Foreign Perspectives

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Funnily enough, just as I figured that it was probably all downhill from here on the English course, I’ve hit a bit of a pothole in the form of a chapter on literature.

Well, not so much literature, but rather the language that Literature (with a capital “L”) uses including various types of poetry and the classics. The amount of stuff that I don’t know about literary techniques could fill a library so this particular chapter is proving to be pretty heavy going for me at the moment.

Fortunately there’s a choice of questions on the exam so I should be able to get by without really knowing a whole lot about the content of this chapter which is just as well.

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Although the English course that I’m doing at the moment has the reputation of being the hardest course in the university, I’m finding that as I go through it I’m picking up speed and seem likely to get to the end of the course something like three months ahead of schedule (which is some going on a nine month course!).

Yet, whilst I’m moving along at a seemingly hectic pace (and, no, I’m not skipping sections to do that), others are saying that they’re falling further and further behind. Why? Funnily enough, it seems to be a result of my history of doing language courses which appear to have covered a good deal of the material before, albeit either in French or Spanish. Most of the others are approaching this English language course with a history of English literature courses behind them which, of course, wouldn’t have covered that type of material.

Whatever it is, I’m now around 75% of the way through the course and planning on taking a week out to do some revision and to complete the next assignment.

What this experience has shown me is that there’s little point in reading about the experiences of others of particular courses in isolation from their prior experience. For example, when I look at the forum for the phychology course that I might be doing next, I see that many people on that are saying that they’re getting behind too. Aside from not knowing what prior experience in the field that they’ve brought to the course, there’s also the bias towards forums being places to air problems as opposed to saying “I’m doing great”.

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In theory the answer is Scots or perhaps Ulster Scots although there’s a lot of debate as to whether either count as a language. However, that’s not the problem with them: in that one key point about learning another language is that you want to communicate with people who you couldn’t communicate with before these don’t count as they’re spoken by people who are 100% English speakers.

So, in reality, the question should be “what’s the easiest useful language for an English speaker to learn?”.

From first principles that would have to be one of the Germanic family of languages of which the closest is probably Dutch. However, unfortunately that too fails the “useful” criteria as both Dutch and Flemish speakers always reply in English unless your Dutch is perfect which, of course, it won’t be for quite a while.

That leaves the second choice of German which has the problem that it’s quite a precise language and takes quite a while to learn. However, at least the Germans will let you perservere with your early attempts at it. Although not in the Germanic family, Spanish is also fairly easy to pick up and if you’re choosing your first second language it’s probably a toss up between Spanish and German if you just want to learn a language although, usually, other factors come into play.

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