The Daily Mail tells a whopper

I don't read the Daily Mail, but couldn't help seeing the front page yesterday when I was sat in the dentist's waiting room, and there at the top of the page, in the very masthead was a real whopping porkie, a blatant lie with feckin' bells on it. "Learn Spanish in a week!" the banner blarted, continuing: "No reading, no writing, no effort". All in aid of pushing an 8-CD Linguaphone Spanish course, disk 1 of which was free with that day's paper.

Now, I worked in a university language centre for ten years, I have very good Italian after over a decade of learning, rusty French, a smattering of Spanish, and am currently learning Gaelic. I'm no linguist, but I do know something about language teaching and learning, being a learner myself, and having worked with many language teachers. I especially know something about 'e-learning' and languages (Computer-Aided Language Learning, or CALL) as it was a major part of my job in the language centre to develop and disseminate language learning software. One thing I do know as a rock-solid fact is that you cannot learn a language in a week to any usable level, unless you undergo a highly-expensive 1-to-1 'crash course' as our language centre used to do for businesspeople, and even then you've only barely scratched the surface of the lingo. If you're using a CD course then even if you spend every waking hour of the week learning the language you'll still not get much further than a basic grounding in the language's structure and common vocabulary, and you'll only learn a few phrases.

The simple, but uncomfortable, truth is that it takes effort to learn any language, same as it takes effort to learn most things. You have to spend many hours a week over many months to get past the beginner stage (or, if it's a language as hard as Gaelic, to just get to the beginner stage), and that's if you have contact with native speakers. If you're learning remotely, without face-to-face or even phone contact, just using a computer and without tutorial support, then unless you're a brilliant natural polyglot it'll take you ages to speak the language in any meaningful sense. Languages are complex constructs that have evolved over thousands of years, so it's not surprising that it takes some time to learn one - it's not quite in the same league as learning to drive.

I had thought that the days of CALL producers claiming that their products could teach you to "speak like a native" were long gone, but plainly not. It's just plain dishonest to claim, as the Mail and Linguaphone do, that you can learn to speak Spanish in a week, unless you redefine the meaning of "learn to speak" from its commonly-understood meaning of 'being able to converse meaningfully with a native speaker' to a more basic meaning of 'knowing a few phrases in the lingo which might help when ordering a beer or getting a taxi'.

In the history of Daily Mail lies it may not rank among the 100 worst, but it has to be one of the most blatant I've seen and one of the easiest to expose. The Mail is deliberately conning its readers, and although its regular readership deserves everything that's coming to them there may be innocents who are attracted by the giveaway into buying the rag, gulled by the prospect of being the envy of their fellow turistas in Torremolinos.

PS: According to employer surveys, less than 10% of UK workers can speak a foreign language - see "Why Britons are 'language barbarians'" (BBC Online, 28/7/04)

Authoritarian euphemisms of our time: "public safety"

The government's Chief Brief - aka the Lord Chancellor, Charlie "Tony Blair was my flatmate" Falconer - has called for criminals to be locked up for good for the sake of "public safety". Not that he was anything like as honest and direct, of course, saying, in a wonderfully English euphemistic way:

"I think there is real concern about the way the [Human Rights] act is operating," Lord Falconer told the BBC.

"What we need to draw from that is the deployment of human rights is, often wrongly, leading to wrong conclusions to be made about issues of public safety."

He said there needed to be "political clarity" that the Human Rights Act should have no effect on public safety issues.

"If it requires legislation to make that clear in particular areas then we need to consider that as well," he said. [1]

Or to put it into language yer average cabbie would understand and applaud: "We're going to lock 'em up and make sure they stay locked up, and none of this poncey human rights malarkey is going to stop us."

