What foreign languages should be taught in Australian schools? (1962) | Sixty years of Four Corners 

I was waiting on one of them to say American.

LOVE IT!!

They spoke proper British English back then.

@@aheat3036 yes they did! Listen to the 60 and 70s newsreaders.

​@@Flamable85anyone can speak American if you speak english.

He definitely was way ahead of his time, Japan is now the second largest trading partner.

Age wise, i guess he still alive and fit.

Japan’s economy was booming at that time.

Eh, not necessary. Teach one standard is enough

Nah I'm good, I shouldn't have to speak another language in my own country.

​@@sevenshooter2987yay you learning Walpiri lol.

no i dont want to learn chinese sorry

@@australian1018 It's important to distinguish between the land of Australia and the nation of Australia. The nation of Australia is entirely the brainchild of Europeans, it's an English speaking nation. The land of Australia is not a single entity but a collection of hundreds of smaller indigenous nations.

One year later I guess your English is better now

there are hundreds of different sign languages in use around the world...

@@ronaldonmg Auslan

@@shramo yes

and French too! I wish I had learned these two languages when I was younger 😊

@@katreenah1000 only malnourished African kids speak French outside of France

@@appleslover 😂

Not so lucky for the indigenous Australians still occupied by the British.

@@lukei6255 I was thinking about this subject,and some respect should be paid to native Australians.Probably some of the native languages should be promoted at schools.After all the natives have suffered the most.

what did he say at the end?

@@testtestsson4927 I don't understand, not/nought English

Perhaps but learning a foreign language requires a lot of effort which is disproportional to the benefits flowing from it. To acquaint oneself with Russian literature, Islam and Japanese cinema - which are my areas of interest - I didn't need to learn Russian, Arabic or Japanese. Instead of learning a new language, it would be less laborious and more beneficial, in terms of broadening one's personality, to study a new subject, say, history or medicine, psychology or physics.

Learning Dutch made me racist against Dutch people.

Почему нет?

@@peterdonohue3243 Где изучал русский язык Петя?

@H Not for The people at the time this video was recorded. I was more referring to Learning a language in this day. Although I’m sure it wouldn’t of been bad back then either. Spanish is the most widely spoken, native language in the world. It’s passed only by Mandarin and Hindi but both of those languages are very country specific. From South America to south-east Asia and Europe, Spanish has a global reach comparable to English.

In Australia?

@@RyanReadsGreek Yes, in Queensland Australia to be specific. Public school at that too.

@@lifeoflycan2037 That's pretty interesting. Also commendable. I think here in the States, children can study Spanish a lot earlier than when i was in school. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, most public schools would only offer Spanish, German, French, and possibly Latin. Mostly in HS and not earlier.

@@RyanReadsGreek I'm here in California and I believe kids can have dual language immersion classes even in elementary school. The two languages being English and Spanish.

Indian is not a language. It is a nationality. Hindi/Urdu is the language used in wider part of the subcontinent. A person can get by with English in the subcontinent because the number of people that speak english is more then the western world. Same thing with Chinese, the language is called mandarin.

how do u translate sucky sucky?

@@smoochie3331 just point at your junk, good woman knows what you mean.

@@bitterlyhonest2307 Or Cantonese! 😉

Wtf is indian lol, if u mean hindi, only around 50% speak than in India (north), english is the lingua franca of India

I don't understand why they teach you languages that you never use or never visit the country. In my country we have to learn three foreign languages. And we go for school trips and summer camps to these countries. People at school who study Japanese or Chinese also go for trips. Paid by our education department. So in the end most of us speak at least three languages fluently. But we also start learning at the age of 4.

Apparently she's a Semite judging by her star of David necklace. You can tell from a mile away she's Semitic, just look at her middle eastern appearance!

She's S e m i t i c due to the star of David necklace. Can't you tell she looks sooooo Semitic!

She's a Semite, can't you tell by looking at her facial features!

She's Jewish

I honestly love his Dutch accent though! I can see how it's cute when people talk with that accent 😁

@Adjunct Prof Colleen B Kelly - Retired Given the growth of the country to the north, it is an imperative for us. A lot gets missed in translation, even if it is digitally translated. I married a Chinese woman, and my daughter lives with her in Beijing. Their culture is very different from ours.

Молодец!

На нём можно только путина слушать (ся), вот и скучноватым стал.

Unfortunately the reason why they are suggesting Russian is because out of fear for the country hahaha

Full of Europeans because Australia was 99% European.

Unfortunately the country has gone backwards and is not a place you would want to live in anymore...

What do you mean? They literally teach Japanese and Indonesian and many schools, its up to the kids to follow through with it but most realise its alot of work for a language they arent going to use.

@@DarrellWilkerson4.6 have you seen any Anglo Australian speaking two languages? 🤣

What about the Irish? Should we learn Gaelic?

​@@Ggdivhjkjlyes, or perhaps Welsh, since people of white British descent are largely ethnic Celtic despite the "Germanic" Anglo-Saxon language we now speak

Turn them on

They’re talking English?

Isn’t it owned by Disney?

@@JasonZero0 No. It's owned by the federal government. @justingriffin2546 is probably commenting on how the ABC turned off comments on the video about the White Australia Policy after several commenters accused the people in the video of being racist. That just goes to show how far right the ABC is that they want to silence people for calling out racism.

