Malta, TEFL capital of the world
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November 17, 2011 at 8:44am
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Nice to see Tonio Fenech is in good company – he should invite him on the ‘plane next time . . .
Ironically, Tonio Fenech is one of the more articulate members of government when it comes to the English language.
How embarrassing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/nov/16/mad-men-how-will-it-end
Are you a Mad Men fan ?
I had recently remarked on this blog that in the very near future Maltese students would have to attend TEFL courses.
They already do.
Well a MATSEC English Paper B exam is practically an int ESL exam.
This video good it is. I like it much a lot. I have it 3 times now. Hehehe.
Loved your comment. – made my day
There are myriad reasons for supporting the great Arsenal team, but surely not being given the wrong football gear, instead of one of the Liverpool club!
As to company, you are bound to get all sorts of types in football fan circles – which I suppose makes it all the more fun.
Quite right, Edgar – I hear Jason Micallef is a rabid Man U fan, so I’ve got a problem.
OMG—- reminiscent of the pot calling the kettle black
Is that other guy next to him George id-doughnuts?
I think this man is managing director of Bronk Productions.
You heard that fella. Now hear this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMkx7xJGx5E
Notice how similar the voices and accents are?
Whilst Dalli’s command of English is better, he doesn’t sound comfortable.
Wen I wocch him maj futbol teams Arsenal plej in di emirejts grawnd I alwejs sej aaaaah tal-genn!
The other guy with him is the ” ta’ id-Doughnuts” character, a favourite on One TV.
I think that he’s the one who can’t keep his mouth shut whilst eating in the video Daphne provided here – http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2011/11/if-i-die-and-go-straight-to-hell-this-is-exactly-what-i-expect-it-to-be-like-bleak-chilly-bare-monochrome-and-full-of-banal-people-who-wont-stop-talking/
Isn’t he an actor … sorry I’ll rephrase that … doesn’t he take part in one of the stupid sitcoms shown on One Tv or Smash?
Is that Gorg tad-Downats next to him at circa 1.15?
Was that George tad-Doughnuts in the video clip?
Of the crying…
Forget the bad English. Imbaghad jghidu li m’hawnx flus fl-idejn: this man has been to watch Arsenal 44 times, and aims to go to watch them 5 to 6 times a year.
Jiena nahseb li “single” dan ir-ragel ghax jidher li ghandu xi jberbaq fuq l-Arsenal.
Ma nahsibx li mill-acting hawn Malta sar xi sinjurun.
Yes Daphne, you might be banging your head against a wall.
The home of the English language is England (not UK) without any shadow of doubt. But Malta really is the TEFL capital of the world.
Malta has the biggest concentration of EFL schools in the world (per sq.km) and is also home of the largest EFL school in the whole of Europe. This is fact – insider knowledge.
The pity is that these EFL schools do very little in Malta itself. Only one of them (insider knowledge again) has a license to teach CELTA & DELTA courses (for people who want to become TEFL teachers).
And for that matter, even if they did do something, native English speakers would always look down on them because Malta is not home to the English language. And it will never be.
They will always say that “we have an accent”. There is no hope that you’d go unnoticed when in England no matter how good and close it is to that of native English speakers.
[Daphne – Which native speakers, though? All native speakers have an accent, and all those accents are different.]
The man in this video is Benny tal-Bronk Productions… tippretendix xi gran che iggifieri. (http://www.bronk.org/bronk/Files/Galleries/f9db9c92-d34d-447b-bf6d-4d47989c2de0/large/GULINU%208.jpg)
What WhoamI? means is that the Maltese speak English with a foreign accent, English native speakers speak with a regional accents.
[Daphne – No, not all Maltese speak English with a foreign accent. I do so only when speaking to other Maltese, for practical reasons.]
As for going unnoticed, I’ll tell you a true story: I once went to the same pub twice. The first time, I spoke Queen’s English and got charged 2 quid, the second time, I put on a cockney accent (this was London) and got charged 1.60, so, yes, some (not many, admittedly) of us do go unnoticed.
As far as I know, students coming from rich families do not go to Malta to study English but they choose other countries. The EFL schools in Malta cost much less than the ones abroad.
Prodott tas-Super One….l-aqwa li mieghu hemm Gorg tad-Downats !!!!
Madonna, how embarrassing.
Siding with Arsenal?
If the RMA had these as gunners, Labour wouldn’t be bleating about the bridge to nowhere.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2031205/Martin-Samuel-Manchester-United-destroyed-Arsenal.html
Anyone seen Balotelli last week?
