# Americans and foreign languages **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 18, 2016, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438 "2016-03-18T19:36:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![chaika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chaika/32/405_2.png) [@chaika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chaika)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2016, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/21 "2016-03-19T20:47:04Z")
In addition to the points previous posters have made WRT geographical isolation and the near universality of English around the world, I would say that there are major problems with foreign language education in the US: how we teach languages and also when we teach them. Generally speaking, kids begin learning a second language in middle or high school, which is at precisely the point when they are losing the ease of language learning that pre-pubescent children possess naturally. Of course, it is entirely possible to learn another language to a high degree of proficiency as a teenager or as an adult, but it isn’t as easy and it is quite a different process at that point. I teach a foreign language in a US university. Since it is a “less commonly taught language” (as the clumsy official wording has it), most students have never studied the language prior to university classes. But even when we occasionally have students who have studied this language in high school, they are almost invariably placed in the beginning level. The proficiency they achieve after years of high school classes is generally very limited indeed, which indicates that something is going awry with pre-college foreign language education. In the summer I often teach in an intensive language program, where students are immersed in the language for 8 weeks. They actually have to sign a pledge promising they will speak only the target language all summer. Not surprisingly, they make tremendous progress in a short period of time. It is the next best thing to spending time in the target country. ---
**Author:** ![Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulf_the_Unwashed)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2016, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/22 "2016-03-19T21:33:27Z")
> [@Telemark](#): > > Another point is that for most of the non-English speaking world the obvious second language is English. It offers huge benefits and there’s a larger group of people to converse with all around you. In the US, what is the obvious second language? Traditionally it has been French, especially in the areas close to Quebec, and Spanish. But there are benefits to learning Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, German, etc. So there’s no clear choice for Americans like there is for the rest of the world. Spanish has become the “obvious” second language. > **[List of most commonly learned second languages in the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_learned_foreign_languages_in_the_United_States)** > > The tables below provide a list of second languages most frequently taught in American schools and colleges. They reflect the popularity of these languages in terms of the total number of enrolled students in the United States. > Below are the top second languages studied in public K-12 schools (i.e., primary and secondary schools). The tables correspond to the 18.5% (some 8.9 million) of all K-12 students in the U.S. (about 49 million) who take foreign-language classes. > Below are the top forei... 72% of K-12 students in the US who are taking foreign languages take Spanish. French is way, way behind in second place at 14%. The numbers for Spanish in the US aren’t up there with the 90% or so of EU students taking English (as a foreign language). But given that Spanish outscores the next nearest language by more than 5-to-1, it has become the de facto winner of the title “obvious second language” here in the US. [Though YMMV. I know a data-ignoring foreign language teacher who insists against all evidence that French is not merely the \*true \*first choice of most American students (not really sure how she makes that claim), but that French is still more useful in Europe than English (this comes from a _New York Times_ article that she evidently misread)…] For the record, I studied German for many years and enjoyed it very much, but have just about no use for it in the US. Never have (or had) any use for French (which I studied only briefly) here in the US either, despite living not all that far from the Quebec border. I did study a little Spanish as an adult and wish I could speak it better, as it is the one language that would clearly come in handy in my life in the US. ---
**Author:** ![Critical1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/3e96dc/32.png) [@Critical1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Critical1)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2016, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/23 "2016-03-20T01:08:29Z")
You can travel from Anchorage to Miami without needing anything but English. Is there anywhere else on earth with such a ridiculous landmass with a single language spoken over the whole thing? China or Russia would seem to be the only possible options. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2016, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/24 "2016-03-20T03:31:11Z")
