there were in the district so in one area with many grammar schools you could get in with a much lower mark than you would need in an area with only one grammar school. Given that these schools were often single-sex, there was often also an imbalance for boys and girls) towards the comprehensive school system (which covers the bulk of the country, bar Kent and Buckinghamshire, but is now under attack from more school selection processes). As a result we were all told that we could all achieve anything we wanted. Having that lesson pressed into us from the age of 5 through to even 21 at university, it is difficult to shake, but my life has proven that it was a lie.
So what have I signed up to, to find that I was incapable of getting anywhere:
Aikido, I studied this for 12 years at 4 different clubs each with a different approach because I moved around the country. I saw people achieving black belts after 3 years and for my 12 years of effort what was I? A yellow belt, the one just off the bottom and I have the suspicion that one club just gave that to me because I turned up every week and they felt sorry for me.
Canoeing, I tried canoeing and embarrassment there was quicker as they would not permit me to join the club as I did so badly in the lessons. Again it was portrayed as a sport that all can do and after 6 weeks of almost drowning as I could not lift my head from the water one week and legs covered with bruises it was deemed that I was too much of a hazard (I almost ran over a scuba diver training in the same location) which did not help.
Fencing, I thought well, if I cannot do the intricacies of Aikido maybe something a little more straightforward would be better. I did fencing for 2 years and had reached the level of ability when a woman 20 years older than me could hit me in the same precise spot 6 times out of 10 (causing a very painful bruise on that spot). Again, even people older than me passed me into competing in competitions. Again the sport had suggested that it could be done by anyone with average fitness and I was not seeking to be world champion or even just district champion, but as with Aikido it became apparent that I could not attain a level good enough to function effectively at the club (this is effectively what happened in Chinese, I was so below the ability of the other students that I could not do conversation or pair work exercises with them).
Go, you can see an Oriental theme developing here. I have always been interested by games from around the world, but despite reading about them, generally I am poor at them (the 6-year old son of my housemate is almost at the level he can beat me at chess; he develops his structures too slowly, otherwise he would win, given how easily he puts pins and forks on my pieces). I thought Go would be an interesting, elegant game. One trouble was that in the club most of the members were of high level, one was also a Master (the level below the better-known Grandmaster rank) in chess already and the other players competed at national level. However, you would think that this meant some of them would be good teachers, especially as at least one of them worked for a local university. One week (by fluke it seems) I almost defeated the head of the club, so I was confident that for once I was actually improving. I had been playing at the club for 2 years by then. When I commented to another of the skilled players that I felt that I was actually improving, he said I was deluded, it was just that they had stopped beating me so comprehensively so that I continued to come and pay my club fee, and that in fact I was not better then than when I had first started. Of course, I left.
So, physically and mentally it is clear that I should be very suspicious when anyone advertises anything as being something that anyone can learn. I know that it is in their interests not to be honest about the fact that most people will get nowhere as they need members/students and the money they bring. There are people out there who can do these things. As I have said, I have seen people in a matter of months get to a national level. However, I think these people are rare. I have known people who can grasp languages quickly. In the 1980s I met a (British) man who spoke every language in Eastern Europe and said his Hungarian was poor but them demonstrated his knowledge of poetry rhythms in that language, something the bulk of us could not do even in our own language let alone one were are 'poor' at. He went off to lecture in China. In the 1990s I knew for a time a man (again British which counters my point made in an earlier posting that the British cannot do languages, but maybe these exceptions prove the rule) who taught himself Korean. He bought one of these book-and-CD (in those days it might have still been cassette) kits through the post and proceeded to teach himself Korean. It was interesting that when he got to the cassette for Part 4 (the final section of the course) he found it was identical to the cassette for Part 3 and it was clear that the company had been sending out the wrong cassette for quite a while but clearly no-one had ever got to the final stage to find out the error. He ended up keeping his diary in Korean and the last I heard he had moved to Seoul, had married and had two daughters.
So, there are people out there who can achieve these things, but I think they are a tiny fraction of the UK population. Whilst I would never want to dim the dreams of young people, and I know from friends that poor performance at school does not bar you from success or from picking up subjects later (one issue about sending children to school so early in the UK and making them choose which pathways they want to take at 14 or even 11, is that some people have no idea of their strengths at that age and only find them when they become adults) and the UK is good for adult learning, I do think we need to present a realistic picture of people's abilities to them. It is not healthy to keep saying to people, in a very American way 'you can achieve anything you want to achieve', just look at the USA to see how that is not the case even in the 'Land of Opportunity'.
