He speak French not so good, isn't it?

Britain, along with a good deal of the English-speaking world, has long been saddled with a reputation for deplorable standards when it comes to speaking other languages. I remember being vaguely insulted, on a summer course in Salzburg back in 1993, when one of my teachers said how very unusual it was to meet an Englishman who could speak another language. For many years fought against this perception of my country: the advent of the European Community, I staunchly believed, had to be a catalyst for change.

Now I've moved beyond refusing to accept this argument to trying to understand why the British continue to be viewed as anything but linguists. The jigsaw’s a complicated one, but I believe I’ve found another piece.

Of all my memories of my childhood in France, one of the clearest is writing conjugations of French verbs up on the blackboard as part of our grammar lessons. I've seen something similar in Germany, another country where they take the learning of their own language pretty seriously, and for all I know other countries do the same, making sure schoolchildren have a good grasp of their own language. While part of it may be to safeguard their language and culture against the influences of others (i.e. English), it's still an admirable trait, one which I have never come across in British schools.

Ask a British child how the English language functions and chances are he or she will be unable to tell you. We have very little idea of the workings of our own language, so it's not surprising we should struggle with others. Grammar is something of a stumbling-block in learning other languages, and therefore something of a turn-off.

Two personal anecdotes to illustrate this: I was the only student of German in my class to have studied Latin previously, another language rich in grammar, and thus the only one for whom the concept of cases (nominative, accusative, genetive and dative) was easy to grasp - some of my peers struggled right into their A-level year. On the flip-side of the coin, it was something of an eye-opener, when working as an English language assistant in Vienna, to be presented with the words "English" and "grammar" in conjunction. I'd never even heard of the preterit ...

Hilaire Belloc’s satirical Cautionary verses includes a poem about a frankly nauseating boy by the name of Charles Augustus Fortescue:
He extremely fond of sums,
To which, however, he preferred
The Parsing of a Latin Word.
We know, therefore, that the time of its publication (1896) the British knew something of grammar, though this analysis of a word in terms of its function within a sentence has long since disappeared from the curriculum. I’m not necessarily suggesting it’s a practice we should resurrect, but clearly something needs to be done to improve English-speaking schoolchildren’s knowledge of their own language before we can expect them to get to grips with others.

And don’t anyone try telling me the British can get by without having at least the rudiments of other languages. Europe is a multilingual continent, perhaps more so than any other. There's only so many times we can go on about English being among the most-spoken languages worldwide or the sea separating us from mainland Europe before it becomes formulaic. These may be convenient excuses, but that doesn't make them reasons.

The internet, for all its faults, serves as a pretty good indicator of linguistic standards across the world. It pains me to say that this grammatical malaise is not restricted to English alone, so perhaps other countries would also profit from re-examining how they teach their own languages ...