England's main faults

[Catkin]

A bit behind with this thread, but my initial thoughts

1) Yes perhaps. But some people are better at creativity and innovating, and others at maintaining and improving. You need both types. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have different countries as predominantly one type in character, and I think being an innovator is great.

2) So other countries are really good at sports we invented? To me that’s a good thing, we’ve created sports others love. Also you want competition, something to aim for. It would be boring to be the best at everything all the time. And we have won world cups or gold medals in various sports, so I think that’s hardly failing. We are also into several sports. New Zealand is mostly into rugby, effort is more focussed.

3) I think it’s hard to learn a foreign language when your first language is English. You have to go out of your way to be exposed to the different language as you’ll never see it in films etc. Many Americans will be more exposed to Spanish than the English will be to another language.

As for Europeans and welsh speakers speaking other foreign languages besides English, studies have shown that once you have learned one foreign language it is much easier to learn another one. Some language courses have trialled teaching Esperanto for 6 months before getting onto the target language, as Esperanto is easy and very regular, but having learned it means later language learning is sped up.

With regard to welsh people speaking welsh, Irish speaking Irish etc. I suspect people who have issues with this feel that the welsh or Irish see themselves as superior because they can speak what the English speaker can’t, and this makes these people feel insecure. The more secure of us don’t care.

4) I think the English media has just shown ordinary English people, and because the media has been quite successful others have seen it more and so see it as ‘the norm’. As you said elsewhere, the English aren’t known for being insecure in their ethnicity, so they would have no need to promote anything. Their only crime is being themselves and successful.

5) I don’t know what to say about this one. I see other countries with private healthcare etc whereas we are still mostly public. We were pretty broke in the 70s, so maybe it’s just a consequence of selling things off to try to raise funds. I’m more pro public ownership where possible.

6) Perhaps they are trying to make it more relevant to ordinary school kids. Teach a council estate kid about slavery and Nazi Germany and you’re teaching them not to be racist, not to treat different ethnicities differently, and the potential atrocities that can come from voting for the racist far right. Life skills and important lessons for their lives.

Teach a council estate kid about Ireland, India, Australia or North America and you teach them not to try to be a power hungry member of the elite who wants to take over another country and impose your culture on them. I doubt many ordinary kids have global domination in their life plan. Plus if you don’t want to encourage arrogance, perhaps don’t teach them how dominant England/Britain once was.




I am being devil’s advocate about all these things. To an extent yes, English people don’t try so hard to learn languages because they know everyone will speak theirs. And no, we don’t get taught every detail of English history in school (though if we did just focus on ourselves we’d probably be called too Anglo-centric).

[Tooting Carmen]

That was the plan but that never materialized. It would have led to a disastrous rise in illegal trade and the wholesale closure of legitimate sellers.

Not that I wish to digress too much, but as someone who (at least in the Dutch sense) is right-wing and conservative, what are your own attitudes towards issues such as drugs, prostitution and euthanasia?

[The Lawspeaker]

Not that I wish to digress too much, but as someone who (at least in the Dutch sense) is right-wing and conservative, what are your own attitudes towards issues such as drugs, prostitution and euthanasia?

I would like to keep a good mood today. I am not touching it right now.

[The Lawspeaker]

But if you really want to know. But I won't be discussing it right now.

[Longbowman]

The tales of Englishmen who say "I went it into the pub and they all started to speak in Welsh" are legion. (They were speaking in Welsh well before you arrived dear). And if you read my OP, I did say that many English people are hostile or at least indifferent to the other native languages of the British Isles, as well as languages from elsewhere.

those are usually either jokes or apocryphal. it's always 'apparently, x.' I live in North Wales and I've never heard of anyone saying it happened to them.

Clearly I glossed over it because it's absurd. The English flat-out don't care either way.

