![]() CATEGORIES: BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism |
My Attitude to Foreign Languages
I study English. Over 300 million people speak it as a mother tongue. It is the state language in 5 countries: Great Britain, Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand. It is the language of computers technology. To know English today is necessary for every good specialist. English is a wonderful language. It is the language of the great literature. It is the language of William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and others. The great German poet Goethe once said: “He who knows no foreign language does not know his own one”. That is why in order to understand oneself and environment one has to study foreign languages.
The most important reason for learning English is: Of the existing languages, English has by far the best start. The total number of languages in the world is large: between 4,000 and 4,500. There are only five languages that can claim a very large number of speakers, namely, Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi-Urdu and Russian (in that order). Of these languages, only English can claim to be a more or less universal language. It is obvious that those who learnEnglish develop closer ties with English-speaking countries. They read books from these countries and learn about their history and their customs. Some people try to refute it offering Esperanto. But as for Esperanto, it is not able to become a world language, because it is a synthetic language and lots of people just refuse to learn it. There are some people who say that we don’t need international language at all. Machine translation has made a lot of progress in the last few years. But computers can only help us in reading or writing, but not in speaking and communication in English, computers will never be as intelligent and interesting speakers as people. Date: 2016-01-03; view: 1702
|