Fire bomb attack against a French language institute

French official culture doesn't seem to command the respect it used to:


Athens braced Friday for further protest demonstrations as violence continued in the city with a fire bomb attack against a French language institute. Eyewitnesses said around 20 masked protesters hurled Molotov cocktails at the institute in central Athens and then escaped down a narrow street. The incident continued nearly two weeks of severe unrest which was triggered by the shooting death of a 15-year-old youth by police on Saturday, Dec. 6.

19.12.2008

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French Losing Ground in Greece

European Language Learning Material Survey:

French: French is a language losing ground in Greece. The materials used for learning French are usually imported: only two Greek publishers seem to specialize somehow in the production of French learning materials. At first site those imported materials look sufficient, but in fact there is a shortage for innovative materials for French for specific purposes.

German: German and Spanish are languages that occupied the ground that French [has] lost during the last [few] years.

WHY FRENCH TEACHERS HAVE THE BLUES

From Pave France, February 23, 2005, previously published on http://www.expatica.com/:

The French language is in dramatic decline around the world, including in its traditional foreign heartlands, according to international language teachers recently gathered in Paris ...for the Expolangues trade fair...
A teacher from Portugal, Teresa Santos, said in her country 70 percent of Portuguese students preferred to take English courses, compared to just 10 percent for French.
"English is magnifique!" a teacher of Ancient Greek at the Aristotle University in Thessalonika, Thalia Stephanidou, said. "Even in poorer neighbourhoods, that language - which replaced French right after the second world war - is taught, even to old people," she said.

Even in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, English has crowded French out of the classroom, despite French being one of the country's official languages.

In Russia, where speaking French was once a prized talent among the tsars, French is trailing "far behind English" in Moscow and Saint Petersburg schools, Mascha Sveshnikova, of the Russian Cultural Centre, said.

Hat tip: Damian