When I lived in Spain, some Spanish friends of mine decided to visit England by car. Before they left, they asked me for advice about how to find accommodation (住所). I suggested that they should stay at ‘bed and breakfast’ houses, because this kind of accommodation gives a foreign visitor a good chance to speak English with the family. My friends listened to my advice, but they came back with some funny stories. “We didn’t stay at bed and breakfast houses,” they said, “because we found that most families were away on holiday.”

I thought this was strange. Finally I understood what had happened. My friends spoke little English, and they thought ‘VACANCIES’ meant ‘holidays’, because the Spanish word for ‘holidays” is ‘vacaciones’. So they did not go to house where the sign outside said ‘VACANCIES’, which in English means there are free rooms. Then my friends went to house where the sign said ‘NO VACANCIES’, because they thought this meant the people who owned the house were not away on holiday. But they found that these houses were all full. As a result, they stayed at hotels!

We laughed about this and about mistakes my friends made in reading other signs. In Spanish, the word ‘DIVERSION’ means fun. In English, it means that workmen are repairing the road, and that you must take a different road. When my friends saw the word ‘DIVERSION’ on a road sign, they thought they were going to have fun. Instead, the road ended in a large hole.

English people have problems too when they learn foreign languages. Once in Paris, when someone offered me some more coffee, I said ‘Thank you’ in French. I meant that I would like some more. However, to my surprise, the coffee pot was taken away! Later, I found out that ‘Thank you’ in French means ‘No, thank you’.

English has become a global language. So which country, not including English-speaking countries, speaks English best? And where does China rank (排名)?

Swedish language education company EF published their 2016 English proficiency index this month. The Netherlands (荷兰) ranked first, followed by Denmark and Sweden. The rankings are based on English reading and listening test results of 950,000 people from 72 countries and areas.

According to the index, the English proficiency in China is still low, ranking 39th. Out of the whole country, people in Shanghai are the best English speakers. They speak better English than Italians and French. Hong Kong and Beijing follow Shanghai as China’s next best English-speaking cities.

Shanghai and Beijing rank high because they are international cities. However, across China, proficiency in English is different from east to west.

China has 400 million English learners, reported China Daily. However, the teaching of English in some areas is not very good. According to the People’s Daily Online, there are seven primary schools in Shetianqiao town in Hunan, but only one English teacher. Many students still learn English by rote memorization (死记硬背).

Sebastian Magnusson, an officer at the Swedish embassy(大使馆)in Beijing, gave some advice. Swedish people speak English well and Magnusson himself is also fluent in Chinese. He said TV programs, movies and even computer games could be learning tools. “Do not limit it to textbooks. What matters most is to use what you’ve learned,” Magnusson said.

Do you speak a dialect (方言) in daily life? While many Chinese people speak putonghua, some local dialects are in danger of disappearing. To save them, the Chinese government started the Chinese Language Resources Protection Project (中国语言资源保护工程) a few years ago.

This project looks at how people talk in 1,712 places. Their languages include 103 dialects that are almost gone. It has helped China to build the largest language resource library in the world. There’s an online library where people can learn dialects from over 5.6 million audio clips (音频) and over 5 million videos.

Scholar Zhang Hongming talked about his worries of the disappearing of dialects. “For about over 10 years, in the Wu dialect areas such as Shanghai and Suzhou, children aged 6 to 15 can understand but hardly speak the dialect, young people above 15 years old sometimes speak it, but not very well. If this keeps happening, the dialect might disappear,” he said.

Why is it important to protect the dialect culture? According to British linguist Harold Palmer, dialects are a key to store local cultures. Language shows the history, the beliefs and the biases (偏见) of an area, he said.

▲ A big national hard work has been put into the project to make it happen, said Cao Zhiyun, the expert on the project. Over five years, more than 350 universities and research groups joined in, along with over 4,500 experts and more than 6,000 dialect speakers.