Will Hutton’s recent misleading piece in the Guardian about the decline in language learning in UK skills needed some serious demolition.

And here it is, by me over at Telegraphs Blogs:

… in my experience both at school and later at the late FCO Language Centre, a big part of the problem with language learning is language teachers. Most people who go into teaching language are obsessive on the detail and fine points. They tend to be poor if not hopeless at explaining the way the language works as a whole, and where intelligent guesses and smart short-cuts might be made.

This was brought home to me by a distinguished retired teacher near Stellenbosch who taught me Afrikaans when I was posted by the FCO to South Africa. His main love was Latin. He told me how he had taken a boy who hated Latin from next to nothing to almost degree standard with a year of private tuition. His method? To look at the whole of Latin grammar – great sheets of verb and case endings – for a first tough two weeks to get the gloomy boy to see the grammar in terms of simple patterns, then to plunge straight into Caesar and other interesting texts.

By contrast the typical British school treats learning a language as a trite linear process. Start with Nominative, then move to Accusative and Vocative. After a year or so of fatuous sentences no one would want to say, tackle Dative and Ablative. X-rated Subjunctive is for serious students only.

Even the former FCO Language Centre – yes, also abolished by Labour(!) – fell into this trap. Teachers of Russian were snootily dismissive of anyone who had learned another Slav language, refusing to see any overlap and congruity. Instead an institution like the FCO should be tackling "Slav", basing teaching squarely on the several thousand root words and general grammar construction common to most Slav languages. With that mastered, budding diplomats can easily switch to and between Russian, Polish or whatever. William Hague has inherited the diplomatic rubble left to him by those long years of Labour incompetence and is trying to reboot the FCO’s language learning capabilities. I have volunteered my services.

But, you ask, is any of this necessary anyway? Aren’t we fast moving to world in which Google instantly translates any page pretty well from its original language to almost any other? Isn’t it just a matter of time before Apple produce a Siri-like way of simultaneously translating speech from one language to another? This won’t be 100% accurate, but then almost no one who learns a foreign language ends up 100% accurate anyway. Surely accelerating technological cleverness is the main driver for not bothering to learn a foreign language?

Plus, native English speakers have one extraordinary advantage. They speak English. The other day I was in Paris as a judge for the latest ICC Mediation Competition. Smart law students from some 70 universities across the planet came compete as negotiators. The competition was run in English. And impressive it was to watch young, tough Chinese students in action.

English is a bit like the QWERTY keyboard. You wouldn’t necessarily choose it as the main common international language of choice, but once it has established itself it has a decisive, ever-compounding advantage. Every day around the world tens of thousands of young people start absorbing or learning English. It’s easy to get started. You can even make up words and still be comprehensible, even witty: "Hey baby! You me go coffeeshoppingwards?” Chinese (say) is on a totally different order of complexity – and inaccessibility.

I have written about foreign language teaching previously. See eg here. And here.

From one who has sloshing around among his diminishing brain cells lumps of Serbia/Croatian, Polish, Russian, French, German, Afrikaans, Spanish and (best of all) Latin.