Why are we so bad at English?
The question regularly hits the headlines.
Until then the British had remained silent like perfect
gentlemen
, showing little more than a polite pout in the face of our attempts to place our tongue between our teeth for the
“th”
and other perilous phonemes.
The canons of Oxford are today attacking the heirs of Molière.
And it was the London weekly
The Spectator
which, in mid-January, asked this insolent question: “Why do the French struggle to speak English?”
»
To discover
Crosswords, Sudoku, 7 Letters... Keep your mind alert with Le Figaro Games
Perhaps you will need to have the title translated for you:
“Why do the French have so much trouble speaking English?”
»
Journalist Patrick West begins by citing a
Times
survey : many French people do not know how to basicly greet someone in English.
He adds with a study published by
Preply
, an online language learning platform.
There are 14,800 searches on
Google Translate
every month for how to say
“hello”
in the language of Shakespeare.
8,100 for weekdays.
It is with
“Thursday”
that the French have the most difficulty, a word which generates 12,000 searches.
The translation of the words
“shirt”
,
“digit”
,
“madam”
, or even
“thank you”
gives rise to 6,600 queries per week on the same search engine.
The story of French resentment
The London weekly wants to reassure its readers.
If English speakers are known for their monolingualism, let them relax all the same!
Apparently, we would be worse than them.
In the meantime, we will come back to find a study on the level of English people in French... The article continues and blames us for
“our pride, arrogance and resentment”
.
Here we are dressed for winter...
Would we then be envious of the British?
Yes, continues the journalist,
“they could be jealous that our bastard language has become the lingua franca”
, that is to say the privileged language in the world.
See you in 2050. According to forecasts from the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF), French could become the first language in the world with the demographic boom of French speakers.
The fact remains that
Le Spectator
cites in support our pages of Le
Figaro
, where it seemed we ourselves deplored
“our lack of confidence in our level of English”
.
However, the weekly concedes a more prosaic reason for our lack of fluency: historically, we did not need to speak English.
“When you speak a language which is the means of communication in vast regions of Africa, the West Indies, Canada and elsewhere, there is no imperative to learn another.”
And the article concludes:
“In reality, and paradoxically, we could almost blame the French for our monolingualism.
So many of us have been made fun of in France because of our academic level of French, greeted with a contemptuous response in English, that we have kept in mind never to try again.”
What a shame
...