Traveller’s Reviews > Introducing Second Language Acquisition > Status Update
Traveller
is on page 9 of 214
Chinese is an L1 for many more people than any other language, and English is by far the most common L2. In China alone, a recent estimate of numbers of people studying English exceeds 155 million: 10 million in elementary school, 80 million in high school, at least 5 million in universities, and 60 million adults in other instructional contexts. Many more millions will soon be added to these estimates...
— Dec 08, 2021 05:40AM
4 likes · Like flag
Traveller’s Previous Updates
Traveller
is on page 13 of 214
Political aspects of language classification:1) When languages are reclassified, [...] eg. demise of Yugoslavia as a political entity led to the official distinction as separate languages of Bosnian and Montenegrin, which had been categorized within former Serbo-Croatian (itself a single language divided into national varieties distinguished by different alphabets because of religious differences)
— Dec 08, 2021 09:05AM
Comments Showing 1-4 of 4 (4 new)
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Jan-Maat
(new)
Dec 08, 2021 06:10AM
When they write Chinese, what language do they mean? Mandarin, Cantonese, something else? Or are they lumping several languages together?
reply
|
flag
Jan-Maat wrote: "When they write Chinese, what language do they mean? Mandarin, Cantonese, something else? Or are they lumping several languages together?"They meant Mandarin. Unfortuntely, these GR "update" spaces are very small, so I couldn't cram the entire paragraph into it.
The other interesting point that it mentions:
is that by 1998, the Modern Language Association reported that Chinese had become the sixth most commonly taught foreign language in US colleges and universities, and numbers are steadily growing. (I guess the book is a bit old - let's see, published 2006.)
It also mentions:
In some countries, e.g. Iceland, very few people speak other than the national language on a regular basis, while in other countries, such as parts of west Africa, close to 100 percent of the speakers of the national language also speak another language.
You could add the rest of the text you want in the first comment. I learned it from Pierre & Manny 😀
Chadi wrote: "You could add the rest of the text you want in the first comment. I learned it from Pierre & Manny 😀"Thanks, Chadi! Yes, not sure how they expect us to post anything meaningful in such short little spaces, which is why I don't often use these update spaces. But I'm picking up interesting little bits as I go along here.
