GLOBAL ENGLISH

GLOBAL ENGLISH

 Track 1.01 

Speaker I

Well, to be honest, learning English isn't my idea of fun. I mean, rock concerts are fun. Motorbikes are fun. Snowboarding is fun. Learning English isn’t fun. It's hard work. But it's worth it. I don't |need English every day in my job right now. But if I want to get on in my career, I know I'm going to need it more and more. English is where the money is, so I just think of it as an investment in my future. We Swiss are very practical like that.

Speaker 2

Hm, well, I accept that English is the language of the media, but I'm not so sure about business. Personally, I know a lot of business people who speak almost no English at all. Twenty-five percent of the world speaks English. OK, but that means 75% don't. The way I see it, if I'm going to sell you something, I should speak your language. But if you come to Ecuador to sell me something, then you should speak Spanish.

Speaker 3

Coming from a tiny country like the Netherlands means we've always had to speak foreign languages. So it's nothing new for us. The same goes for people from Luxembourg, Belgium, Scandinavia. Eighty percent of Dutch people speak English. Most of us speak some German too, or French. We certainly don't expect anybody to speak Dutch! In fact, the firm I work for recently introduced English as the official company language. So now I speak English all day- to other Dutch people!

Speaker 4

I'm afraid I really don't like English that much. I find the pronunciation very difficult. It's certainly not as beautiful a language as my language, which is Italian. And, anyway, I think it’s more difficult as you get older to learn foreign languages. But my company wants me to learn English, so I don't really have much choice. If a quarter of the world speaks it, I suppose I must too. But I'll always think in Italian. My brain works in Italian.

Speaker 5

I don't know why people who speak European languages complain about learning English. Try learning it when your native language is Korean! Actually, I find I can speak English OK, if I'm doing business with other non-native speakers, like Argentinians or Japanese. But with native English speakers, I do feel at a disadvantage. I've 'heard that 66% of British people don't speak a foreign language at all. Hardly surprising when so many of us have to learn English.

Speaker 6

Well, actually, I love English. It's true the pronunciation is quite hard to get right, but the 'I grammar is much simpler than my language, Hungarian - at least at the beginning. That's the thing about English - it's easy to speak a little quite quickly. It gets harder later, of course. Frankly, I don't know why some French and Germans are against using English words. It seems to me that English is full of foreign words - especially French and German!