Can imagine the gentleman expressing his passion writing Arsanal somewhere…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuYXVWXqfFE&feature=related
There’s a limit as to how much finger-licking and full-mouthed talking I can take, so I didn’t make it to the end.
A product of the fine atmosphere at Junior College
http://insiteronline.com/news/no-comment-special-pulse-and-sdm-rally-the-troops/
I don’t see what’s ’embarrassing’ about this. So the guy doesn’t speak very good English. That in itself shouldn’t be embarrassing to anyone except the gentleman in question. And if he’s not embarrassed about it, then good on him.
Good the megezeen hes stampi ghax furxur he kennot english read.
I don’t find this interview with this Arsenal fan embarrassing. I’ve met managers around the world whose English was not as ‘refined’ as this guy’s.
I think he is able enough to communicate with an English speaking person, his method is not TEFL, I call it ‘learning on the job’. With some encouragement he can improve his English in no time.
[Daphne – Don’t compare Maltese people with others, John. Maltese people are expected to speak English because they grew up in a country where it is an official language, and where there is constant exposure to the language. Maltese people really have no excuse for speaking it so badly, when Dutch people, for example, only learn it at school and yet speak it perfectly, accent and all.]
You can’t compare the Dutch to the Maltese. Compare to the French or the Italians. Many Italians and French people would love to be able to speak English to the level this guy can.
[Daphne – Why can’t we compare the Dutch to the Maltese? Because height and blond hair affect one’s ability to learn English? The French do not wish to learn or speak English, for historical and cultural reasons, and in fact they resist it. The Italians have no exposure to English and it is very badly taught in schools. We should be better than the Dutch, because our advantages in this respect are greater, but we are not. And please don’t give me some rubbish about Dutch being similar to English, because it is not.]
No, cause Dutch is a germanic Language, just like English, whereas Maltese is mostly a romantic (yes nowadays more than semitic) language, like French and Italian.
Quite obvious really, if you take the time to think. Yes, think- there’s a concept for you ;)
[Daphne – Maltese is structurally identical to Arabic and much of its vocabulary is identical too. English has very little in common with Dutch, and it’s only some nouns here and there. As for Germanic languages, German itself has, structurally, far more in common with Latin (declensions) than it does with English. And Latin itself has more in common with German than it does with the so-called Romance languages, which are derived from it but are nothing like it. But I wouldn’t expect you to know that.]
God, you’re a dumb one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages
And no Latin does not have more in common.. no wait, I won’t even reply to that most idiotic of remarks. I congratulate you actually for the inventive attempt at being stupid.
Well, I have to go now miss “no” it all ;)
I can’t argue with a fool.
[Daphne – I know a great deal about English, Sherlock. The fact that it is a Germanic language does not mean it has anything in common with Dutch, or that it is easy for English-speaking people to learn Dutch and vice versa. On the other hand, it is extremely easy for German-speaking people to learn Latin, because they have internalised already the single major obstacle to speakers of English and of Semitic and Romance languages who try to learn it: the concept that nouns are declined. Speakers of Arabic learn spoken Maltese in no time at all merely through immersion, and vice versa. However, if you stick a Dutch person who knows no English into an English-speaking community, he will still need to take lessons and will continue to struggle. Quoting Wikipedia impresses nobody, rather the opposite. The roots and origin of languages are one thing; what those languages are in the present, having evolved over time and space, separately, is another. It is a complete misconception that those who speak Italian will find it easy to learn Latin, or that those who speak Dutch (or German, for that matter) will find it easy to learn English. My mother tongues are a Germanic language (English) and a Semitic language (Maltese), yet I have no plans to even try learning German or Dutch, found Latin a terrible struggle, but had absolutely no problem with French. I probably will not have any problem with Arabic, either, and plan to take it up.]
Hey! I came to read your predictably spurious and specious reply.
Thanks for the laugh.
I particularly like this part: “The fact that it is a Germanic language does not mean it has anything in common with Dutch.”
You’re a born comedian.
[Daphne – Run along and find somebody your own age and mentality to play with.]
You’re right. I need someone more mature than you. ;)
The atrocious English spoken by the majority of Maltese is indeed an embarrassment to the whole nation, but to none more so than to the privileged classes (a member of which you declare yourself so vociferously to be) – the privileged classes who have enjoyed generations of literacy and enhanced access to foreign culture that the common man could only dream of – the privileged classes who have always (and still do as evidenced by this blog) looked down at the rest of the hoi polloi with disdain and indeed barely contained revulsion.
