Artikel

English Language

Learning english as a foreign language is something interchanged with learning english as a second language. Indonesian, Thai, and Japanese people learn english as a foreign language, because they have their own official language that is Indonesian, Thai, and Japanese respectively. In big cities in Indonesia, people speak Indonesian at home, in the shops and at schools whereas in small towns or in villages people speak Indonesian and vernaculars ( Javanese, Balinese, Batak, etc. ) interchangeably. They speak english only at schools in their english classrooms.

The Philippines has adopted english as second language. English is an official language in the Philippines for a different reason. The Philippines had been under successive foreign colonization, first Spanish and then American, for a long time. Even nowadays Spanish is still being taught in many highschools in Manila. In Philippines, people speak Tagalog mostly at home and english mostly outside. in same way as the Indonesians living in Central or East Java speak Javanese home and Indonesian outside. English has become an official language and a medium of instruction at school. Even at kindergarten children speak english for communication. No wonder most people from the Philippines are very fluent in English.