> [@Critical1](#): > > You can travel from Anchorage to Miami without needing anything but English. Is there anywhere else on earth with such a ridiculous landmass with a single language spoken over the whole thing? > China or Russia would seem to be the only possible options. Well in descending order, I presume it would be something like… Australia Greenland Brazil etc. You can just keep doing down the list until you reach a region of land that is no longer ridiculously sized. I’m not sure where the cutoff is… China has a common written language but many of the Chinese dialects are mutually unintelligible. I believe that there are also areas of China that do not speak any dialect of Chinese. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2016, 6:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/25 "2016-03-20T06:31:03Z")
I’d say Chinese may be catching up to Spanish in the US as a language that would be helpful for one to learn. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2016, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/26 "2016-03-20T06:38:15Z")
I bought into the “Europeans can all speak different languages” myth until I actually went to Europe and encountered so many who knew just their own language and nothing else. ---
**Author:** ![Sangahyando](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f14d63/32.png) [@Sangahyando](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sangahyando)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2016, 10:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/27 "2016-03-20T10:25:14Z")
> [@RivkahChaya](#): > > One thing about English and English speakers: I’ll bet we can code switch and understand different dialects in a way that people whose native language isn’t so widely spoken don’t dream of. I mean, I once went to London, and could understand a guy in Limehouse who I think was a little drunk, and have 5 or 6 teeth. I can understand Monty Python, and\* Priscilla, Queen of the Desert\*. I can understand people from Appalachia, border neighborhoods in Texas, people with Cajun accents, and people from Jamaica. My mother is a linguist, and calls switching among dialects “code-switching.” I’ll bet native English speakers excel at this. > [@Shagnasty](#): > > That is a good point. I have heard ideas that English is one of the hardest languages to truly master but one of the easier ones to learn in pidgin forms. I don’t know if that is true but it might be because I can understand many very different forms of it very easily no matter how badly it is spoken or written. You have to screw something really badly before the general idea can’t be conveyed at all. > > However, it is possible to have unintelligible dialects of English even within the U.S. My affluent Boston area raised wife visited my very small Louisiana home town when we first started dating. I took her to truly excellent but primitive BBQ stand out in the middle of nowhere because I wanted to show her what good barbecue was. She literally could not understand what anyone was saying even though everyone was speaking their own versions of English. The people that ran it were very old-school black men that spoke in their own dialect that isn’t really found anywhere else. I never realized it up until that point but the accent and vocabulary were so different that it became mutually unintelligible so I had to provide translation from one version of English to another. > > I didn’t have any trouble understanding either side and never realized I was bilingual until that point. It is like a more subtle version of the Jive translation in the movie Airplane!. It wasn’t as over the top as that and it wasn’t a question of Ebonics either. It was just that native English speakers from very different areas and cultures had diverged enough so that they could not communicate effectively anymore but I understood both perfectly fine because I grew up with each version so it was effortless and seamless for me. **RivkahChaya** , I’m sure you didn’t mean to make a totally-universal blanket generalisation: but I’m British (English) and thus a native English speaker; and I’m dreadful with accents. If I’m confronted with someone whose English is of any variety other than the standard “cultured” BBC “received pronunciation” that I grew up with, I’m likely to have difficulties – often bad ones. When watching an American film, I often wish that it had sub-titles ! And my problem is with the other speaker’s pronunciation, not as a rule with their vocabulary. I can’t be a total “dud” re languages in all respects: at school / university I became reasonably competent in French and German, and learned a small amount of Russian (all this was mostly in the reading-and-writing, not the spoken-conversing) sphere. But count me, for sure, as one native English speaker who is hopeless at the code-switching thing referred to here. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2016, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/28 "2016-03-20T13:07:20Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Well in descending order, I presume it would be something like… > > Australia > Greenland > Brazil Brazil is larger than Australia, and both are larger than Greenland. (Fun fact about Brazil: it is larger than the continental US/lower 48.) Argentina would be another country with only one official language, larger than Greenland. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2016, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/29 "2016-03-20T13:53:28Z")
Anyway, the question there was about landmasses, not countries. Traversing the Hispanophone Americas (say, Tijuana to Rio Gallegos) is a greater distance than the Anglophone. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2016, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/30 "2016-03-22T14:33:26Z")
