Ignorant. Offensive. Cheap.

In the past week or so I’ve seen a couple of videos posted online which feature famous people speaking English.

One was in the British Daily Telegraph newspaper and was of Russian president Vladimir Putin talking about the World Expo. The Daily Telegraph sneer and giggle and make snide comments about the way he speaks English.

And again this morning I saw a Yahoo sports article which talks about Real Madrid players struggling to speak English “with comedic results.”

Let me make it plain. This kind of snide, immature giggling is ignorant, offensive and cheap.

A simple question: how many of the Telegraph reporters can speak Russian? Putin apparently speaks German very well so he’s no linguistic moron – unlike, I suspect, many of the staff on the Telegraph who by deriding someone who can’t speak English well are simply expressing their own ignorance of the learning process.

And the same applies to the writers of the Yahoo article. How many of them are fluent in any language other than English?

As someone who has struggled to learn foreign languages I find this kind of attitude unforgivable. Who are these people? How dare they make fun of people who have tried to learn and educate themselves?

Shame on them.