This comes after the 'scandal' of the top court in the land decreeing, with uncharacteristic vehemence and unanimity, that Afghanis who had hijacked an Afghan airlines plane in order to flee the medieval theocracy of the Taliban and who had sought asylum in the UK should not be sent back to certain death in Afghanistan, a decision that wound up the Dear Leader bigtime such that he called it an "abuse of common sense" (unlike, say, invading a country thousands of miles away on a fabricated pretext to loot its oil and killing tens of thousands of its people in the process, which was plainly a "common sense" thing to do, y'know, uh-huh). There have also been recent cases of prisoners released on licence who've pretty seriously re-offended:

Lord Falconer said that a report this week into a murder committed by Anthony Rice, a rapist freed on parole, demonstrated that officials were more concerned about human rights laws than protecting the public. [2]

Then there's been the 'scandal' of "hundreds" of "foreign criminals roaming the streets" who should have been considered for deportation at the end of their sentences [3]. This 'scandal' neatly, and unpleasantly, conflated two of the defining characteristics of this regime - its chilling punitive authoritarianism and its virulent racism towards "asylum seekers" - and led to the 'reshuffling' of Big Scrotum (aka Charles Clark) out of the Home Secretary's job and his replacement by Big Bampot (aka John "are ye lookin' at me, Jimmy?" Reid).

The 'lesson' that is being drawn from cases of prisoners carrying out crimes after release, even though it's hardly a new phenomenon, is that lags should be locked up for as long as the State deems them to be a threat to "public safety". Once a person is convicted of a crime s/he becomes a "criminal", and ceases to be a human towards whom "human rights" should be applied. The crime can be anything from shoplifting through Twoccing to robbery to rape or even murder (though most crime is non-violent, a fact your average Daily Mail/Sun/Express reader could be forgiven for not knowing given the doom-laden hysteria peddled by those rags), but once convicted you're no longer a human but a "criminal". No matter that it's easier than ever in This Sceptred Isle to become a criminal, with the UK locking up more people per capita than any other nation in Europe [4], once you're a prisoner you're a folk devil and any measures can and should be taken against you for the sake of "public safety".

Indeed, if you read the sewer Press, you probably believe that no prisoners should ever be let out as there's a chance that any released "criminal" will assault, rape, or kill, and whatever the level of risk it's a risk that should not be taken. Even the best-reformed model prisoner could be pulling the wool over the eyes of the woolly-minded bleedin' 'eart liberals who, according to the sewer Press, rule the roost in the "criminal justice system". If you let 'em out, what's to say that they won't commit violent crime? To which the simple answer is that there's no guarantee of this, in which case maybe they shouldn't be let out in the first place, because surely the human rights of any potential victims not to be assaulted/robbed/raped/murdered outweighs any 'rights' an inhuman criminal scumbag may have.

Of course, even the scum Press balks at calling for indefinite sentences for all crime, other than for pedos who are so "incurable" that life imprisonment is the only solution, because it's an unsustainable argument even if you're a foamy-mouthed barking Right tabloid editor, but when it highlights time and again cases - some real, some that exist only in the editors' fevered imaginations - of released criminals or, horror of horrors, foreigners (they come over here, take our crimes...) committing serious crime, with the anguished cry of "why was he let out?", the only conclusion to draw is that the only way to guarantee "public safety" is to lock 'em up for good and throw away the key and not worry about the "human rights" of those who are no longer human because, say, they nicked a car. Or, to quote the Super Soaraway Sun:

Nearly 35,000 rang our You The Jury hotline within 24 hours to back our call for an end to the interests of killers, rapists and paedophiles coming ABOVE those of victims. The crazy legislation has led to many dangerous criminals being freed to re-offend. Others have used the barmy laws to gain perks and pay-outs. [5]

This has to be the first ever government of Guardian readers for Sun readers.

[1] "Human rights law may be changed. " BBC Online, 13/5/06
[2] "New public safety laws considered. " Guardian online, 13/5/06
[3] Foreign prisoners: the numbers. BBC Online, 26/4/06
[4] Smart Justice briefing 2003
[5] "35000 back Sun on rights". Sun Online, 13/5/06