Find the mistake in each question and correct it. Can you answer these questions?

1. How much languages are there in the world?

2. What the world’s most spoken languages are?

3. The best way to learn a foreign language is to practice a lot, wasn’t it?

4. The Latin (Roman) or Greek alphabet is the most widely used writing system in the world?

5. What the ways of enriching the vocabulary of a language are?

6. Why do some people negative about using English (foreign) words in

their language?

7. How different Modern English from Old English?

8. What is the basic linguistic characteristics of Modern English?

 

5. Make up a question to each text using the given prompts:

 

1) The ease or difficulty of learning another language can depend on your mother tongue. In general, the closer the second language is to the learner's native tongue and culture in terms of vocabulary, sounds or sentence structure, the easier acquisition will be.

 

What... (the ease or difficulty of learning another language / depend on)?

 

2) A Polish speaker will find it easier to learn another Slavic language like Czech than an Asian language such as Japanese, while linguistic similarities mean that a Japanese speaker would find it easier to learn Mandarin Chinese than Polish.

 

… (to be / easier / than)?

 

3) Dutch is said to be the easiest language for native English speakers to pick up, while research shows that for those native English speakers who already know another language, the five most difficultlanguages to get your head around are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

 

What …. (to be /five/ native English speakers)?

 

4) Globalisation and cultural homogenisation mean that many of the world’s languages are in danger of vanishing. UNESCO has identified 2,500 languages which it claims are at risk of extinction. One quarter of the world’s languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people and if these are not passed down to the next generation, they will be gone forever.

 

What … (cause / extinction of languages)?

 

6. Complete the question and match the question with the answer:

 

1. What … (to be / the world’s most spoken languages)?	a) As of 2010 the European Union has 23 official and working languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish.
2. How many people … (to speak / Esperanto / nowadays)?	b)The United Nations uses six official languages to conduct business: English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Arabic.
3. What … (to be / the world’s most widely used alphabets)?	c)The world's most widely spoken languages by number of native speakers and as a second language, according to figures from UNESCO, are: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German and French.
4. How many official languages … in EU (to be / there)?	d)The world’s most widely-used alphabets (or scripts), which are still in use today (in alphabetical order), are: Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Burmese, Chinese script, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese script, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Sinhala, Thai and Tibetan.
5. How many official languages … (to be used / in the UN / for businesses purposes)?	e)Esperanto is widely spoken by approximately 2 million people across the world.

 

Personal Pronouns

 

Nominative Case	Objective Case	Possessive Case	Possessive Case (Absolute form)	Reflexive pron., Emphatic pronouns
I	me	my	mine	myself
you	you	your	yours	yourself
he	him	his	his	himself
she	her	her	hers	herself
it	it	its	its	itself
we	us	our	ours	ourselves
you	you	your	yours	yourselves
they	them	their	theirs	themselves

 

7. Fill in the appropriate form of personal pronouns:

1) Learning foreign languages helps … to gain a better appreciation of … own language.

2) … can’t broaden … mind if … see the world only from the perspective of … own culture.

3) … should try … best to reserve all languages on … planet because a language is the main part of people’s culture and without languages … will lose … great cultural heritage.

4) Some students think that being able to communicate is the most important in learning a language and … do not care that … make many mistakes in speaking.

5) A grasp of a different language improves … abilities to use … first language and explore other cultures more successfully.

6) … all lead busy lives and learning a language takes time.

7) … will have more success if … study regularly, so try to establish a routine.

8) … isthe great growth of population in the United States, assisted by massive immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thathas given the English language … present standing in the world.

Discussion