High school foreign language classes

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

Russia is a rising country, really? But anyway I think the Japanese example as I said above (English/Japanese bilingual signs at the Minneapolis airport looks kind of strange now) shows how you can’t guess stuff like that.

Also the morphological tonality in Chinese spoken dialects as well as huge number of symbols to learn makes it an unlikely candidate for the international language. It isn’t just a question of when X country GDP gets to be biggest. A whole lot of other things have to change, and there’s a whole lot of sunk investment of all kinds in English and learning English. Again hard to predict but I’d guess English is going to be last de facto international language and what follows will probably be seamless enough machine translation that it doesn’t matter what language you speak, for most purposes, not all purposes. Whether that’s years or several decades away I don’t know.

Today’s situation of computer assist is already a big change from what it was, and opened up lots of different useful levels of language learning. For example I know some languages (eg. Spanish, Italian, German) just well enough to find what I need on the web and translate it well enough, I also do that for web material in languages where I can read whole pages, but I’m slow and have to look a lot of words up (eg. Japanese). In Korean OTOH it’s become about as easy for me to read and look up words as figure out what a garbled machine translation means (Google does Korean worse than most languages, though noticeably better than it did only a few years ago). And if a source is non-electronic (book, document or mag article) I’ll generally just plow through it reading, slowly if Japanese or Korean, French I can actually read at good speed with fairly little dictionary reference, once I get warmed up. But I’ve done a fair amount of research in Russian by scanning, OCR’ing and machine translating non-electronic texts. That’s drudgery (because scan/OCR programs still make lots of mistakes you have to correct first), but does save the upfront investment of improving my Russian enough to just read big texts.

Such variations were impossible years ago. It was more like you either knew the language or not. So the idea of studying languages to ‘proficiency’ for all uses is itself arguably becoming obsolete. Depends what you want to do.

62

A lot of experts in pedagogy and linguistics want students learning foreign languages not to keep the language dept.s afloat, but because of the side effects (mentioned several times already in this thread) of understanding your own language better, understanding at least basic of linguistics in general, getting a basis to expand upon later, if better language control becomes necessary…

Secondly, the view that schools should only teach what is necessary for business is a very narrow, short-sighted and unhuman one. When people draw up curricula for school, they don’t think “in order to work in business, little Johnny needs to learn reading, writing, typing, computers, and nothing else”, but instead, to offer an education that makes Johnny a rounded person, capable of being a good democratic citizen: so critical thinking through essay writing and reading critically should be there, along with sports and some health classes, some basic understanding of natural science, how to get facts and why facts are important…
not just a drone who can perform five tasks and nothing else.

Learning how to do his job is what happens at university/ vocational school, not in primary or secondary school.

It’s also terribly short-sighted because neither the children themselves, nor the parents, nor the teachers, know what 10-year old Johnny will want to work at, or be good at, when he’s 20 years old. Not even experts know. So by giving him a broad overview, Johnny can decide where to go at the end of High school, instead of being limited to office work because his school neglected music, arts and science.
Given how quickly the modern job world changes, it’s especially short-sighted to limit students to some subjects instead of broadening their experience as wide as possible: even if at 10 years old Johnny knew he wanted to be an engineer, who knows if he still has a job at age 35, or something completly different is available?

That’s why good schools have a broad curriculum.

63

Concur with your point re: electives.

64

At a guess and hoping that the original had correct grammar, it could be:

“¡Cómo gritas, hijo! ¿Qué hay en esa bolsa? ¡AAAAH! ¡Una calavera!” (How loudly you scream/Why are you screaming so loud, my son! What’s in your bag? EEEEK! A skull!)

It could also be culebra (small snake; if you call a boa a culebra it will sue you before eating you) and/or have broken grammar as well as non-Spanish exclamations, of course :slight_smile:

Grito: “I scream” or “scream (noun)”. Gritas: “you scream”. Grita: “he/she/it screams”. Gritos: “screams (noun)”. We just do it to confuse y’all.

65

Re. electives and teaching only things needed for business. My primary school didn’t have electives (extra requirements yes; electives no except when such subjects were listed as elective in the legal curriculum*), but one of the “extra subjects” that people from other schools thought proved the nuns were also nuts was typing. I type faster than most people talk; my current boss was all grumpy about my custom of preparing texts mentally before starting to write them - until she saw me dropping what she viewed as “staring at the wall” and gun out a 10 page document in less time than she would have needed for a page.

