I graduated from high school in 1966. I had two years of Latin and three years of German. Both languages greatly extended my command of the English language and it’s fun to be able to occasionally translate Latin stuff I read in books.
I have had occasion to use the German several times. Most recent was last week, when I was manning a table at a local elementary school spring fling. One of the moms that registered her son for Taekwondo lessons was German and was very pleasantly surprised when I was able to chat with her in German. Limited chat, as I have forgotten a lot of the vocabulary, but still…
In HS I had two years of Latin (waste of time) and 2 years of French (somewhat helpful when I really had to learn some French). In college I had three years of German. It would have been better had we really tried to speak it. I knew enough to get past the French and German PhD reading exams (now largely abolished since English has become nearly the universal language of science) and I can order a meal or get a hotel room in Germany. My kids went through French immersion from kindergarten and are all quite fluent.
Helado (the kind in a box or on a cone), polo (the kind on a stick). That’s for Spain: other dialects use different names, specially for the ones on a stick.
I took two years of Spanish in high school; there was no foreign language requirement for me in college.
I don’t think a single thing I learned in those classes has been relevant to me since. What has been of incalculable value over the years was the several years of emphasis on Greek and Latin roots during grammar school English. I didn’t learn any foreign words, but I can undestand a whole lot of them simply by being able to identify the pieces that make them up.
I went to a high school that didn’t offer four years of any foreign language, so I took two years of Spanish and two years of French. I did well enough that I satisfied my college language requirement. So you could say I used it (and definitely got my money’s worth) right there.
Then I went to journalism school and they required I demonstrate “advanced” proficiency in a foreign language. All that grammar and rules I had forced on me paid off again.
As a journalist, I never had to translate anything to or from another language, but I personally know more than a few who did it frequently, and it’s a handy skill to have.
My sister once witnessed a car accident where one of the drivers was too upset to even think in English, so my sister patiently spoke to her in Spanish and calmed her down until the police got there with a genuine interpreter.
Maybe you skipped a bit? He first gives sources of studies about yes, it’s difficult to learn a second language (any child must learn a language to communicate with its enviroment), and epople avoid if they can, except for a few with a gift at language-learning.
Then he gives advices for strategies to make language learning more accepted in population; and then, he gives a warning “those are strategies that worked for me, but may not work for everybody”
1/3 sounds very high for me, I would have guessed maybe 10%. Because of many studies about where in the brain the language center is, and how the language center works.
Note: I’m not using you to mean you, the poster, but to mean the generic you.
The problem with the statement “Everybody (educated) in the world speaks English anyway, so why should (we anglophones) learn another language (when it’s so hard)?” is that to everybody else outside the Anglosphere, it sounds a lot like arrogance and cultural imperialism.
Not-native English speakers know and accept the need to learn at least one, often two or more foreign languages, in order to get along in the world. Whether because in Africa/ India many languages exist next to each other, so trade or govt. jobs require several langauges, or simply moving outside your village/ tribe requires it; or whether in Europe you will meet, not just on vacation, people from other countries who have not yet learned your countrys language.
Yes, a German and a French person talking to each other will often try using English as lingua franca (or they might have learned a common language with the strong-german-French cooperation).
But there is already both teh strong economic influence from the US, and the strong cultural influence of Hollywood movies and TV series. If you then add “We speak English, we don’t need to learn your languages” many people hear “you are inferior, your language and culture along with it will be eradicated by us, and you will all have to bow to us”
That does not engender nice feelings towards your country in the rest of the world.
And yes, language learning is hard (so is learning math or biology, though). Saying “You (inferior foreigners) need to learn English, but I can’t waste my own time and brain on learning any other languages” implies either “I’m too lazy to bother” or “I’m too stupid to learn a second language” both of which doesn’t help the image of lazy, arrogant, stupid Americans many in the rest of the world already have you for several (some valid, some less valid) reasons.
When a contineal European meets a Brit, and they say “I took French/ German/ Spanish in school” you can still talk in English - but you know that the Brit can relate to how hard it is learning a second language.
Meeting an American, who never bothered because it wasn’t required, and is proud of not wasting his time - or saying “Yes, I took 2 years of French, I sucked at it, never used it, what a waste of time” leaves the other person thinking you are lazy or stupid (or both).
Because an adult person, who’s grown beyond being Calvin* and enjoying getting out of homework, means also the ability to recognize areas in yourself where you need to improve, and why “life-long learning” is not just simply a buzzword from company managers to get employees to add qualifications to their profiles, but rather, a fact of life.
That doesn’t mean that every adult is required to master French and Spanish at age 30 - if your personal inclinations and talents skew towards chinese calligraphy/ Irish folkdancing/ playing video games/ programmig Linux/ building toothpick models, and you make that your hobby and improve that, go for it.
But don’t dismiss everybody who recognizes that foreign languages, as part of foreign culture, are important.
That year did have an unusually high % of engineers, we were just weird. I’m sure our percentiles for anything didn’t match those in the general population; we also behaved unusually in Music, Shop, Math and Draftmanship (that I know for sure).
Yes, but what the native English speaker’s conclusion about the return on investment of learning a foreign language ‘sounds like’ is not necessarily much of a practical consideration. It’s still not clear the extent to which that consideration, if at all, offsets the big skew in practical return on investment from English speakers learning one foreign language v the return on learning English from everybody else’s POV.
Another aspect I mentioned before in the context of technology also applies somewhat in the social ‘sounds like imperialism’ context as well. An English speaker now, rather than spending the effort to fully master one foreign language, might devote the same effort to learning a bit of a number of languages, enough to facilitate using machine translation (still hard if you know zero of the language), Optical Character Recognition programs (to scan and translate non-electronic texts) etc. As I said before, depends what you want to do. That sort of limited skill is not too relevant to talking to people, but useful if your interest might be reading what the non-English speaking world says about news, particular topics in history etc.
