{"id":73,"date":"2018-07-28T17:15:02","date_gmt":"2018-07-28T16:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress-232648-741634.cloudwaysapps.com\/?p=73"},"modified":"2018-07-28T17:15:02","modified_gmt":"2018-07-28T16:15:02","slug":"everybody-speaks-english-nowadays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/everybody-speaks-english-nowadays\/","title":{"rendered":"Everybody Speaks English Nowadays"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>\nEvery English language and literature major hears this a thousand times throughout their studies. Didn&#8217;t you hear: &#8220;Everybody already knows English&#8221;. And why not&#8230; There are so many schools where you can learn it at the lightning-fast speed of &#8216;twenty days&#8217;.<\/p>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n<p>&#8211; Nephew, what major did you choose?<br \/>&#8211; English language and literature.<br \/>&#8211; My goodness\u2026 How on earth can that be useful? Everybody speaks English nowadays!&nbsp;<em>(makes a face full of pity)<\/em><br \/>&#8211; First of all, it&#8217;s not true that everybody speaks English.<br \/>&#8211; How is it not true? Take my Marija, for example. She speaks perfect English. She spoke with English people this summer! That&#8217;s why she&#8217;s studying Italian as a foreign language at Hospitality school.<br \/>&#8211; Good for her. How much do they charge for classes?<br \/>&#8211; Hey, don&#8217;t be rude now. I&#8217;m just saying that it won&#8217;t pay off because everybody speaks English nowadays.<br \/>&#8211; People also think they speak Serbian, and yet they still study it for twelve years in school. And they don&#8217;t even speak Serbian, 90% of the population is functionally illiterate. And when you don&#8217;t know your own mother tongue, you can&#8217;t possibly know a foreign language any better. Second of all, nobody is born learned. People with training are needed to educate the population, your daughter with her Tourism degree certainly won&#8217;t be teaching the subjunctive to anybody. Third of all, even when I finish my degree I myself still won&#8217;t know English. I will only be equipped with the knowledge to begin to learn the language the way it ought to be learned, and that process continues till the day I die &#8211; let alone someone who only took a course in the UK!<br \/>&#8211; Alright dear, now don&#8217;t get upset. All I&#8217;m saying is that you should have taken up Spanish\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n<p><em>Translated by Nina Pantelic, lecturer at Universidad Complutense de Madrid<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every English language and literature major hears this a thousand times throughout their studies. Didn&#8217;t you hear: &#8220;Everybody already knows English&#8221;. And why not&#8230; There &#8230; <a title=\"Everybody Speaks English Nowadays\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/everybody-speaks-english-nowadays\/\" aria-label=\"More on Everybody Speaks English Nowadays\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":74,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_generate-full-width-content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[298],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}