Your comments

Dan Stone from Manchester
boys are focused and straight to the point wheras girls are more inclined to daydream and plan for the future.

Molly owens from cambridgeshire
I think this is true in my class all he boys try to show of in frunt of the girls by shouting out and making silly comments.

Nick P - Dorset
I believe that there's one very good reason why we aren't good at languages. We don't have to be - or rather we think we don't have to be, because of the myth that everybody else speaks English. Actually apart from a few exceptions - Holland, Scandanavia and a few others, the standards of language teaching in Europe are no better than ours.

I spend a lot of time in France, and very seldom meet anyone who can hold a conversation in English. I've found it much the same in Spain away from the Costas, Italy and even Germany. They're certainly better than us, but not by that much.

The other myth is that if we all learned a foreign language, it would open up new markets for us, because we'd be able to speak to all these potential customers. Learning a language is a major undertaking, and unless you've achieved some degree of fluency, doing business is not really a realistic goal. Hard enough in French or German - but in Chinese or Japanese - I don't think so. That's why you need interpreters. However with the right motivation it can be done.

A few years ago the drivers on the Eurostar had to learn French, and I believe that with no background in languages most of them were able to reach a reasonable standard - their jobs depended on it. All airline pilots having to speak English is another example.

What however really puzzles and saddens me is the number of British people, going to live abroad, who not only make no attempt to learn the language, but don't even see it as something worth doing. I know that the French really resent that, and it colours their view of the English. Not that the ex-pats I'm talking about would care about that, because they'd never get close enough to the "natives", to find out their views anyway!!

One last thought before I shut up - being bi-lingual isn't that unusual. It's thought that about 70% of the world's population are bi-lingual, but mostly they live in the developing world, where societies tend to be far less mono-cultural than in the West.