[Daphne – You have to be a real socialist to believe that what some have, they have because others don’t. It is the very opposite of liberal thinking, the polar opposite of the thinking which has underpinned the way this country has been run since 1987. How did my family’s literacy over generations prevent others from becoming literate? Please explain, because I am mystified. It is, in fact, the other way round: it was their literacy which made the other things possible. The literacy came first. There is absolutely no excuse for not learning English in the present, or how to read and write, for that matter. The idiots writing ‘tejt’ and ‘tiji’ all over their Facebook walls are not sub-literate because I am literate. They are sub-literate because they don’t mind being that way and consider literacy and fluency in English to be unnecessary.]
Instead of levering their privileged positions in Maltese society to help the common man rise up out of his misery and ignorance, they went to the greatest lengths to cordon themselves off from the rest of the peasants, reinforcing the class divide that they found so convenient.
[Daphne – Oh yawn. Get to grips with your history. And quite frankly, we’re all still cordoning ourselves off from the peasants, and the peasants are still determinedly cordoning themselves off from us. The easiest way to clear a room of chippy ‘jien nitkellem bil-Malti ghax jiena Malti’ people is to have a bunch of people like me enter it. “Ajma xi ksuhat”. “Zutt!” “Kellem bil-Malti hi!”. The class divide is reinforced by people like that, and by people like you with all these chips. They’d feel a hell of a lot better about themselves if they just learned how to speak and write and got on with the business of improving their lot. And incidentally, it WAS the privileged classes who improved the lot of what you choose to call the common man, through trade, industry, commerce and – oh dirty word – capitalism. When it comes to improving the lot of the common man, even you have to admit that the capitalist nations have done a whole lot better than the communists.]
In view of the relatively recent past of this island and this society, I find your disdainful dismissal of anybody who has an inferior proficiency in the English language to your own to be, frankly, odious, in extremely bad taste and lacking fundamentally in the grace that a genuine “upper class” individual of good breeding should possess.
[Daphne – God, you’re tedious. It’s precisely because of this country’s recent past that there is no excuse for not knowing English. It might have escaped your notice, but plenty of people from my sort of social background speak poor English. There are many reasons for this, from their political history to stupidity,, but I can’t be bothered to go into them here. I suggest you take down your Che Guevara poster, wipe your arse with it, and enter the 21st century. Oh, and you might not wish to hear this, but you construct some terrible sentences and have quite obviously learned English as a second language. So you see, it can be done.]
I’m working class but I still disdainfully dismiss any Maltese who has an inferior proficiency in English. How’s that for socialism?
Look, the way we speak is the way the Dutch do , accent and all.And we are just like them: we only learn it at school.
[Daphne – John, Maltese people do NOT speak English like the Dutch do. And we do NOT learn it only at school. We have constant exposure to it. A person has to be really bloody-minded to grow up in Malta and determinedly speak bad English. It just shows the most appalling laziness: “I won’t bother.” The same people learn Italian ‘only at school’ and what do you know, their Italian is really good. They were brought up to hate English, that’s all, and so have a mental block about it.]
Expecting to have all the people of Malta speak English , because some bright spark made it an official language, is asking for too much.
[Daphne – A very bright spark indeed. Imagine how dire things would be in Malta if that were not the case. As I always say, we can scrap Maltese without a second thought (not that we’d want to) and carry on successfully, but if we scrap English, we’d dead. You wouldn’t have been able to train in your field of work without English, or get and hold down your job, or use the internet. You wouldn’t even be here, arguing about this. Look at all those poor scraps on Facebook, talking only to each other with ‘tejt’ and ‘issa orite hi’. What sort of life do you think they have? Those are the people who speak no English at all, and just see how cut off they are and how poorly educated because they have no access to information.]
Officialdom and what the people commonly use are totally two different things.
Someone tried to push into our throats Arabic, making it a mandatory subject to enter University and other coercing tactics. Everyone knows the result .
Thankfully most of us accept that it is beneficial to learn English, officialdom has nothing to do with the learning of the language. You can take the horse to the water but you cannot make him drink.
We normally use Maltese to communicate between ourselves.
[Daphne – You might. I don’t. Most people I know – all of them just as Maltese as you are – use English to communicate, or both.]
TEFL has nothing to do with this guy’s knowledge of English. If we are shown a Maltese bloke speaking broken English it does not follow that Malta is not a good place to learn English.
[Daphne – That was not the point. The point is that people like him are a lousy advert for Maltese TEFL schools. Had I been thinking of taking a TEFL course in Malta, I would have cancelled my plans on hearing him.]
“It is beneficial to learn English”.
It is beneficial to exercise.
It is beneficial to read.
It is beneficial not to stuff your face with greasy food.
