A foreign language is a language indigenous to another country. It is also a language not spoken in the native country of the person referred to, i.e. an English speaker living in Japan can say that Japanese is a foreign language to him or her. These two characterisations do not exhaust the possible definitions, however, and the label is occasionally applied in ways that are variously misleading or factually inaccurate.
Some children learn more than one language from birth or from a very young age: they are bilingual or multilingual. These children can be said to have two, three or more mother tongues: neither language is foreign to that child, even if one language is a foreign language for the vast majority of people in the child's birth country. For example, a child learning English from her English father and Japanese at school in Japan can speak both English and Japanese, but neither is a foreign language to her.
Read more about Foreign Language: Foreign Language Education and Ability, Research Into Foreign Language Learning, Foreign Language Vs. Second Language
Famous quotes related to foreign language:
“If you don’t know foreign languages, you don’t know anything about your own.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“And when discipline is concerned, the parent who has to make it to the end of an eighteen-hour day—who works at a job and then takes on a second shift with the kids every night—is much more likely to adopt the survivor’s motto: ‘If it works, I’ll use it.’ From this perspective, dads who are even slightly less involved and emphasize firm limits or character- building might as well be talking a foreign language. They just don’t get it.”
—Ron Taffel (20th century)