Why we need to learn other languages

A person who speaks two languages is called bilingual; a person who speaks three languages is called trilingual. So what do you call a person who speaks just one language? Answer: British.

It is, I fear, rather a fair point. If you travel to mainland Europe it quickly becomes painfully clear that the average German, Swiss, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Swede and even, heaven forbid, French citizen is comfortable chatting in a language other than their own. The fact that it’s often English is at once cheering, comforting and also slightly embarrassing.

It becomes downright humiliating when you hear Europeans using our language with greater panache than many of us. Arsene Wenger, the urbane manager of Arsenal Football Club, speaks English with a beautiful turn of phrase.

I once spoke to Gianfranco Zola and Gianluca Vialli, footballing titans both, and was struck by the way in which they had embraced the English language. These two proud and intelligent Italians would happily chat to each other in my language, simply, I suspect, to avoid appearing rude.

And yet among British people there is sometimes a feeling of uncertainty about using foreign languages, as if it is somehow a dubious skill.

Why should this be? Is it some kind of vestigial sense of imperial pride, carved from the feeling the rest of the world should learn our language rather than us muddying our brains with the words of others? Or is it the result of being an island nation, cut off from foreign borders?

Perhaps it’s something else - an ingrained intellectual laziness created by the fact so many other people do speak English. If the linguistic mountain has come to Mohammed, why should Mohammed bother going to the mountain?

You telephone a hotel in Paris, try to speak to them in French, and get answered in perfect English. You order a meal while on holiday in Spain, and the waiter answers you in your own language. We take it for granted other people will speak to us in English. Which, when you think of it, is ridiculous.

The fact English is such a popular global language is remarkable. Its prevalence across North America, India, Pakistan, Australasia and beyond make it a genuinely worldwide form of communication.

Far from dying away, the number of people speaking English appears to be growing, with the expanding Chinese middle class grasping our language with enthusiasm.

There’s the warning. The Chinese aren’t just embracing foreign languages, but also foreign universities, trade, travel and exploration.

China looks to the world far beyond its shores in the way Britain so readily used to. And yet now we feel a more insular nation, no more so than in our reticence to learn other languages. While the Chinese speak English, how many of our young people get the opportunity to learn Mandarin?

My daughter and elder son are at secondary school now, and both are learning languages. In fact my son’s early forays into the world of German have enthused him so infectiously I’ve started learning his vocabulary, too. I’ve always had a vague hankering to learn German so maybe this is my chance.

For me, the joy of learning a second language is a respectful ability to communicate with the world.

Very little in life isolates you as much as being unable to speak to those around you, or to understand what they are even saying. Nearly 20 years ago, I had to spend a day in the nondescript Japanese town of Yokkaichi, entirely on my own. This was the era before the internet and no mobile phone that could phone home. There were, as far as I could see, no other foreigners in the whole place.

And nor was there anyone who spoke English, which was a pity because my grasp of Japanese was - and is - woefully lacking.

So I spent the day using sign language, making awkward smiles and pointing at things to try to make myself understood. I then had to work out the route back to another city, negotiating the train network on the way. It was one of the longest, loneliest days of my life, containing plenty of interactions but not one conversation.

So learn a language; accept the challenge and make us more open to the outside world. For a decade from 2002, the number of children learning a foreign language to a decent level was in decline. Now, apparently, that is being reversed, albeit gradually. We are a great nation but, if we rely on the rest of the world learning our language, we are in danger of being diminished.

I WENT to Watford Junction in the rush hour last week and made two notable discoveries.

For one thing, the traffic lights had completely failed at the junction of St Albans Road and Langley Road, resulting in a nexus of cars, all coming from different directions, slowly entering the box junction and gingerly going round each other. It looked like the sort of low-speed traffic jams you get in Mumbai or Karachi and, frankly, it seemed to work much better. Instead of the normal ten-minute slow crawl through the lights, I was through in a comparative flash.

And the second thing is the Junction car park at rush hour is truly, truly horrendous. It took me longer to get from one end of that horrible tunnel to the other than it had to get from Chorleywood to Watford in the first place. It’s almost impossible to think how the system of traffic flow could be any worse.

There now seems to be a lovely big space for the Harry Potter buses to turn around, but commuters paying £7 a day to park face a miserable experience getting out.

It cannot be right. Taxi drivers have been complaining about this for ages and perhaps we’ve all been a little bit blasé on the basis that cabbies are notorious for complaining about everything.

But they’ve got a point on this one. The town deserves better.