> [@coffeecat](#): > > Is it because our system of foreign language education sucks compared to that in other countries? Could be. What do you guys think, and what can be done? The US doesn’t place the same priority on foreign languages as other countries. In both Japan and Taiwan and I’m sure a majority of many other first and second work countries, the study of English starts at kindergarten and is taught through high school to every student. A high percent of kids in Asia attend cram schools and get an additional three to six hours of English per week. It is also one of the subjects used in entrance exams. According to the data from the link **Ulf** provided, a mere 18% of K-12 US students are enrolled in foreign languages. Since the percentage of children learning foreign languages in elementary school is small, somewhere between 30% to 60%+ middle and high school students are studying foreign languages. As they are not on the SAT or ACT, there isn’t a real incentive to truly master the language and as **chaika** points out, the children don’t learn that much. That said, most of the emphasis studying English in this part of the world is on written rather than verbal communication and there is a low retention rate for people who do not continue to study or use English in their lives. > [@Shagnasty](#): > > I think it is just because most Americans don’t encounter people that can’t speak some English very often. Languages take consistent practice to maintain or proficiency withers fairly quickly. That isn’t the case in, say, Europe where someone is likely to have several neighbors that all speak different languages so there is some benefit into learning others. This is undoubted not the case on both accounts. First, the major reason is the lack of language education in the US compared to Europeans, but more the number of foreign speakers in the US is a far higher percentage than in Europe. The US, is now the country with the second largest number of Spanish speakers, second only to Mexico and will [surpass that sometime before 2050](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/29/us-second-biggest-spanish-speaking-country). > [@](#): > > Another reason is that English is the de facto universal language. You can travel all over the world and never be forced to interact in anything but English if you don’t know the local language because hospitality staff in most of the popular spots speak English just fine. This is the more important reason, but again this is limited to people engaged in business and tourism. Even in companies engaged in international business, the percentage of people who speak English isn’t necessarily that high. In terms of total numbers, both of these segments aren’t high percentages of the population. There are countries such as India and Singapore where English is used by the various groups to communicate with each other. > [@Shagnasty](#): > > That is a good point. I have heard ideas that English is one of the hardest languages to truly master but one of the easier ones to learn in pidgin forms. I don’t know if that is true but it might be because I can understand many very different forms of it very easily no matter how badly it is spoken or written. You have to screw something really badly before the general idea can’t be conveyed at all. This is silly and without merit. Most languages are quite difficult to truly master and you can learn a pidgin form of most if not all languages. > [@chaika](#): > > In addition to the points previous posters have made WRT geographical isolation and the near universality of English around the world, I would say that there are major problems with foreign language education in the US: how we teach languages and also when we teach them. Generally speaking, kids begin learning a second language in middle or high school, which is at precisely the point when they are losing the ease of language learning that pre-pubescent children possess naturally. Of course, it is entirely possible to learn another language to a high degree of proficiency as a teenager or as an adult, but it isn’t as easy and it is quite a different process at that point. Speaking as the father of children whose first language was Japanese and now speak native Chinese since we moved to Taiwan and who still speak Japanese and then some English, in that order; and as an English teacher for everyone from toddlers to retired folks, this is not correct. It’s a common misconception, but has been shown to not be the case. Young children are able to become native when they are immersed in a language where those of us who learn at a later stage will not. However, kids don’t magically pick up languages when learning as second or third languages. They don’t have as advanced reasoning or learning techniques as older teens or adults. Some have less resistance which gives that advantage, but if you look at households of immigrants in most cases the children are not truly bilingual but rather the children speak the language of the surrounding culture while understanding their parents’ language but perhaps not speaking it natively. It is possible to have children become bilingual by exposing them to enough hours in a week (it usually takes more than 20) but that’s not practical for the general public. Nor would be economically feasible. > [@](#): > > I teach a foreign language in a US university. Since it is a “less commonly taught language” (as the clumsy official wording has it), most students have never studied the language prior to university classes. [aside]After