February 23, 2005

French teachers singing the blues...

Interesting article over at Pave France about the decline of French speaking in other countries: From Damian:
What results when a language is made into a museum piece and is imbued with snobbism? Hhmmm. A language of limited utility and no broad appeal.
Damian then quotes from this article: WHY FRENCH TEACHERS HAVE THE BLUES
A teacher from Portugal, Teresa Santos, said in her country 70 percent of Portuguese students preferred to take English courses, compared to just 10 percent for French. "English is magnifique!" a teacher of Ancient Greek at the Aristotle University in Thessalonika, Thalia Stephanidou, said. "Even in poorer neighbourhoods, that language - which replaced French right after the second world war - is taught, even to old people," she said. Even in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, English has crowded French out of the classroom, despite French being one of the country's official languages. In Russia, where speaking French was once a prized talent among the tsars, French is trailing "far behind English" in Moscow and Saint Petersburg schools, Mascha Sveshnikova, of the Russian Cultural Centre, said.
It must suck to be so irelavent... Posted by DaveH at February 23, 2005 9:53 PM