Personally, a native English speaker, I’ve had a family reason to acquire reasonable speaking skill in one non-English language I didn’t study in school. Besides that my interest in military history has led me to acquire some reading ability in half a dozen or so other languages (varying degree), plus polishing up my reading ability in French which I did study in school, and which I can also speak a little bit. But just imagining somebody without those interests, while it might be unfortunate to ‘sound like an imperialist’ I doubt that consideration itself justifies a lot of actual effort.
I’d note that I do accept the argument in favor of languages in schools as part of a general exposure to different things, just having some idea for instance what it takes to learn a language other than as infant/toddler.
Part of the problem is that many Americans never travel outside the US, so we’re never put in a position to use the foreign language we’ve studied. Brits, for example, are just across the channel from France, and many vacation in Spain or elsewhere in Europe, so they’re much more likely to use the language skills.
When I was in fourth grade, my parents drove us to Montreal for a family vacation and we got hopelessly lost someplace rural in Quebec. We stopped at a farmhouse to ask for directions and my father pushed my sixth-grade brother, who had a year or two of elementary school French, at the farmer to see if he could be understood. It didn’t work out well, but we eventually did find our way to Montreal.
I studied 3 years of Japanese in high school (which is why my username is a self-mocking translation of my real life name in Japanese). I opted for that language because I was very interested in video game design and at that time (the 90s) many games came from Japan and so I thought it might give me an edge.
Fast forward 20 years and my only game design has been as a hobby and my Japanese hasn’t even helped there. I don’t think I’ve really used it for any practical purpose beyond being able to read the wrapper on a Japanese snack to tell you what it is. I was pretty good at it too, I think, because I pretty much got straight As and even got some kind of Presidential award in my 3rd year. But I’m pretty rusty and while I could maybe get by if I was stranded in Japan I’d probably sound like an absolute moron in the process.
One thing that’s interesting is that I’ve retained most of the grammar and syntax rules I learned but it’s the vocabulary that keeps fading. Maybe that’s one reason why formal language studies start there, so that you’re sure to learn something that sticks.
That’s interesting because in another post someone had said almost the opposite, remembering the vocabulary was easier than remembering the grammar. I wonder if it’d just a personal thing or if it has to do with the languages themselves. The other, if I recall correctly was French.
IF we were on the college track in high school we had to take a language. And if we wanted to take any language other than Latin, we still had to take a semester of Latin first, before taking the other language.
I took French in junior high (no requirement for Latin first, nor was Latin taught in jr. high), then the required semester of Latin, then two years of Russian. I thought it was fun.
I also took French in college, because I needed a certain amount of language. What we did was read books in French, then discussed them, but the discussion was in English.
Now these things were required for my degree, but I think it also helped me broadly understand things inherent to a lot of languages. My paltry French got a lot better when I was in France, and even 30 years after the high school Russian I retained enough to ask the Russian woman in my son’s day care (who was learning English right alongside a bunch of 3-year-olds) what toy my son played with most. (A truck.)
I’m now wondering the same thing, because I also learned a little Spanish in college and I remember individual words better than how to properly phrase them.
Maybe it’s because French and Spanish words are often very close to English words, and Japanese words often bear no resemblance except when derived from English (or vice versa). Just a guess.
I wonder how much of a Change it would make towards acceptance in US if, like all other countries mentioned so far, students didn’t start in 9th grade, but in 5th grade or earlier (10 years old) with the first foreign language, when it is easier (it’s never fully easy, but it is easier early than later).
Yes; now that I’m learning French (aside from my pronounciation and listening being terrible) a lot of the time I can see the relationship between the French word and either English or Latin word I already know.
Because I learned English first, I tend to see French as “funnily pronounced English” *, though that’s not historically correct
Apparently, some French snobbishly/ jokingly Claim that English is only “badly pronounced French”, which does account for about half of the vocabulary, with Germanic words the other half.
To clarify, I first did a brief section in French in 6th grade. Another year or two (forgot to mention earlier, forgetful) in 7th and/or 8th grade. More classes 9th, 10th, and 11th grade. Nothing 12th, then 3 years of college. I retain more than I would’ve expected but my at least conversation skills are lacking. It’s not necessarily a problem of lack of education (though some school districts don’t have much language education), so much as a lack of means to practice. I’m not sure that UK language education is that great either, while English Canadians learn French, but don’t know French. Connaître vs. savoir, n’est-ce pas?
Specifically, English is mostly related to Medieval Norman French due to invasion. And as French is a relatively conservative language (no Icelandic though), things haven’t changed that much from a regional, old, version of the language.
My mother was still quoting one from her French school book sixty years later - the kind where there’s a “typical” family and the phrases come up in everyday situations. In this case, the dog had gone missing, but suddenly reappears outside the front door to be greeted by the maid (yes, that typical, but this was getting on for 100 years ago) with “Ah! Te voilà déjà de retour, fripon!”. Comes in useful all the time.
Or another time, I was taught some basic Russian with audio and slides, and I can remember the (terrifying) teacher running through simple sentences like koshka govorit (=the cat says) and making us solemnly repeat after the tape “Miaouw Miaouw Miaouw”. Thinking back, I wonder if this was his idea of a joke.
But the point of any sort of learning in school is the lesson in learning itself: you can’t avoid some elements of rote learning and just sticking with it in languages, and understanding a bit about how any language works, and how languages vary one from another, does give you more insight into things you might otherwise take for granted.
