hi Melandri,
basicay we do learn french, spanish,german at school for a few years.
as said earlier we dont use it so it gets forgotten.
i only did french and struggle to remember much.
i learnt myself a decent amount of spanish about 8 years ago as i used to go on holidays to spain and
it helped a lot with the locals. i learnt this from c.d.s and books.
i also have a few 'get by ' words in german and are picking up more and more as i work for an Austrian company.
i think the main reason we dont have to speak another language is because we are lucky as english is the business
language of the world.
also i believe that on the continent you have easy access to english t.v., most pop songs and music is in english.
and you are all exposed to the language at a very early age. if we were in the same situation we would of course
have to learn. we arnt unable to learn we just dont need to.
i do feel ignorant when i go to the continent but i do try as a lot of other people do.
the bottom line is for most people why have something that you dont need??
the part of the UK where i live has its own strong dialect which to outsiders is another language.
'
examples: 'ar bin ya' means 'how are you'. 'cor' means 'can not', 'am' means 'are', 'ar sid yow a wek afowr' means 'i saw you last week'
mad or what