No question, English is an even easier second language, but only because it’s acceptable to speak it so poorly that a foreign pilot with Level 4 can be easier for us to understand than a “fluent” Northumbrian.
But still, I’m with Rwy20. Very little effort is needed to understand enough French R/T for situational awareness, and to use an un-towered FR-only airfield. On the other hand, knowing, for instance, that Reignier and Romeo at LFLI are widely considered to be one and the same, is another matter…
I do a lot of work with refugees arriving in the UK. They come from a huge variety of countries (it is a sad reflection on the state of our political history that in our small refugee charity alone we have people fleeing 25% of all the countries in the world).
Most of these refugees are adults, my guess that the median age is 30, mean age 25, with a range of birth to 65, but very few younger than 17.
My experience is that most of these adults older than about 25 have a huge problem with English, both understanding and speaking, but most speak better than they understand. There also seems to be a large number of cultures where it is unacceptable to admit that you don’t understand (anyone who has placed work in an Indian development company will recognise the syndrome :-( ).
I can’t agree that English is easy.
That adds up to a real problem for aviation.
Ironically, it seems that the easiest language to learn the basics is (Hoch-) German, because it is so logical and has far fewer irregularities of tense, spelling or pronunciation than most languages.
Must depend on your origin, the quality of the teaching, ability to learn languages, etc.
I came from Czechoslovakia and found English easy, German hard (both on an evening course aged 10 and still out there) and French utterly impenetrable at school in the UK.
The problem with learning a simple list of phrases is that the whole thing will crash the moment anyone talks back to you. Consequently I won’t fly to any airport which is not English speaking.
Le Touquet was mentioned. Is it FR only on some days? Some years ago it was, 1 day a week.
What is the likely purpose of this survey and what is driving it? As I said earlier, there is already a law making French speaking on the radio mandatory for French license holders. France (or any other modern country) cannot go any further practically speaking, notwithstanding the fact that French is an “ICAO language” (along with Russian, etc).
We (French) are Latin people and, like the other latin (spanish, italians, etc) not very inclined in learning other languages.
That added to the fact the whole new world emerged in the 30 years after WWII, we were granted the moral right to impose our language as an international one.
Germany was not, and being occupied by the US for many years, English became their second natural language.
That being said I think in fact it would be a great safety improvement to impose English as the only R/T language.
But this is doable on international major airports in A class airspace, but not on others as Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux who welcomes small private flight.
The basic french PPL has never spoken a word of english in his life and all the US tv series on our screens are (badly in my opinion) doubled in French.
So it will be impossible to him to speak english on the radio, forcing him to stop flying.
As for non-french speaking people frequenting french-speaking only airfields with a basic RT sheet, excuse me but it is COMPLETELY INSANE AND INSAFE.
I was witness and actor at numerous times of said-pilots who passed their message (and this was on some occasions totally non-understandable due to misprununciation) but did not understand on sole thing of what was being said in return. Not counting the fact that on those airfields, the local players (gliders and paradroppers first) tends to consider the field as their gamefield and are not really pleases when an outsider came perturbing their flow. So if this outsider is an english, it could be on some airfields played by old schnoks, a (bad) game to increase RT flow perturbing his comprehension and pushing him to fault.
On one occasion I was obliged to warn a pilot, in HIS english, that an “emergency” was occuring, and he was going to cut the final of the aircraft (the french pilot who was in training did not use the mayday transmission, so he was at fault to).
So, I’m sorry to speak like that, but if you don’t have a valid French R/T rating, stay the heck of french-only airfield circuits. Otherwise, that is really an accident waiting to happen.
jeff64 wrote:
if you don’t have a valid French R/T rating, stay the heck of french-only airfield circuits. Otherwise, that is really an accident waiting to happen
I have conversational French, and know most aviation French, it would be interesting to know if I would pass a French R/T rating. What is the easiest way to try?
jeff64 wrote:
but if you don’t have a valid French R/T rating, stay the heck of french-only airfield circuits
Only that there is no such thing as a standalone French R/T rating (except in Switzerland). The French get it as part of their PPL. It is not a separate exam or paper.
We (French) are Latin people and, like the other latin (spanish, italians, etc) not very inclined in learning other languages.
That added to the fact the whole new world emerged in the 30 years after WWII, we were granted the moral right to impose our language as an international one.
Germany was not, and being occupied by the US for many years, English became their second natural language.
I think this is a problem for all the countries which centuries ago used to be great and ran large chunks of the world i.e. Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Great Britain. These countries have a lot of old national pride. Most of the people in these countries don’t speak another language and, in some of them particularly, won’t even if they can 
So you get silly stuff like the tourist office in Zaragoza speaking only Spanish
Germany doesn’t speak English much IME either, but they do on the aviation scene.
Obviously in the aviation world the de facto adoption of English favours the UK and America.
The smaller countries don’t expect anybody to speak their language so when you go to e.g. Greece everybody at any “customer interface” speaks English (and often German). Same for Benelux… there they often speak English anyway.
Anybody who does business around Europe will readily see all this, and lots of other stuff that forms a heavy political backdrop to any discussion on the topic.
As for non-french speaking people frequenting french-speaking only airfields with a basic RT sheet, excuse me but it is COMPLETELY INSANE AND INSAFE.
That’s what I have been saying for years but many disagree, and obviously one gets away with it (and should avoid getting a fine, too) if the place doesn’t have any traffic. For example when LFAT was FR-only on (IIRC) Wednesdays, blind calls would work OK because on weekdays there is very little traffic, plus most would-be visitors would be scared off by the FR-only requirement anyway.
To be honest I don’t think we Germans are any more inclined to speak English when flying within our own country than the French are. In 45 hours of PPL training we spoke German during R/T for maybe 43 hours, the only exceptions being when approaching the international airports Bremen and Hannover and some communication with FIS for practice. Both Bremen and Hannover are perfectly legal to be communicated with in German only btw.
I say let the French speak their own language on their home turf. The problem is: While French was called a romance or latin language above, this is only formally correct. I had six years of Latin at school, which enables me to fairly easily understand at least written Italian or Spanish without a single hour of formal training in either language. But French mangled its Latin roots so badly, it is totally unintelligible. There also seems to be no correlation between written and spoken French. The same is true for English too, to a lesser extent.
As @Timothy correctly observed above,in this respect German is actually easier to learn because once you can pronounce the German alphabet you can basically speak the language, because each letter is almost always pronounced the same (this is called a phonetic language I think).
That’s simply not true, Peter. I know exactly 0 people in Germany who don’t speak any English, and most young ones speak well.
About 60 percent of all Germans between 29-29 speak English well or very well. Of course lessof the older people.