In particular as is becoming apparent to me, abilities do deteriorate quickly and even if it is accurate to say to a 20-year old that they can achieve big things if they try, this is no longer true at 40, let alone 50 or 60. By the time you reach stage you have to be given the attitude of a woman I worked with who joined a gymnastics club in her mid-20s and they told her bluntly that she would never achieve anything more than she had achieved as a child doing gymnastics. That principle should be emblazoned on every club or course brochure.
Why is it important to have a realistic appreciation of our capabilities and the level they have deteriorated to? It is because 'humility' and 'humiliation' come from the same source. I have learnt that humility this week, that I cannot achieve what a 20-year old student can achieve, but it comes at the price of humiliation and I feel completely useless this week. That is one reason why I blog, to cast off the bits of lead from my life and also hopefully this will be a warning to myself when I am tempted to sign up to a course promising me a new skill.
Tuesday, 15 May 2007
The British and Foreign Languages
Given that in the UK at any one time you are usually an hour or less flight time to a country which speaks a different language; in parts of Kent you can even see France, it seems odd that the UK has such a poor record in speaking languages. I can understand the difficulty if you live say somewhere in Nebraska or in Alice Springs, but leaving my house now I could be in a foreign country quicker than I could be in Scotland. London is actually closer to Prague than many Scottish islands and closer to Berlin than it is to the Shetland Islands. Yet, when travelling you find most British people have no grasp of a single other language. Contrast this to people you meet from the rest of Western Europe who generally have English in addition to their own language, and often have German or Russian or French too. Many Spanish speak Italian and vice versa; Finns are brought up speaking their own language and Swedish from the start. Of course a lot of British people or their parents or grandparents come from another country and speak languages such as Urdu, Hindi, Cantonese. However, even among such communities it is common within a couple of generations for people to lose knowledge of this kind. There are British people with language skills, but they are seen as eccentric. The British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden (1955-57) spoke fluent Arabic and Farsi at a time when the British were having difficulties with Egypt (Arabic speaking) and Iran (Farsi speaking), so he could have addressed these people in their own language, understood nationalist radio broadcasts, etc. Yet, he never revealed this ability publicly because he knew it would make him appear suspect in the eyes of the British population.
Why are the bulk of the British so poor at languages? Is it simply a fear of appearing 'suspect'? You see them failing to grasp things or even have a smattering of local languages and we are not talking about ones which are far away such as Arabic or Japanese, but ones that are in close proximity, such as French and German. Some (Anglo-Saxon) Americans can be as bad, but these days more and more of them can speak Spanish at least. Is the British problem that so many people speak English? Apparently 380 million people have it as their first language, and primarily because of US culture, it is dominant across the world in pop music and movies, and so it is usurprising that a fifth of the world's population (about 1.3 billion people) can speak English to some degree or another. So does this simply make us lazy? Is it a hangover of British imperialism? Whilst checking some facts for this post I came across blog entries asking why British school children should bother learning any foreign languages. If at most you have to wait until the fifth person comes along to get someone to speak to you in English, I guess that is a fair argument. However, it is one I will contest, if you give me a moment.
One reason why the British are so poor at languages is that they start late. If you begin before the age of 8, learning any foreign language you will find it far easier to develop that language or pick up another. However, until recently most British schools started no languages until a child turned 11. This has improved. However, if the parents speak no foreign language there is no support for the child's study at home in the way there is with things like English and Mathematics. If you go to a university as I have often done, you will find that many of the students who do well in languages have parents of different nationalities, I have encountered many with one French and one British parent or even one Chilean and one Norwegian in one woman's case. In the latter case she was operating in a third language, English. It is far rarer to find children of British-British parents with any foreign language skill. The situation has deteriorated since the government stopped making any languages compulsory once pupils turned 14; now they are backtracking furiously because recruitment on to language courses at higher levels, even GCSE (the examinations at 16 years old) which is very basic conversation level, were falling sharply.
