Posts Tagged ‘language courses’
A second language could improve your social life as well as your career
Most of us can remember being at school, at the point where you finally get to choose which subjects you want to keep studying and which ones you give up. I know at my school they always told us we should be choosing languages because we’d find it easier to get jobs that way, but hardly anyone listened. Instead we opted for the more fun subjects, music and art and drama, or whatever involved the least actual work. The future seemed so distant, it hardly seemed to matter at all.
I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I regret that now – I don’t mean having fun at school, but not keeping up with language courses when I had the chance. Because the truth is that yes, a second language could help you get a better job, depending on what sort of work you are looking for, but the benefits don’t stop there. Being able to speak a second language could be good for other areas of life too.
If you want to travel then speaking a second language is possibly the most invaluable thing you could do. Being an English speaker will get you around America, Australia and most of Europe at a push, but learn Spanish or Chinese as well and you’ll be able to make your own way around most of the world.
Even if travelling’s really not your thing, even if you mostly like staying in, you probably still use the internet, or maybe you like taking on your mates on XBOX live. The technology we have today makes it easier than ever to connect with people from around the world, but once we’ve connected we need to be able to communicate. It’s great to be able to play XBOX against your friends even when you’re not in the same room, but English is only spoken in eight of the 26 countries that have XBOX live. Imagine how much better it would be to learn French or German and be able to connect with all those other people as well!
Why learning another language could be the best decision you ever make
Whichever way you look at it, language barriers have become more and more of a problem in the UK over the last few years. Recent figures show that one in every seven schoolchildren between then age of four and 11 do not speak English at home, causing overall results to fall across the board as teachers struggle to cope.
The Children’s Department are addressing this problem by supplying more funding for language courses to help these children catch up with their English, but education is not the only area that’s affected, and it’s not just immigrants who are finding themselves at a disadvantage because of their language.
With the recession making it harder and harder to find work, people who are fluent in a second language are finding things a lot less difficult. In the modern world of the internet where the rest of the world is just a click away, having a second language is a hugely sought after skill. International communication is more important than ever in the business world and someone with the ability to converse fluently in the native language of that country will always be a valuable asset. In these hard times where work is scarce, the decision to learn French or any other language could be one of the best decisions you ever make.
It’s not just your career that could be improved by learning another language. If you’ve ever wanted to travel, being able to speak and understand languages besides English is invaluable. It’s true that most people in Europe speak at least a little English and it’s usually easy enough to get by, but English is not the most widely spoken language in the world. Depending where you want to travel, you will find that you will probably have to learn Spanish or Mandarin (Chinese) to get by as there are many regions where these languages are spoken exclusively.