Most British travelers would like to learn another language.

  This article from Reuters entitled

No foreign language on holiday please, we're British

seems to focus its headline on the negative, but I find it encouraging that a significant majority of even British people seem to see a need to learn another language. At least this true among those who travel. Now if we can just convince them that it is both fun, and not so difficult, we would untap a huge market for online language study and for LingQ.

I am not quite sure how we do that, however.

Comments

[Cantotango]

No doubt the headline was inspired by the play "No Sex Please, We're British" which ran for a very long time in London.

[adalberto]

why not partner up with travel agencies? You know "Thomas Cook" etc.

[jon s]

I'm british and I'm afraid I honestly don't see this problem of monolingualism in the UK (and America, for that matter) ending until English ceases to be the dominant language in the world. I remember being told all the time that there's no point in studying that hard in French or German lessons because 'everyone in Europe speaks English', even by some teachers.

Just about every year or so some government official says that british students have to get better at speaking languages or India and China will destroy us, and then do absolutely nothing about the awful way in which these are taught in schools (grammar drills, no choice of language, 95% of lessons in native tongue etc etc) that makes students just give up. (Which inlduded me, btw).

I think adalberto's suggestion of teaming up with a travel agency would be a good idea, and an initial advertising blitz (though initially expensive) couldn't hurt. I think focussing on Britain would help you a lot. We're getting more involved in the EU (which doesn't have English as an official language *quelle horreur!*) and we're only a Eurostar away from a lot of foreign countries. And appealing to the people who travel a lot would be clever (every quality newspaper here has a big travel section).

If you have too few people paying for the premium services, you could have a 'donate' button somewhere and make people feel guilty for free-loading. People feel anxious to sign up to stuff that will charge them every month, but they might pay for something on the free service.

Anyway, sorry for taking up all the space in your comments section.

Jon x

[Jason]

I'm also British (from London) and agree with Jon's comments. Here's just some of my thoughts/brainstorming that you may have have had yourself on your recent visit here Steve. Perhaps advertising in the carriages of the London Underground(even if 1 space in say 5 coaches)in multiple languages e.g. English, Polish, Portuguese, etc.
A feature in the (now free) London Standard and Metro newspapers, Easyjet and Ryannair in-flight magazines or an advertisement on hot courses.com? Ad. spaces on Heart or Smooth FM. Of course I realise the costs may be prohibitive.

[Kevin Geoghegan]

Monolingualism is a common feature of many countries, not just the UK. Hungary, Spain, Italy and Portugal are all about as bad as the UK at only speaking one language. Of course English is an official language of the EU, being the language used in a member country, i.e. the UK, for legal and administrative purposes. There are 23 official languages in the EU to date which is one reason for the phenomenal amount of bureaucracy. According to Wikipedia, there are also 150 regional and minority languages used. German is the language with the highest number of native speakers (18%), followed by English and Italian (13%) and then French (12%). English is by far the most spoken foreign language (51%), followed by German (32%), French (26%), Italian (16%), Spanish (15%) and Polish (10%).

The reason why more people don't learn languages is, as Mark Rosenfelder says:

Languages take immense effort to learn, and people will only learn them if it's socially or economically inescapable.

see When do people learn languages? and other interesting articles on the zompist.com website for a good read.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Kevin,

There are some very interesting observations here and I will do a post and a video on this subject.

Steve

[Steve Kaufmann]

From my personal experience, England is probably the most monolingual country in Europe but that is not surprising for the reasons stated here. It would be more fair to see in which countries there are more speakers of foreign languages, other than English.

I have met English businessmen who were fluent in a number of languages, Japanese, Swedish, Russian, French, to name a few. There is no genetic impediment. The necessity just is not there.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Not a bad idea Adelberto.