Austrian students have to learn it in almost every year they spend at school. Usually, they start at the age of nine, maybe eight in primary school. Some children are taught by their very progressive parents to count in English when they just have learned to count at all! It´s amazing to listen to a four-year-old guy counting the numbers from one to twenty. Kids obviously do learn languages easily.

In fact, it wouldn´t work, if Austrian English teachers weren´t as good as they are. Most of them have been spending half a year or more in Great Britain or in the USA to improve their skills in pronunciation or grammar. Those who study English on Austrian universities are examined many times in the subject of English pronunciation – and it´s hard to pass these exams. I was told that once an Irish student failed in this exam in Vienna.
If an Irish told me that my German pronunciation was not good enough, I would not take him seriously, of course.

What do you need to communicate in a foreign language?- Vocabulary and the grammar. Sometimes the words suffice for our needs. “Today I go swimming” is enough, right? Actually, you even don´t have to know the correct tenses: “Yesterday I go swimming” and “Tomorrow I go swimming” is what every responding person would also understand. No problem: when you want to learn a language, learn the words first.

But it´s a big challenge to understand idioms. “Idiom” means “belonging to”, “being part of something”. So idioms are certain expressions in certain languages. Have you ever tried to translate a foreign idiom via “Google language tool” in the internet? There is e.g. a German idiom “Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund“, which means that people should use the early morning hours for their daily have-to-be-dones (like English “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”). Have “Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund“ translated from German into Italian, from Italian into Spanish, from Spanish into English and then back into German, so you get “In der Früh verdient der Zahnarzt am meisten” (which of course is translated literally and means that a dentist earns most of his money in the morning!). Try to translate “a star is born”, and probably you will be led into the wide world of astronomy…

I am supporting all efforts aiming a bilingual education in Austrian schools and daily life. Thus, I am not fighting the globalisation of languages, which finally is a focussing on English. In Austria, we have magazines called “Woman” and “News”, we play basketball and go snowboarding, we like lifestyle and so many events. All those terms, concerning especially the young, are not translated into German anymore. Even the mobile phones have their own word, they are called „handy“ in Austria. It sounds like English, but it’s not. Cool.

Walter Dujmovits, jun.