So British people do not exposed to languages much at school. They do not seem to pick them up elsewhere either. This is despite the fact that the ownership by Britons of homes in France and Spain has reached high levels (250,000 houses in France are now owned by British people). I think this can be explained by the fact that the British form enclaves in which they eat, sleep and speak English. Talking with a British builder's merchant who now runs his business in Bordeaux, he said that there (which unlike regions such as Normandy or the Dordogne is not renowned for having lots of British) he never spoke French as all his customers were either British builders working in the region or British home owners. (As an aside when the British complain about immigrants in the UK they should remember that 1 in 10 of the British population now lives outside the UK; though still not learning the local language).
Another reason why British people do not grasp foreign languages is that there is a real snobbery. In the UK someone will ask you if you speak a language, if you say 'yes' they assume you can speak it perfectly and will get angry if you make any mistakes; even, as is common they know no foreign languages. It is all or nothing for the British in contrast to much of the world, who as someone recently noted, 'get by in bad English' when they do not have a common language. Yet another factor, certainly in contrast with neighbouring countries in Europe, you cannot pick up any foreign television channels in the UK. In contrast many Dutch, Belgians and French write in to programmes shown on the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).
Yet another reason I have had suggested to me is that 'all the intelligent British people have left the UK'. This argument goes along the lines that with migration to the empire in the 19th and early 20th century and to the Commonwealth and especially to the USA after the Second World War (the so-called 'Brain Drain') and now with middle and upper class people choosing to live abroad (saying which when in Milton Keynes you would encounter people who commuted from Caen in France because with budget airlines the combined flight and coach ride to reach the city was £16 (€23; US$32) compared to £36 (€52; US$72) for the train journey from London), the argument is that those with the intellectual ability to grasp foreign languages have left. They have been replaced by the people with 'get up and go' from South Asia and now Eastern Europe. Certainly, if you look at successful businesses in post-1945 Britain many have been founded by immigrants or first generation settlers.
Why does all of this matter? If the British in the UK are the dim leftovers who rarely travel abroad and when they do go only to British enclaves why do they need foreign languages? It is about more than the language, it is about the mentality and analysis that knowing another language provides. As I age my memory is deteriorating rapidly, so I have forgotten so much of what I learned when younger, but I have been having ago at learning Mandarin Chinese and I have found out interesting things about its sentence structure. Questions are sentences with a question word put at the end. In English we would say 'Are you hungry?' in Mandarin it would work out 'Hungry, are you?'; 'Is it raining?'; 'Raining, is it?' and so on. (Someone said to me today it is speaking like Yoda from the 'Star Wars' movies, and that is the case, because Yoda intentionally is supposed to be a sage and in the West we often see sages as being Oriental, hence such a sentence structure). Now, people say to me, 'Chinese people never ask any questions' and no I know why this appears to be the case. If I asked you 'Are you ready? Do you have any questions?' and you are Chinese you have to track down the actual question word and then make your own question sentence, bringing on board all your vocabulary, but getting it in the backward questioning way that us English speakers like. By the time you have done that the average English speaker has assumed you have no questions and have moved on.
So, my argument is, that until you begin to learn another language, you do not come to understand the other ways in which people of the world structure their thinking. Neither do you know how hard it is to get across what you want to say and the embarrassment of getting it wrong. Someone who bellows all the time in English is never going to appreciate such perspectives. It allows them to make sweeping judgements about other people's attitudes and so they see hostility rather than co-operation. Individuals do not notice that the best jobs are now going to educated people from continental Europe who speak two or three languages and British society, increasingly uneasy with dealing with the rest of the EU let alone markets in China and elsewhere, is shutting itself off from both intellectual and financial benefits.
Why are the bulk of the British so poor at languages? Is it simply a fear of appearing 'suspect'? You see them failing to grasp things or even have a smattering of local languages and we are not talking about ones which are far away such as Arabic or Japanese, but ones that are in close proximity, such as French and German. Some (Anglo-Saxon) Americans can be as bad, but these days more and more of them can speak Spanish at least. Is the British problem that so many people speak English? Apparently 380 million people have it as their first language, and primarily because of US culture, it is dominant across the world in pop music and movies, and so it is usurprising that a fifth of the world's population (about 1.3 billion people) can speak English to some degree or another. So does this simply make us lazy? Is it a hangover of British imperialism? Whilst checking some facts for this post I came across blog entries asking why British school children should bother learning any foreign languages. If at most you have to wait until the fifth person comes along to get someone to speak to you in English, I guess that is a fair argument. However, it is one I will contest, if you give me a moment.
