This headline from a popular British newspaper doesn't surprise me: “UK voted worst country in Europe at learning other languages.” That was in 2016, the year in which 17 million people voted to leave the European Union in the Brexit referendum, triggering a political earthquake that continues to be felt today. Politics aside, though, why are Britons notoriously bad at learning another language? It's not an easy question to answer, but in this post I will attempt to do just that. Anyone who has watched the first episode of the Netflix series “Red Rose” will have seen a group of sixteen-year-old school leavers in the north of England celebrate not having to endure any more “boring” French lessons. This scene stayed with me, one reason being that I, on the contrary, enjoyed learning French at school, although there were times when I was expected to memorise long lists of verb conjugations, a rather dull process that is best avoided, in my opinion. Schools in the UK now allow pu
The words of an English language teacher & proofreader