I’m a native speaker of Spanish. My first word was in Spanish (Castilian Spanish) the main language in Spain. However in the UK people ask silly questions like, can you speak Spanish with a Spanish person?
I applied for some jobs where a native speaker of Spanish was required and my application was not taken into account because I am from Peru, not Spain. One employment agency even told me that the requirement for the job was to speak Spanish Spanish and not Peruvian Spanish.
Perhaps this is because the Spanish can be very prejudiced towards South Americans but this shouldn’t be acceptable. Imagine if you were told you cannot even apply for a job somewhere because your accent might irritate customers.
I wonder if people think that an American, a Canadian and Aussie, etc would not be able to speak English English so they shouldn’t work in the UK.
I would never think about asking a Canadian, “Can you have a conversation with a British person?” – but that is something people have asked me!
I think that because English is the business language around the world and everyone else has to learn English, that English speaking people don’t have the necessity to learn any another languages, so most of the people speak just English.
In countries like Peru there is an abundance of schools and academies to study English apart from school (English is taught in most of the Schools). Here in the UK, I don’t see any Schools of foreign languages with the exception of some colleges with a few students that study for a hobby or because they bought a house in the South of France or Spain.
I laughed when I saw a TV program where British people in Spain were complaining about Spanish Hospitals where people didn’t speak English. If a British person moves to Spain they should learn the language spoken there. They go to Spain to have the nice weather there but they want to keep their language and habits.
Some foreign languages are taught in school but a only few hours a week, that’s not enough to learn a language properly. Also there is very little foreign television or radio in the UK (apart from US programmes) so people cannot become familiar with the sounds and pronounciation of that language. I went to see the film ‘Apocalypto’ and because it had subtitles there were only 5 people in the whole cinema.
I think that because most of people in the UK don’t speak any foreign languages they don’t understand how languages like Spanish are spoken around the world in the same way as English – we even have the same phrases and expressions as the Spanish.