enrolling in the University of Utah returning from my LDS mission to Japan, I decided to take some Japanese classes. Because of the large number of former missionaries, the university had had to change its system. LDS missionaries are encouraged to not study the kanji, but rather work on grammar and vocabulary. Hence, they uses to have to been dumped into Japanese 101 where they would easy soak up all the A’s. The language department created two upper level courses which concentrated almost exclusively on kanji and reading and writing Japanese. Students passing the two classes would receive an additional 15 credits and could receive a minor in Japanese. [/aside] > [@Urbanredneck](#): > > I’d say Chinese may be catching up to Spanish in the US as a language that would be helpful for one to learn. Almost certainly not. The actual number of Americans who would really benefit from knowing Chinese would be in the thousands or many tens of thousands but almost certainly much less than the number who would benefit from knowing Spanish. > [@Siam\_Sam](#): > > I bought into the “Europeans can all speak different languages” myth until I actually went to Europe and encountered so many who knew just their own language and nothing else. Yeah, me three. Not to mention having lived half my life in Asia and finding the vast majority of people don’t speak English. ---
**Author:** ![Donnerwetter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b2d939/32.png) [@Donnerwetter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Donnerwetter)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2016, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/31 "2016-03-22T15:25:13Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > Another reason is that English is the de facto universal language. You can travel all over the world and never be forced to interact in anything but English if you don’t know the local language because hospitality staff in most of the popular spots speak English just fine. I’d say that is precisely the heart of the matter. For Americans (and other native speakers of English), there is, in general, no compelling reason to thoroughly learn and practise a foreign language. ---
**Author:** ![sachertorte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sachertorte/32/3727_2.png) [@sachertorte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sachertorte)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2016, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/32 "2016-03-22T15:41:39Z")
When I was in High School I intentionally did not take a foreign language because the foreign language education at my school was terrible. I took a classical language, Latin, instead. Our class salutatorian took five years of Spanish and failed miserably when he tried to take the Spanish AP exam (no one else even bothered to try). My classmates in Latin did fine on both the Catullus/Horace and the Aeneid Latin AP exams. As noted above, teaching to a standardized test is not a great way to teach fluency, but they couldn’t even manage that! ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2016, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/33 "2016-03-22T16:28:39Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > I’d say Chinese may be catching up to Spanish in the US as a language that would be helpful for one to learn. More so than even twenty years ago, especially if you want to travel to China. If you stay in the US, I would expect there to be more Spanish-speakers who don’t speak English than Chinese people who don’t speak English. Although I have no hard data. You have to speak a language to learn a language. I spoke German with my grandmother, took a lot of German in high school, and minored in German in college. Then I stopped speaking it with anyone, and lost most of it. Then I became friends with the family across the street, who spoke German, and I picked it back up in a few months, to the point where I was moderately fluent again. Then they moved back to Germany and I lost it all again. My kids went to vist in Germany, with only a couple of years of high school German and what they picked up from conversations with our friends. They got along pretty well. As my son said wisely, “After the third beer everyone speaks the same language”. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2016, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438/34 "2016-03-22T17:09:50Z")
I agree with others that it’s basically just lack of opportunity. In the UK, I learned French from the age of 7 and was largely fluent (occasionally had some trouble with verb conjugations in the less useful tenses) thanks to regular immersion. I moved to the US at 14 and essentially can’t speak a lick now. I can still read fairly complex texts in French (and Latin) though. > [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Something I once heard and I’m wondering if anyone can confirm or refute it. It was that Brazilians have a similar reputation to Americans; the stereotype is that Brazilians only speak their native Portuguese and don’t learn other languages. > > Is this a genuine stereotype about Brazilians? And if so, is there any objective basis to it? Not sure about rank-and-file Brazilians, but the relatively wealthy people who infest (and I use the term advisedly) Walt Disney World from now to about the end of summer (in enormous tour groups) can generally converse in Spanish. It’s helpful, because most of them don’t speak much more English than “please.” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americans-and-foreign-languages/749438.md?page=1)