And then I find it a strange story that there are more than 10 primary schools in Rotterdam alone where the children are taught English
as a mother tongue in addition to Dutch.
On the other hand, how likely will such a project succeed? If the pupils need to talk English to the teacher, but can only talk Dutch to children from other schools, to their parents, and to almost everyone else, at least until they are about twelve and start watching subtitled TV programmes.
And this summer vacation I was in Germany staying with a friend, and I have gone to his school for one day, and I saw their English class. Their level was absolutely horrible, I don't say my English is good, but their accent was like in Allo Allo and I have seen all kinds of spelling and syntax mistakes. And that while they were almost all 16 or 17!
I think the point here is that there are enough Germans to keep the language alive; if you are German, you do not need to know any other language to "survive", almost all movies are dubbed, there is a German Linux Magazine, there are lots of original German movies, there are lots of German music and I can go on.
In the Netherlands things are a little bit different, you are almost literally bombed with English on TV and in ads and on universities; I can understand that it is impractical to translate all scientific books and magazines to Dutch, but with TV and ads it is
just and only that English is "cool" in the Netherlands - I guess at least 3 out of 4 pupils from my class has never have to use English anywhere within the Netherlands.
And for me, I want to learn German really well, because I would really like to go to Germany after I finish school or so, making the use of English to read computer books and webpages.
And with that internet, did you know that there are estimations that Chinese will be the
most used language on the Internet in 2007? This because so many people in China get internet access and thus can chat, email, use fora and can make webpages.
EDIT: what would the world be
boring if everyone spoke English! In some cases it would be easy, but I think it would be really really boring.
Not to mention that the more speakers English has, the less chance on a
spelling reform there is, and wouldn't that be a bad thing?