I can't speak for Wales, but usually the biggest issue with Gaelic comes from other Scots rather than the English, who don't think it belongs to the 21st century and complain about the exaggerated cost to preserve it, Daily mail and Express type readers. Maybe it is different in Wales, You have done a better job of preservation than us.

Nope, it's the same. Why the fuck would Dickless McGee from Norfolk have anything at all to say about Welsh? Christ on a stick.

[Graham]

Dickless McGee from Norfolk

I think I know him,

[Longbowman]

I think I know him,

no, I live in Suffolk

[Bellbeaking]

Lack of cycling infrastructure and a car centric culture doesn't work well on a small island with Victorian roads, we need to cooperate and share the space we have, bikes, trains etc do nicely to create space. Shame society is too individualistic and British people are probably not cooperative or high trust enough for such things to ever happen. Although cycling is better than say, France or Spain afaik.

I think English people don't have much of an emotional or cultural connection with English, they just see it as a medium to communicate (I mean it's a mutt language and not really our indigenous one after all) seeing as it is the language of America it may as well be the language of the world. So it seems odd to us when others, like the French do care a lot about theirs.

[Tooting Carmen]

Lack of cycling infrastructure and a car centric culture doesn't work well on a small island with Victorian roads, we need to cooperate and share the space we have, bikes, trains etc do nicely to create space. Shame society is too individualistic and British people are probably not cooperative or high trust enough for such things to ever happen. Although cycling is better than say, France or Spain afaik.

All very true.

I think English people don't have much of an emotional or cultural connection with English, they just see it as a medium to communicate (I mean it's a mutt language and not really our indigenous one after all) seeing as it is the language of America it may as well be the language of the world. So it seems odd to us when others, like the French do care a lot about theirs.

I dispute this. Although the English may care less OVERTLY about their language than do the French - we have no proper equivalent to the Academie Francaise for starters, although the OED is a sort of equivalent - how do you think most English people would react if (a) the UN or some other international body were to decree that English be renamed 'American' (that is what people are mostly learning or speaking, after all) or (b) any English town or city became as de facto bilingual (presumably with either Polish or a South Asian language) as several US cities and towns have become with Spanish. The truth is that English dominates very strongly even in cities like London, Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford - certainly, whatever bi/multilingual signage, information and education those cities may have doesn't remotely compare to what is found nowadays in New York, Chicago, Miami and several towns and cities in Texas and California.

[Bellbeaking]

All very true.

I dispute this. Although the English may care less OVERTLY about their language than do the French - we have no proper equivalent to the Academie Francaise for starters, although the OED is a sort of equivalent - how do you think most English people would react if (a) the UN or some other international body were to decree that English be renamed 'American' (that is what people are mostly learning or speaking, after all) or (b) any English town or city became as de facto bilingual (presumably with either Polish or a South Asian language) as several US cities and towns have become with Spanish. The truth is that English dominates very strongly even in cities like London, Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford - certainly, whatever bi/multilingual signage, information and education those cities may have doesn't remotely compare to what is found nowadays in New York, Chicago, Miami and several towns and cities in Texas and California.

Sorry, I forgot about this comment.

I don't feel much deep connection with English but I would be offended if either of those where to happen, either suggesting those examples are not definitive proof that one cares about their language or that sub-consciously I do care about English as a facet of my national identity more than I realize. In the first case I feel it would strip my country of recognition and attention it deserves like it would make the country less relevant, English being spoken across the world is a trophy of colonial and historical achievement to some extent. Having it's name stamped on the worlds largest language seems like a bad thing to loose, it's like a perpetual advertisement. As for the second example I think it would be a little rude if they didn't speak our language, not speaking how we speak in our own country is an inconvenience to us irrespective of what that language is. Although I would have to agree that the English language is part of the package of Englishness, as demonstrated by the fact that Americans (who are usually more conservative) are not as anal about people speaking it in their country, so yes I agree with you, but still think that pride in our language is not a feature of English culture, unlike the French though such 'pride' may emerge when it's 'attacked' as per your examples.