New Academic Year
As lots of people and organisations (including Linguatastic) prepare for a new academic year, we’d like to share the highlights of a new report from the Higher Education Policy Institute, which sadly shows a big drop in formal language learning in UK schools and universities:
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Under 3% of A-Levels taken in 2024 were for Modern Foreign Languages, Classical Subjects, Welsh (Second Language) and Irish.
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There are now more A-Level entries for PE than for French, German and Classical Languages combined.
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Since 2014, 17 post-1992 universities have lost their modern languages degrees, leaving modern languages in just 10.
There is often the misconception that English is enough and that tools like Google Translate means that there is no need to learn another language. However, anyone who has spent some time abroad this summer (and not just in an English-speaking region of another country) will recognise that although machine translations are fantastic tools, they aren’t the same as actually being able to speak the language oneself.
For starters, they do not always accurately interpret the context. Instead, they often break sentences into words or phrases and analyse them separately. This can result in awkward translations that may confuse or offend the target persons.
Perhaps most importantly though, whilst useful for communication, they are not designed for conversation. When we meet somebody in or from another country, we might want to get to know them better. Translation tools are not enough to properly do this. A culture is more than just the words. Tapping a sentence into a smartphone and pressing the translate button and holding it up to another person’s face, misses out the body language and the small gestures, which teach us about them and their culture…