"1. LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES, ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
• Give reasons why to learn languages
• Name typical features of English
• Describe the history of English
• Varieties of English – name and give examples of differences

The importance of English
Studying foreign languages is important for everybody. We have many reasons to study them. We need languages for travelling, for reading foreign materials and books, for business communication etc. That is why people all around the world try to study foreign languages. But the most important language for the world communication is English. English is the most widespread language in the world.
English is a member of Indo-European language family and belongs to the Germanic group. The main varieties are: Standard English (British), American English, Australian English, and Canadian English.
Today, English is used by, at a minimum, 750 million people. Over half the speakers of English are not native speakers. English has the largest vocabulary of all the world’s languages. In the “Oxford English dictionary” there are over 500,000 words.. Over half of the world’s scientific and technical magazines are in English and English is the language of computers. Also, most of the world pop culture, especially music, is in English.
What makes English relatively easy to learn is the fact that there is no declension using different endings and the cases are differentiated by prepositions. On the other hand, there are many problems with pronunciation because of the big differences between the written and spoken forms."

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