Learning foreign languages

Studying foreign languages is important for everybody. We have many reasons to study them. We need it for travelling abroad, for reading foreign materials (books, newspapers, magazines), for business communication, for corresponding with our friends or for cultural reasons (watching films, visiting concerts and exhibitions).

The most important language for world communication is English. It's spoken in many parts of the world, mainly in Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and also in Malta and Gibraltar). We can find English expressions more and more at present - in technical and electronic scientific circles people use many English abbreviations (zkratka) and expressions, computer programs and games are in English.

English is very popular and important now but we also have opportunities for studying other foreign languages. Only around 14 million people speak Czech all over the world, that is why we have to study foreign languages if we want to make ourselves understood. In our country we study mainly German, French, Spanish and Russian. We begin studying them at basic school.

Today, English is one of the major languages in the world. It is difficult to imagine that 300 years ago only a few million people spoke English, the language was not so important for other European nations and was unknown to the rest of the world.

English has become a world language because of its establishment (ustanovení, zřízení) as a mother tongue outside England, in all the continents of the world. The exporting of English began in the 17^th century, with the first settlements in North America. The great growth of population in the USA and massive immigration in the 19^th and 20^th centuries have given English its present standing in the world.

People who speak English fall into one of three groups: those who have learned it as their native language; those who have learned it as a second language in a society that is mainly bilingual; and those who are forced to use it for a practical purpose (účel, cíl) - administrative, professional or educational.