  • If Little Johnny’s parents didn’t want Little Johnny to take one of the extras, Little Johnny’s parents would have been offered the door and a refund, and asked “why did you choose this school then? The extra curriculum is one of its main features!”
66

Actually, your skull interpretation makes more sense. calabra->calavera (with “b” and “v” being the same sound in Spanish.)

67

He doesn’t seem to know about learning styles, though. I was part of that 1/3rd-ish of my class that couldn’t get anything done with the “learn the words” methods used by most of our teachers; we needed to understand the grammatical framework first. Not completely of course, but without a frame to hang the words on forget about it.

That 1/3rd ended up over 90% engineers, with an economist, a veterinarian turned air traffic controller (dude’s got terrible allergies; hopefully he won’t become allergic to planes) and a dentist for leavening.

68

Five years of French. Slacked off, told the teacher I’d never use it anyway.

Moved to France fourteen years after that. Didn’t use a damned thing I learned in high school except to impress with my knowledge of the simple past while showing people around- plaques are just about the only place you get it. But somehow, that was more important to my high school than, say, the conditional tense. Or how to do your taxes. Or seeing a doctor.

69

I too am in the 1/3 of the class that needed the grammar to make sense of anything.

And even after years of not using Spanish I remembered the grammar and most of the conjugation rules. With that level of understanding, I can choose any words from a translation dictionary and make myself understood. I continue to learn and my Spanish vocabulary continues to grow naturally as I encounter new words and look them up in a dictionary if needed I understand most all of it, except for those random words derived from Quechua that Mrs Iggy’s family like to throw into conversation. :eek:

70

I took four years of French in high school, plus a year each of Italian and Russian. When I first visited France, 40 years later, I was amazed at how much French came back to me, once I was surrounded by the language. Oh, not verb tenses or declensions or noun genders. But simple vocabulary, things I hadn’t thought of in 40 years, I was surprised at how much I remembered. I wish I had taken more Italian too, would help in understanding opera.

71

Yeah–I would agree that everyone has different learning styles, and some have a better time as adults with a more methodical approach involving grammar and rules. That said, everyone, of course, learns language initially without any “rules” or grammar being taught to them explicitly. But there isn’t a “one size fits all” method to learning language.

72

Two years of Latin (actually, the first year was in junior high. A language had to be taken for one year, if I recall, and the options were French, Spanish and Latin. This was in the mid-fifties)
I don’t recall now why I took Latin–a challenge, maybe? I still recall some of it.

73

High school foreign language instruction generally tends to be bad (though it’s getting better), which is probably why so many people in this thread are staying it was useless for them. As a linguist who works in language acquisition, however, I can safely say that motivation and contextualization are probably the two most critical determinants in the facility of foreign language learning, and neither of those is usually present in high school language classes. As mentioned above, semi-immersion earlier in the student’s life is much more effective. I don’t have time to look at that entire essay but with a brief glance I’d say I agree with most of it. Any broad statements about language acquisition should be looked at very skeptically, especially if no research is specifically cited.

74

Two and a half years of German, and I was a B student, and I can’t remember most of it, 20 or so years later.

Should’ve taken Spanish.

75

The terminal was built as a hub for Northwest Airlines, which also had a hub in Tokyo. (Delta still does have a (shrinking) hub in Tokyo, but I don’t think Minneapolis is as important to getting there as it was back when planes couldn’t fly quite as far.)

76

I did 5 years of French, 3 of German and one of Latin. I’ve used all three to an extent, certainly more than I ever used my school Geography.

I’m pretty sure that learning some of a second language as a kid, any language, helps if you then decide to learn another further down the line. I’ve always suspected my early exposure to Welsh (I don’t speak more than a smattering, but my whole family spent a while trying to learn it for a move that never happened) helped my ability to pick up phonemes not used in English, just from being introduced to the concept when tiny.

77

Yes, all so true. High school should be a place to learn how to learn and I think expose kids to a wide variety of topics. I think learning another language is a good example of that I guess I don’t understand why so much emphasis is placed on it. I think it’s great to have the opportunity to be exposed to it, but as some others have said it may also be more practical at a younger age.

78

I find that very interesting, how it came back to you, not so much the grammar, but the vocabulary itself. Sounds kind of like riding a bike, once you learn it…

79

You forgot to mention the Spanish for “ice cream”. :stuck_out_tongue:

80

6 years of French in Jr High/High School. Used it many times in my life, most recently in the last month, 25+years after graduating.

1 year of German in college, never really did much with it.

1 year of Japanese in night school, followed by 20+ years of self-study. Use it on a daily (if not constant) basis.