Category Archives: Why study French?

Applying to study modern languages, French language, Why study French?

100 Good Reasons to Study Modern Languages at University: Reason 95

Leave a comment

A planetary disk of white cloud formations, brown and green land masses, and dark blue oceans against a black background. The Arabian peninsula, Africa and Madagascar lie in the upper half of the disk, while Antarctica is at the bottom.

There are seven billion people on the planet. Fewer than four hundred million of them speak English as their first language. Five billion of them don’t speak English at all. If you want to talk to them, you’re going to have to learn a foreign language.  Even with the ones that do speak English, you’re not going to get very far if you know nothing of their culture, and can’t understand anything they say to each other.

That should be reason enough to be considering a degree in modern languages. At Oxford, we offer courses in the two most widely spoken first languages on the planet, Chinese and Spanish,  the other major languages of Europe (German, French, Italian, Czech, Slovak, Greek, Polish, Portuguese), and of the increasingly important BRIC economies (Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Bengali), and of East Asia and the Middle East (Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Turkish), as well as minority languages like Catalan, Galician, Yiddish, Gaelic and Welsh. Most of these are available to learn from scratch, on their own or in tandem with another language or another subject. You can explore all the possibilities and combinations on our admissions pages.

How does French measure up against these other choices? Well, according to the French government, there are more than 220  million French speakers in the world, spread across five continents and 77 countries with French as an official language. It is the second most widely learned foreign language after English, and the sixth most widely spoken language in the world. French is also the only language, alongside English, that is taught in every country in the world. France operates the biggest international network of cultural institutes, which run French-language courses for close on a million learners.

The majority of French-speakers live outside Europe (which has approximately 87.5 million French speakers).

There are:

16.8 million French speakers in the Americas and the Caribbean (notably in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Quebec and French Guyana),

2.6 million speakers in Asia and Oceania (particularly in the former colonies of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia),

33.6 million in North Africa and the Middle East (especially the ‘Maghreb’ countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, and Lebanon and Syria in the Middle East),

and 79.1 million speakers in sub-Saharan Africa (including Benin, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mozambique, Niger, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Niger, Togo, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, and several others.)

French is very much a global language of the twenty-first century, and studying it at university opens doors that lead far beyond our nearest European neighbour.

Why study French?

100 Good Reasons to Study Modern Languages at University: Reason 96

Leave a comment

posted by Simon Kemp

You should study modern languages at university, because if you don’t, it’ll cost us fifty billion pounds. Every year.

According to a recent BBC report, the UK may be losing that much due to our poor language skills as a nation. A cross-party group of MPs has called for a “national recovery programme” to improve our skills in foreign languages.  Baroness Coussins, speaking for the group, claims that ‘the UK economy is already losing  around £50bn a year in lost contracts because of a lack of language skills in the workforce.’ She also suggested British businesses were losing out on export opportunities, and struggling to fill posts, because of a lack of British workers able to speak a foreign language. Apparently,  only 9% of 15-year-olds are competent in their first foreign language in the UK, compared with 42% in 14 other European countries.

What could Britain do with an extra fifty billion a year?

Well:

£50 000 000 000 buys….

625 London Eyes every year. 

three hundred thousand Ferraris.

an Olympic Games in a different UK city every two months forever.

a Twix for everyone in China  every week (with enough left over to give everyone in Spain a Curly Wurly).

a fleet of 157 brand new Airbus 380s every year.

the NHS’s full running costs for 6 months,  or enough money to double the education budget.

an £800.00 Christmas present to every man, woman, child, baby and grandma in the UK every year.

And if helping out your country in its hour of need isn’t reason enough for you, then there’s also the fact that the dire state of Britain’s language skills puts people with, say, a university degree in French in a very competitive position on the UK job market at the moment…

Why study French?

100 Good Reasons to Study Modern Languages at University: Reason 98

Leave a comment

posted by Simon Kemp

Maybe not the most urgent reason, but it’s one you’ll thank me for later. Learning a second language, it turns out, keeps your brain going for longer. The Annals of Neurology publish a scientific paper today showing the evidence that learning a second language can help keep your mind sharp into old age, and that it can in fact stave off dementia for an average of four years. In case you don’t fancy tackling the research paper itself at the above link, here’s The Independent’s take on the story:

The case for improving the national uptake of foreign languages is usually phrased in economic terms. British people are notoriously leery of extending their linguistic repertoire. Lulled into a sense of security by the omnipresence of English, we sit at or near the bottom of European tables in terms of bilingual proficiency. Organisations from the British Council to the British Academy have warned that such stubborn Anglocentrism risks the nation’s future competitiveness in an increasingly transnational economy, as workers from abroad who can speak one or two other languages elbow tongue-tied Brits out of the way. These reasons are compelling enough on their own, but they do not offer the full picture.

A new study clarifies the beneficial effects that learning a foreign language can have on the brain. Even if the lessons start late in adult life, as brain function naturally decreases, they can help ward off dementia. This builds on existing research that shows, for bilingual adults, Alzheimer’s setting in an average of four years later – at 75 instead of 71. The data is strong enough to suggest that the NHS ought to consider encouraging patients, especially the elderly, to try their hand at a new language.

Besides the travel opportunities, the sense of achievement that comes with such study might appeal. As the number of people suffering from dementia is expected to rise to over a million by 2021, prevention needs to take its place near the top of the health service’s agenda – and language-learning should now be packaged up with exercise, the other preventative tool backed up by a number of neurological investigations. It is a sad fact that the best time to treat the disease is before it’s even begun. In this case, drugs can only smooth the descent.

We have yet to fully turn the corner in embracing foreign languages, though there are positive signs in the education system. After decades of decline, the number of students choosing to study French, German and Spanish increased last year – and from this year all will be required to study one foreign language between the ages of seven and 14. Now we know that the benefits of language-learning are not limited to the young, there is all the more reason for parents to join in.

Why study French?

One Hundred Good Reasons to Study Modern Languages at University

Leave a comment

posted by Simon Kemp

There are lots more than a hundred good reasons to study modern languages, but if I’m going to drip-feed them to you at one reason per post, and no more than a couple of posts per month on this topic, then a hundred will keep us going nicely for a while. Many of these reasons are about the pleasures of discovering a foreign culture, exploring its history, literature and film. Others are about learning to handle another language confidently, discovering how languages work, how they develop, and how your own language connects with or differs from the language you’re learning. Still others will be about the experience of meeting new people on your year abroad, getting by in an exciting, unfamiliar environment and broadening your horizons. But of course, in the age of tuition fees and economic austerity, we also need some hard, cold facts about your prospects for employment and earnings at the end of your degree. Luckily, as well as being one of the most stimulating, adventurous and intellectually fulfilling choices of university course, a modern languages degree aces the career statistics too. So let’s start there.

Counting down, then, we’ll begin with Good Reason to Study Modern Languages at University, Number 100…

The Destination of Leavers from Higher Education survey asks recent UK university graduates what they are doing six months after graduation. The most recent data is from graduates in 2012, which found that only 9% of modern languages graduates were unemployed six months after graduating. That compares with 10% unemployment rates for business studies, engineering, architecture and physical sciences, 11% in creative arts and design, 12% in media studies and 14% unemployment for computer science graduates. In fact, only teaching, law and medical/biological sciences have lower unemployment rates than modern languages for their graduates.

So modern linguists go on to many different things after graduation, but the dole queue is not one of them. We’ll delve further into these Destination of Leavers statistics later on to find out more about what these graduates are actually doing, but I thought this might be the most important place to start.