The Spanish example is also very true in Southern Italy, where most of their tourists are Northern Italians. It’s also true in many places in France outside of Paris.
The Scandinavians are just a breed apart when it comes to languages.
A lot of students don’t use what they learn beyond the first years of math either, but society needs a large number of people who do. Kids don’t have the required understanding of their future and the needs of societyr to make a good decision if this learning isn’t compulsory.
I had French starting in grade school, through high school. I have used it in Canada, and for reading. I also had Latin in high school. It wasn’t offered, but I petitioned for it and got it. Latin has been useful in the sciences, and now, since I’m learning Spanish. (My mother tongue is English, and, to a small extent, pre WWI immigrant Finnish)
Language learning is always useful, even if you don’t go to countries where it is spoken, or watch movies in that language, or read foreign newspapers for a different perspective on world events. It’s good for the brain, it provides insights in your own language, and provides insights into cultures.
I remember being at a ski resort in Finland, and sitting with a group of Finns after a ski lesson. Everyone in the group shifted from Finnish to Swedish to French to German to English and back again, depending on the subject under discussion, because it seems as though some subjects can be discussed better in some languages than in others. I loved that.
What high school subjects were useful to you?
Taking a foreign language class while may not help you speak that language any where near fluency later in life, should help you improve your overall vocabulary. It should make you are more well rounded person from an educational sense.
Most societies outside of the US are bilingual, usually their native language and English. English is the most common language taught as a second language globally. Their have been numerous studies showing that children that become bilingual think and learn differently than people that only know one language. Most people that are truly bilingual think in their second language as well, it is not a constant translating. It is an extension of their vocabulary. My daughters attend a dual language elementary school, where half of their day is in English and half their day is in Spanish.
I had five years of Spanish (from seventh through eleventh grade). And while I have only very limited ability to speak it or understand what someone is saying, I think it was helpful for the pronunciation aspects (how to pronounce words with tildes in them, for example).
I never understood why they taught it the way they did. “Today’s lesson is on the future pluperfect tense of the verb to be.” Meanwhile, I use various tenses of verbs in English without understanding or remembering what those tenses are called formally. So why couldn’t they have taught the language in a more conversational fashion?
Pretty much, I believe. It’s decided by the curriculum in each province, but I think each province does require some classes in either French or English.
I took French maybe 4 years in middle/high school (in the US). I made almost no direct professional use of it ever, and used it little in any way for many years. In more recent years though I’ve diversified my (somewhat vast, false modesty aside) reading on military/naval history away from English, and some topics are best and most extensively written about in French. And I’ve naturally found French easier to ‘pick up’ than languages I never studied in school. Also having taught myself to read passably in some Asian languages, it seems to have reversed the mental switch in my mind that used to find it such drudgery to study French in school. French is so easy as a native English speaker compared to Japanese or Korean.
In general it’s too simplistic though IMO to judge curricula just by whether you ‘use’ it.
Two years of French. Useless, crazy gibberish.
Gotten more use from the two semesters of Mandarin I took in 6th grade.
Four years of French for me. It comes in very handy in Canada, and actually it seems I can get the gist of Spanish signs and whatnot due to the similarity.
I’m not fluent in French by any means, but can read it well enough to grasp the context.
This debate has been going on for years. How should we define “basic education?” I assume we can all agree that an educated person should know a certain level of math, history, science, and literature, and be able to read and write proficiently. So, should we add “know a bit of some other language” to that list? I don’t think so, but reasonable minds can differ.
I struggled significantly to take two years of High School French. (despite cruising through the rest of the curriculum with little effort). I’m still resentful.
Two years of Latin in high school. Besides Typing, the most important subject I took. Studying Latin is where I learned about all those things I was doing as a native speaker of English – in other words, I was learning Language and how language works because it has structure and grammar and rules. Like, Aha! – that’s what all those things are that I’m doing in English!
Then a year of German in college, where I did not think I learned anything. But ten years later in Germany, it all came quickly back to me and I had a head start building a decent proficiency.
The important thing about studying a language in school – any language – is that you first begin to realize what language is, and why all those foreigners don’t just learn to speak ours like the rest of us.
Bilingualism is the greatest gift you can give a small child. By the time they are in high school, it is too late.
I took English since 4th grade until 12th: my school was a private one but, like every school in Spain, required to follow the official curriculum. Like most private schools, one of the ways in which it “differentiates itself” from public schools is by offering more of certain subjects. In this case, when the government made a second language compulsory for high school, my school started requiring it (back then, French) in 6th grade; when the government made a second language compulsory from 6th grade, my school made English required from 4th.
