On Monday I visited my Mum, as mentioned here, and while there I talked also with my brother Toby, who is a UKIPer.
The report I wrote yesterday about our conversation has become the trigger for a very satisfactory Samizdata comment storm about matters European and EUropean, as I write this still blowing.
After writing that, I then googled "Toby Micklethwait", which I haven't done lately, and I found my way to this:
This is my contribution to the BBC charter review.
That's all the explanation you get, in the page I googled my way to. Presumably, what Toby is referring to is this. I am not encouraged that "Micklethwait" is spelt so very wrongly in the web address. This suggests to me that no very great attention was paid to what he said.
Which, if true, would be a pity, because after Toby's what-you-would-expect-from-a-UKIPer denunciation of BBC bias (concerning the idea of Britain getting out of the EU – surprise surprise), he then veers off into this:
Finally, perhaps off topic, it seems to me uneconomic to spend billions of pounds on language education in schools, and then to fail to spend the few millions needed to ensure that there are free to air television channels in French, Spanish etc. Such channels should be purchased from abroad. The best programs for learning languages are quiz programs (preferably with text on screen), followed by nature programmes, and then news. Fast moving comedy is very difficult to understand in another language.If proof is required that TV affects language learning, then I point out that dwellers in Copenhagen understand Swedish well, whereas in Esbjerg they do not. The difference is not in the schooling, it is in the TV.
What an interesting observation. He is quite right that our government, or at any rate a fragment of it, has for some time been in initiative mode about language teaching in schools. We now have a strategy to make more people learn foreign languages.
Toby's idea is the best I've heard for achieving greater foreign language knowledge in Britain, and, as he says, at a trifling cost. Just sling a few cheap and cheerful foreign language channels up on regular don't-pay-as-you-watch TV, and let nature take its course. Excellent.
So good is this idea that I reward brother Toby with two gratuitous pictures of him, looking studious and educational, and looking happy, taken a year or two ago at a Christmas family gathering at his home in the leafy suburbs of Surrey.
A few learned comments on this TV helps language learning idea would be very welcome. Does it really do this? Is Toby (and am I) getting too excited about this idea? If he is right, are there some other examples to throw into the pot from elsewhere in the world? I do recall reading in all kinds of places that lots of people have learned English by going to the movies and listening out for the English words to go along with the subtitled words at the bottom. But how about TV? Do Spanish speaking Americans learn their English (assuming they want to learn it) by watching Anglo-TV? Do Europeans learn English by watching British and American TV?
If the idea survives scrutiny in the comparative privacy of here, I can then give this notion another push on Samizdata. If I get no comments here, I'll stick it up on Samizdata anyway.
Apart from the idea itself, is there any way to access the place where this piece got posted, and most especially any replies to it? I tried ringing Toby to ask this, but he seems to be extremely busy just now. He is, presumably, among other things, UKIPing, helping to reinforcing their success. If so, it makes sense.
Your brother is clearly an intelligent bloke (too). I found, even living in Germany, that watching TV is a great way to tune your ear into the sound of a language. Easier at the start, in fact, than sitting and talking with people in bars etc. because people on TV generally have much clearer diction (as the evening wears on), subject matter is more predictable etc.
He's broadly right about what to watch, too. News and, as he says, quiz shows. (The presenter of the German Who Wants To Be A millionaire is the best TV presenter I've ever seen in any language) Anything with rapid crossfire dialogue is too hard at first. Bad dubbed American action movies are also good because they have extreme
... ly simple and predictable dialogue
(Your commenting system has become very picky about what it accepts lately, as a result of which the end of that last comment (and a complete one about Indian films yesterday, basically just recommending Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding) got bitten off as a result)
I think there is a lot of merit in your brother's idea. A few years ago I spent a week in Oslo teaching a very technical software course at a local branch of my employer. As I usually do in such situations, I apologized for my American accent and asked the class to tell me if I were to speak too quickly. They replied that they did not have any trouble understanding my accent and that, in fact, they found Americans much easier to understand than Brits. I was puzzled by that at first and then I realized that there were many American television programs on the local television stations. Probably because Norway is a relatively small television market, cost factors seemed to rule out dubbing in Norwegian voices and the programs were broadcast with the original American dialog and Norwegian subtitles appearing on the bottom of the screen. After spending time every week with "Friends" and other American shows, no wonder they found American accents more understandable than British accents.
I think it may also be that people in Copenhagen can understand Swedish because the version of Danish that is spoken in Copenhagen is pretty close to Swedish anyway. The Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic) are pretty much mutually intellegible to start with, which is not to say that there aren't cases where people have difficulty understanding one another (as there are between people speaking variants of "English" for that matter).
Which is not to say that anything your brother says is wrong of course.
The spectacle over at samizdata's comment mill is not a particularly edifying one. Though it might pose a philosophical problem that would entertain a scholastic: what happens when an indefatigable bore meets an immovable ideologue?
Anyway, your brother of course quite right that immersing yourself in a language is the best way to learn, though he overlooks the fact that the idiot box is unnecessary here when internet radio is available to just about everyone. Back in the eighties I would occasionally listen in to Radio Moscow and was always puzzled by the perfectly accented American English the announcers used. Since learning their English abroad seemed impossible where did they pick up their accents, then it struck me - of course, they must have been one of the few classes of people permitted to listen to Voice of America. Comforting proof that at least some heterodox opinion was being heard in the Evil Empire.
