Are things looking up?

Gurgle wrote: »

Yes, it is.
Spend a few hours a day for 4 years with rosetta stone, audio books, web pages, blogs, news sites etc and you can be fluent in whatever language you choose.

Spend 4 years in UCD and you can get yourself a BA in a language studies. Throw in a H.Dip and you can teach languages to LC level.

There is a big difference between the kind of fluency you need to make general conversation with someone and the kind needed to work in a business environment speaking to native speakers over the phone.

Most call centres are looking for native or near-native speakers when it comes to customer facing jobs. Everybody has heard somebody complaining about getting through to some call centre in India that they couldn't understand which left them frustrated with the company. Companies are painfully aware of this and it's why we have so many English speaking call centres here.

We have people who have lived for 10 years in this country whose English is not good enough to get a job that would require them to speak to a customer day-in, day-out.

As for the college option, those who take up the degree you are talking about are those who have a natural aptitude and affinity towards languages. They will have already been almost fluent in at least one other language before even hitting that degree and the degree is there to fine tune. I did a second language to degree level. It's a tough slog and not as simple as having 4 years and an internet connection.

Your average maths graduate would struggle to complete such a degree, let alone those who worked as labourers on building sites - you specifically referred to construction workers - and have been out of education since they were 16 years old. This is not even taking into consideration the relative costs of such degrees coupled with the lack of money incoming during this 4 year period to sustain families, houses, etc.

Are you suggesting that 10% of the population (the current live register) don't have the capability to learn a foreign language?
I couldn't disagree more.
Anyone who can speak English can learn another language. It just takes time, effort and motivation. Motivation is sustainable employment, time and effort is up to the individual.

This is a romantic notion. The "You can do anything if you put your mind to it" ideal that is nice to aspire to but not grounded in reality at all. The reality is that a huge number of people would find it incredibly difficult to learn a language - certainly not through self-motivation and downloading a Rosetta Stone - not least because it is not something that is ingrained in Irish culture.

We are not Norway or Sweden where the economic limitation imposed by their language was noticed generations ago and dealt with over a long period of time through extensive education of kids. They learnt English in tandem with Swedish or Norwegian for the first 20 years of their life.

Basically, I don't agree with this blasé attitude that if you really want to, you can become business-fluent within 4 years and that this could be a realistic goal for a large amount of people, especially those for whom education stopped at 16. It would require a massive cultural change over generations.