Tbf most the comments are just Americans crying about how "this isnt english" or people saying "man those were the days" 😂

Yeah I thought that was strange too. Kinda took me by surprise.

That's not rude at all. It was the normal way of asking a person's nationality in Australia right throughout the 20th century.

So english?

SEND THE FOREIGNERS BACK TO EUROPE

Then we can go claim racism and pick up a centrelink cheque every week ...I am in

Aboriginal? What's that? You obviously don't understand Indigenous culture you racist.

@@NathanCroucher no

English is derived from German and Latin, which date back to around 2000 years. How do you think the English felt when they were invaded, slaughtered and had their culture taken away and their many languages (which were originally derived from Gaelic ) wiped out by the Romans, Saxons and Vikings? It has, however, become an international language and is widely spoken on every continent which I think is great! But it was not 'The English' who curated it into a separate language.

@@katreenah1000 That's a weird way of putting it. The Celts were invaded by the Romans in 43 CE, and the Anglo-Saxons, who brought with them the early English language, didn't start arriving until the 400s. In 1066 CE, William the Conqueror of Normandy invaded Britain, which brought many Norman words of Latin origin into English. So English isn't derived from German and Latin, it's a Germanic language with heavy influence from Latin. And the 'English' weren't invaded by the Anglo-Saxons, they WERE the Anglo-Saxons.

She's a Semite, can't you tell by her middle eastern appearance!

Why do you think that? I’d love to learn it but at the same time Spanish is more directly useful to me

NOT ALL FRENCH OR GERMANS SPEAK ENGLISH!

Yes the current classes in schools are useless for language learning. It also needs to be done everyday, not just once a week for one class with barely any homework

Honestly I have no interest in learning aboriginal languages. Plus, there are so many! I think learning certain names for things sure, but not the language as a whole

At least learn one of the many languages of the South Pacific. Aussies still act like theyre not in the South Pacific

@@shamicentertainment1262 Maybe teach the local language in the schools of the area.

​@australian1018 ahh yes, learn 250 languages or learn one irrelevant local one that will never be used and so kids from different areas cant even use it with each other, yup great idea mate 😂

it's too difficult to learn, too much time is spent to even get to a basic level

No probably not. It's not useful even compared to Russian during the cold war. Russian was taught in all of eastern Europe, the middle east, Cuba, central Asia, and China making it a trans-continental language while Chinese is only taught in China making it a mono-continental language making not so useful compared to French or Arabic.

@@gibusgamingMandarin is a good business language, and one day will likely be necessary since the Chinese have so many international ties.

Yes, there is actually. “Standard Chinese” aka “Standard Beijing Mandarin” is the dominant Mandarin dialect in many government, TV and radio communications and is the most widely taught common Mandarin dialect in schools, is supported by the central government and uses the “Simplified Chinese” character set. So it’s entirely appropriate to say there is a language called “Chinese” and people should understand that to mean “Standard Beijing Mandarin”. Given that there a exists hundreds of regional languages and dialects of those languages in China, “Standard Chinese” represents an attempt to provide a language to facilitate communication between all regions of China.

@@stuartcole4845 its Mandarin or Cantonese. No such thing as Chinese.

@@pps900 Stuart Cole is right. Standard Chinese is Mandarin (aka PuTongHua). We would never assume Cantonese or one of the thousands of other dialects (Hokkien, Shanghainese, Hakka are some of the other more important ones). I do speak Chinese (with a Taiwan accent, not a BeiJing one) and I would never think people mean Canto if they say "speak Chinese".

According to most linguists, there are a few dozen sinitic languages. According to the Chinese government, they are "dialects" because they are mutually intelligible when WRITTEN

@@ronaldonmg OK, thousands of dialects.... it is true that the languages of China are generally categorised into related groups but this is like saying English is a Germanic language. They generally only have small parts that are mutually understood even when from the same group. The mutually intelligible thing is simply not true for many instances dialect words have no written form. The only real instance of dialects having specific characters is some from Cantonese which are in common use in HK, Macau etc but will not be understood by people who don't speak Canto. In Taiwan sometimes a phonetic representation of Hokkien words is used with system called BoPoMoFo for words that don't have a Mandarin equivalent and sometimes characters which have no directly understood meaning to Mandarin speakers are used. For other dialects forget about it they are purely spoken languages (I have seen transliteration using Western letters of Shanghainese but 99% of Shanghainese speakers wouldn't have a clue about those).

Only when you Americans learn it first on the "innernet" and "staahp" speaking like they do.

Or perhaps, how to speak English WELL? 😉

@@mpras684 🙄

JQ Dog whistle?

It is not actually that useful. Really only China, Taiwan and to a lesser extent places in Asia that use English too (eg Singapore and Malaysia) use Chinese. I am a Chinese speaker but I am very bearish on China under Xi JinPing with his war wolf diplomats.

Not really. China is on a downward trajectory. Just coz there’s a lot doesn’t mean it’s worth learning

AFAIK arent there hundreds of different indigenous Australian languages?

Is that a joke?

@@_Atzin There must be a main one they all speak .... Is there ?

@@boggy6060 No there isn't, just like there is no "the european language" or "the nigerian language"

@@ronaldonmg Oh. I see. Well maybe the most popular one then ?

Like you dont have accent right? I take it you learned a rough American style english 😂

😒

Wuahahaha you’re the stuttering lady in the stupid hat

I disagree. Learning a few other languages usually improves the way you use your native one