One reason why the British are so poor at languages is that they start late. If you begin before the age of 8, learning any foreign language you will find it far easier to develop that language or pick up another. However, until recently most British schools started no languages until a child turned 11. This has improved. However, if the parents speak no foreign language there is no support for the child's study at home in the way there is with things like English and Mathematics. If you go to a university as I have often done, you will find that many of the students who do well in languages have parents of different nationalities, I have encountered many with one French and one British parent or even one Chilean and one Norwegian in one woman's case. In the latter case she was operating in a third language, English. It is far rarer to find children of British-British parents with any foreign language skill. The situation has deteriorated since the government stopped making any languages compulsory once pupils turned 14; now they are backtracking furiously because recruitment on to language courses at higher levels, even GCSE (the examinations at 16 years old) which is very basic conversation level, were falling sharply.
So British people do not exposed to languages much at school. They do not seem to pick them up elsewhere either. This is despite the fact that the ownership by Britons of homes in France and Spain has reached high levels (250,000 houses in France are now owned by British people). I think this can be explained by the fact that the British form enclaves in which they eat, sleep and speak English. Talking with a British builder's merchant who now runs his business in Bordeaux, he said that there (which unlike regions such as Normandy or the Dordogne is not renowned for having lots of British) he never spoke French as all his customers were either British builders working in the region or British home owners. (As an aside when the British complain about immigrants in the UK they should remember that 1 in 10 of the British population now lives outside the UK; though still not learning the local language).
Another reason why British people do not grasp foreign languages is that there is a real snobbery. In the UK someone will ask you if you speak a language, if you say 'yes' they assume you can speak it perfectly and will get angry if you make any mistakes; even, as is common they know no foreign languages. It is all or nothing for the British in contrast to much of the world, who as someone recently noted, 'get by in bad English' when they do not have a common language. Yet another factor, certainly in contrast with neighbouring countries in Europe, you cannot pick up any foreign television channels in the UK. In contrast many Dutch, Belgians and French write in to programmes shown on the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).
Yet another reason I have had suggested to me is that 'all the intelligent British people have left the UK'. This argument goes along the lines that with migration to the empire in the 19th and early 20th century and to the Commonwealth and especially to the USA after the Second World War (the so-called 'Brain Drain') and now with middle and upper class people choosing to live abroad (saying which when in Milton Keynes you would encounter people who commuted from Caen in France because with budget airlines the combined flight and coach ride to reach the city was £16 (€23; US$32) compared to £36 (€52; US$72) for the train journey from London), the argument is that those with the intellectual ability to grasp foreign languages have left. They have been replaced by the people with 'get up and go' from South Asia and now Eastern Europe. Certainly, if you look at successful businesses in post-1945 Britain many have been founded by immigrants or first generation settlers.
Why does all of this matter? If the British in the UK are the dim leftovers who rarely travel abroad and when they do go only to British enclaves why do they need foreign languages? It is about more than the language, it is about the mentality and analysis that knowing another language provides. As I age my memory is deteriorating rapidly, so I have forgotten so much of what I learned when younger, but I have been having ago at learning Mandarin Chinese and I have found out interesting things about its sentence structure. Questions are sentences with a question word put at the end. In English we would say 'Are you hungry?' in Mandarin it would work out 'Hungry, are you?'; 'Is it raining?'; 'Raining, is it?' and so on. (Someone said to me today it is speaking like Yoda from the 'Star Wars' movies, and that is the case, because Yoda intentionally is supposed to be a sage and in the West we often see sages as being Oriental, hence such a sentence structure). Now, people say to me, 'Chinese people never ask any questions' and no I know why this appears to be the case. If I asked you 'Are you ready? Do you have any questions?' and you are Chinese you have to track down the actual question word and then make your own question sentence, bringing on board all your vocabulary, but getting it in the backward questioning way that us English speakers like. By the time you have done that the average English speaker has assumed you have no questions and have moved on.
So, my argument is, that until you begin to learn another language, you do not come to understand the other ways in which people of the world structure their thinking. Neither do you know how hard it is to get across what you want to say and the embarrassment of getting it wrong. Someone who bellows all the time in English is never going to appreciate such perspectives. It allows them to make sweeping judgements about other people's attitudes and so they see hostility rather than co-operation. Individuals do not notice that the best jobs are now going to educated people from continental Europe who speak two or three languages and British society, increasingly uneasy with dealing with the rest of the EU let alone markets in China and elsewhere, is shutting itself off from both intellectual and financial benefits.
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