Today marks the start of the Higher School Certificate (HSC) examinations in NSW. These are the state-wide, final high school exams for all students. I was having a look at enrolments for the various subjects and found this list of “Top 10 Languages”:
It’s interesting to see the extent to which Asian languages have displaced the European ones. They now fill four of the top ten positions, with Japanese and Chinese respectively the first and second most popular. Arabic, too, makes it into the top ten.
Good to see that Latin is still hanging in there too!
Why? I continually fail to see the point in studying Latin unless you’re a Classicist or a huge Classics nerd. (Which, going by your username, you are.) Why not study an actually useful language?
Other than Latin, looks like a good list for people living in Australia, I suppose.
I just…I really like languages, and I feel like the point of learning them is to be able to communicate with more people. And Latin doesn’t really accomplish that. Right now I’m taking Russian. I think being able to put “intermediate ability in spoken and written Russian” on my resume will be a really tangible benefit for my career, whereas Latin…won’t. It just doesn’t seem like the best use of one’s time, learning a dead language.
But not everyone has the same goals I do, of course. YMMV.
Latin also makes learning other European languages easier, because it teaches grammatical concepts we don’t learn in English class anymore. And Italian and Spanish are supposedly quite easy to pick up after Latin, though I wouldn’t know. That said, knowing that I couldn’t go to Rome and chat with cute centurions in Latin put a damper on it for me, and I much preferred modern languages.
I’m very impressed that so many students in Australia choose the difficult Japanese and Chinese!
The argument that Latin helps you learn Romance languages strikes me as bizarre - you know what else helps you learn Spanish and Italian? Studying Spanish or Italian. Hell, I took Spanish, and then when I decided to teach myself French, I found my Spanish background immensely useful. No Latin necessary.
Australia is in the Asian sphere of influence. It’s really a valuable skill on a practical level for Australians to learn Asian languages, probably much more so than European languages. (I’m not Australian, but this is the impression I’ve picked up.) The PM of Australia, Kevin Rudd, has his degree in Chinese and has encouraged the study of Asian languages a lot.
Lots of reasons. It’s intellectually stimulating. It gives one a great insight into the grammar of many modern European languages. It helps greatly with the etymology and understanding of English.
From the point of view of current high school students, it makes very good economic and cultural sense.
Isn’t it intellectually stimulating to learn a language you can actually use, though?
I feel kind of bad for attacking people who want to learn something. Learning is good. I’m sure Latin is interesting. I just feel like, learning a language is a very time-consuming process. You only have so much time in your life. Why not learn a language that will actually, say, help you in some way? It just strikes me as a purely intellectual and impractical pursuit. Which is not inherently bad, but I do think kids should be encouraged to learn a modern language in school.
By use, I take it you mean speak? Because, as I and others have noted, if you have a knowledge of Latin, you do use it.
Of course, learning a modern language is useful and I’d highly recommend it to all school students. I wouldn’t mind betting that most of the students sitting this year’s HSC Latin exams are also taking at least one modern language too.
Really? I don’t know how the Australian school system is organized, but in the US school system, it’s unusual to take more than one language because most students - at least, the sort of serious students who would voluntarily take multiple languages - don’t have enough room in their schedules. When I was in high school, I had room for two electives every year but my senior year, when I had room for three. I always took Spanish and band, and my senior year I was a TA as well. (I would have liked to take something more interesting, but nothing I wanted fit into my schedule.) Just the way the classes are scheduled, it would have been virtually impossible - and maybe actually impossible, I never tried it - to take French (the only other language my school offered) as well as Spanish.
How is it done in Australia? (I am genuinely interested; I took a class last semester called International and Comparative Education, but we focused almost entirely on developing nations.)
In Western Australia at least, in your final two years of high school every class is an elective. You have to take an English class and if you want to sit the TEEs (tertiary entrance exams) you have to do at least 4 TEE subjects but otherwise you can pick whatever the hell you want. Languages weren’t very popular because they weren’t prestigious (the standard “serious student” course load was some variation of two maths, two sciences, English literature and economics which we called the “super six” or “suicide six”) and didn’t scale well (Chinese in particular was notorious for this because the fobs all took it and if you got 90% on a test it’d get scaled down to a fail mark). But I did know a few people who took two languages and it was quite possible to do so.
Edit: Chinese may be the second most popular language on the list, but I can guarantee you that 90%+ of those students are Chinese, and maybe 50% are extremely recent immigrants (like educated in China up to year 11 or so).
My experience is only with the NSW education system. I can’t speak for any of the other states.
The rules are pretty simple. Each subject is assigned a certain number of units, depending upon its degree of difficulty. Standard courses are generally worth two units; more advanced courses are worth three or four units. Students are required to do:
at least two units of English;
at least three courses of two units value or greater;
at least four subjects in total;
at least ten units in total.
Within these parameters the choice is entirely up to the student. In a sense, every subject other than English is an ‘elective’. Of course a lot depends on the school: what subjects it offers; how they’re timetabled etc. But it’s certainly possible to do two languages at HSC level. I did Latin and Classical Greek, and would have done French had I been able to timetable it. I know of people who did three languages (Latin, French and German).
The top ten “languages spoken at home by non-English-fluent residents” (from here, not exact numbers)
Vietnamese 66,000
Cantonese 62,000
Italian 55,000
Greek 45,000
Mandarin 36,000
Arabic 33,000
Spanish 14,000
Korean 14,000
Macedonian 13,600
Turkish 12,000
That’s language purely, not ethnicity … the Italian and Greek ethnicity numbers would be much higher, because the big waves of Mediterranean immigration were in the 50’s and 60’s.
I’m kind of surprised Greek didn’t make it into the top 10 HSC list. Italian is much easier though.
I’m thinking the entire HSC Vietnamese-studying cohort probably falls into the category of “hey, easy credit, I use it with Granny all the time!”
That one year of Latin I had to take in High School came extremely handy to learn German, perhaps because the Latin teacher (who had previously been out Spanish Grammar and Lit teacher) expected us to understand grammar, while none of the German teachers did.
It’s also handy for figuring out technical words based on their roots.
Of all the subjects which I only had for one year, Latin has been the most useful hands down, and it has been more useful than the 3 years of French and the 4 years of German.
