Viral video after Mexico’s Gold Cup win sparks a conversation about speaking Spanish

After graduating UF in 1970, we went to live there for 5 years. I taught English/American History at a German high school. The students taught me German as I taught them English. Our two youngest children went to school there and are fluent in German - without accent. My accent was such that Germans thought I was Dutch.

 

When in Flanders, speak Flemish!

The interesting thing is that a high percentage of the Flemish people speak French, but much fewer of the Walloons speak Dutch. An even higher percentage of the Flemings speak English. That made us hard for us to learn Dutch because people didn’t want to tolerate our poor Dutch when they could just speak to us plainly in English.

One friend told me he learned English from rock ‘n’ roll and TV shows. In the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, they do not dub in television shows or movies, but only have subtitles. In the French-speaking part, they dub the shows in French.

Brussels is officially bilingual, but it’s almost all French or English. Technically German is also an official language, but that’s only spoken in the far eastern part of the country.

 

I agree. I mentioned this to a language teacher at the university in Belgium and he contended that adults can learn faster because they can grasp the technical aspects of grammar and conjugation and stuff like that.

I still contend that children can grasp the sounds much better and faster. I was told once that palates don’t harden until about 16 to 18 years old. If you learn a second language before then, then you can sound like a native.

My wife has just started teaching ESL. I’ll be interested in her experiences.

 

Yeah, I didn't have much trouble in Belgium knowing basically just English and vaguely recalling 2 semesters of shitty college French. My Grandfather (who's dad was a German speaker) used to claim he could understand Flemish perfectly during the war, but that might have been one of his exaggerations.

 

The more languages you know, the better for you and the world.
Travesty that most Americans only know English...

 

When we lived in Belgium, our children were preschool and kindergarten ages. Our two oldest were fluent in Dutch for their age. After coming back to the US, however, they gradually lost it. The strange thing for them is that they can watch home movies of them speaking Dutch. They say “I know that’s me, but I have no idea what I’m saying.”

One thing that fascinated me about language is that once a guy came to look at the house for sale that we had been renting. He did not speak any English and I had the hardest time making out his Dutch. He might’ve been speaking in dialect. My oldest daughter, however, understood everything he was saying. The problem was, she could not tell me what he was saying. So language translation must have different mechanism in the brain than hearing and understanding and communicating in a language.