That’s just the sort of attitude that produced this subliterate, obese nation. You learn English because it is your language. If it isn’t, then let’s strike it from the constitution and end this charade.
On the subject of TEFL in Malta, why not ask the students themselves? And I don’t mean asking them if they enjoyed the beaches and sunny weather.
I have worked with Dutch people for two years and met others on other occasions, our accents are the same.
[Daphne – ?????!!!!!!!! A Dutch accent is like a Maltese accent, when both are speaking English? Not even remotely.]
Don’t get me wrong , not like this bloke here ,or like a Sliema woman asking questions interspersed with Maltese words and with a Maltese tonality.
[Daphne – Sliema women? You’re talking to one right now.]
We end a question on a higher tone whereas the British end a question on a lower tone .
[Daphne – It’s unfortunate that you mention ‘the British’ rather than ‘the English’, given that the typical Maltese accent is most often confused with a Welsh accent, precisely because of that sing-song intonation you mention. The Welsh are British.]
What I mean is that the hard consonants are uttered by the Dutch like like we do. Our accent is a grade lower than the very hard Scottish accent.
[Daphne – I give up. When the average Maltese person speaks English, he doesn’t sound like the Dutch, or the Scottish, or even the Welsh. He sounds like a Middle Eastern or North African person speaking English, for very obvious reasons. It’s not as though you didn’t have enough exposure to that over the last few months on the television news. The Dutch at least know English, but most Maltese are at North African level, despite our separate recent history and very different linguistic heritage. Indeed, watching people interviewed on the streets of Tripoli and Benghazi, I was taken aback to see just how many spoke far better English than so many people in Malta do.]
Baxx, my mother language, is Maltese.We can’t have two mothers, can we?
[Daphne – No, but we can have two mother tongues if we had a bilingual mother.]
I learnt another language because it is beneficial to me.
English is highly important for our survival, but we shouldn’t sideline our mother language , I’m proud of my country.
I can assure you, John, that if I were to hear you speak English, I would never in a million years take you for a nederlander.
This maybe an interesting ‘discussion’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnwlLWL6mO4
@John , when I was eleven I had to speak English, our headmaster was English and the rector was an American. Their lessons were obviously delivered in their mother tongue.
Your obsession with a “mother tongue” is exactly why this country is fucked up beyond repair. English and Maltese are your official languages. They’re both mother tongues.
I’d like to see you get a job anywhere in the world (except Malta of course) if you put “Maltese” as you mother tongue in a CV.
I’ve left Maltese out altogether in mine. It’s useless outside the tiny confines of this madhouse we call home.
I know we need English , Baxx, but I’m proud of my mother language. It’s part of our culture.
To tell you the truth, I’ve been to many parts of the world and prefer to work here in this madhouse we call home, like many other people in Europe want, after all.
There’s no place like Malta, mild weather, friendly people, even friendlier politicians who are careful not to upset us, everything is a stone’s throw away, beautiful sea, windy all year round, no smog, no red, orange or green alerts, free medication, no heat expenses, no land tax , no council tax, no slippery ice covered parts of the road, no tax on food and medicine (it is permanent now) safe to go out for a walk after seven in the evening and enough time on our hands for a pastime.
X’iz-zubbara trid iktar?
[Daphne – 1. Mild weather can be found in many parts of the world, and Maltese weather is, between June and October, extreme and not mild. 2. Maltese people are not friendly, but hostile, suspicious and keep newcomers at arm’s length. 3. Who chooses where to live on the basis of whether politicians are friendly or not? 4. Everything is a stone’s throw away: that’s why things get so mind-numbingly, soul-destroyingly boring and dull. 5. Beautiful sea – fine, but others might have beautiful mountains or lakes, so who cares. 6. Wind? 7. The air is actually quite polluted. 8. Free medication might be a winner if you crippled by a chronic condition, but otherwise why bother considering it. 9. On the contrary, heating costs more here than it does elsewhere, because paraffin, electricity and wood cost the earth. Those who say they have no heating expenses have intolerably cold houses between November and April. 10. Taxes etc – agreed. 11. Ice on the roads? Who cares. 12. Yes, you have plenty of time to do things after and around work BUT there’s not much to do, is there.]
A couple of years ago a journalist (sorry I’ve forgotten the name) on the Times of Malta wrote, that in the Scandinavian countries the films at the cinemas are being shown in English with sub titles also in English so those who cannot follow the full dialogues could refer to the titles.
It seems that this system is also helping the people to improve their command in English.
As a Scandinavian I strongly doubt that ever happens. We have always watched films in their original language, but with Swedish subtitles.
OMG