My two eldest nephews now attend the same primary school; the eldest will soon move to the same high school I attended. He was mad, mad I tell you, that his 3-years younger sister and him would be starting French at the same time: he was starting it in 4th grade, she in 1st (for children his age, the legal requirement was to have a second foreign language from 6th; for her cohort, from 4th). Of course, both had had English since the first of their 3 years of preschool. The Newest Nephew will attend a different private primary school, which also offers English since preschool; I know that several of the public schools do as well. One of them (across the street from my old primary school and in a permanent tizzy over trying to one-up “the nuns”) even offers a “fully bilingual track”, in which general subjects such as Math or History are taught in English (… now I’m wondering if the kids are supposed to pronounce “Tordesillas” or “Cantigas de Santa María” in Spanish or in English…).
We’re also required to have one year of Latin, which came very useful when I studied German (German declensions are much simpler).
And as for whether my English was useful, well, you tell me 
Thank you!
I hated the way my French class was taught, and I didn’t learn anything. It was a ludicrous process of memorizing vocabulary and tediously translating useless phrases and sentence fragments.
I learned so much more in the 1 year of Mandarin I took in 6th grade than the four semesters of high school French because my Mandarin teacher wasn’t just having us memorize vocabulary, she was teaching us how to talk. Now, I can’t have what anyone would describe as a natural conversation with a fluent Mandarin speaker, but I can make myself understood without sounding like Tarzan. In French, all I can really do is spout off a few dozen random words.
We were at DisneyWorld a while ago, and the self-serve laundry room wasn’t coin-op; it was all debit/credit card payments, for the soap, the washer and the dryer.
All the signage explaining how it worked was in English. Really? In Florida, a tourist hot-spot, you don’t put up bilingual English/Spanish signs??
There was a couple there who spoke Spanish. They were very confused.
I had gone through the same confusion a few days before trying to figure out how it all worked.
I don’t speak any Spanish, but to help I just explained each step to them, slowly, en français. Given the similarities in the languages, they were able to follow my instructions and got their laundry done.
Which is why the Cub has been in French immersion starting with pre-K, age 4.
He has a lovely accent.
The requirements aren’t based educational needs, they are based on being able to fund the language departments. In college, a language professor talked about how recently his language department got the college to agree to make it a requirement to extend the number of terms of a foreign language that was required for a degree. He said this was done, because not enough students were signing up for those classes and this was a way continue to fund them. There was no educational basis for extending the requirement, it was all full of self-interests for the language department and the college, not the student.
I took French, never had a reason to use it, and have forgotten almost all of it. I took it with the hopes that I would be able to use it when traveling. I doubt in an emergency if I needed to speak in French now I could do it. I am not against teaching foreign languages, but their usefulness seems to be extremely limited. This is because everyone wants to speak English. People travel the world for pleasure and business only knowing English and repeatedly told me they don’t have a problem. So I question making it a degree requirement to take more than a term/semester of it.
Even in business now, I use Google Translate to try to be more friendly to people who speak another language, and you know what, they reply in English anyway. Again, I’m not saying it shouldn’t be taught, but considering how many courses are required in your major already in college I don’t see it being necessary to require a year of it.
The other thing which is overlooked, is that if you didn’t have the language in high school, it makes it much harder to learn in college.
Oftentimes, the high school school may “require” something that the state doesn’t. In that case, the school can’t actually force the student to take the course. If mom/dad goes in and says Johnny ain’t taking Spanish, then Johnny ain’t taking Spanish.
Now if Johnny tries to get into a 4-year university, he may come to regret not taking Spanish since foreign language is a pretty common admissions requirement.
English-speaking Canadians study French at school for 12 years. When they graduate, they can’t even order a doughnut at Tim Hortons in Quebec.
My grandmother instilled a love of learning languages into me that I still have. She was a traveler and believed in the politeness of learning the language prior to visiting. She had a treasure trove of coins from around the world that I would paw through whenever we visited.
Did you take a language in high school?
I was a major polyglot in high school, in fact I was upset I couldn’t fit more languages into my time there. In my senior year I was in:
German 4
Spanish 4
French 4
Japanese 1
AP English
(Our high school also offered Russian and Mandarin but I had to take science instead.)
In college I majored in German, minored in French and took a semester of Swedish.
**Do you use anything you learned? **
Yes, often. I still love to travel and will brush up on the language before I get to the tarmac.
Also, at 43, I’m still learning new languages. In preparation for a trip to Prague, I’ve been working on Czech for the last month. My only problem is with patience. I can’t stick in my brain fast enough and my pronunciation skills are a bit lacking (I’ve told my husband that we can have three or five of something but never four. Four=čtyři and is something my tongue is completely rejecting.)
To me, learning a foreign language as an adult, since I didn’t start learning them until I was 15, is like learning a new puzzle. Finding how the pieces fit, decoding idioms and declensions, that’s all part of the fun. Your fun miles may vary.