I beg your pardon, but yes you did. Here’s the entire sentence you typed:
But if you simply misspoke I withdraw my question.
>> Say Isabelle, would you mind posting why you think Spanish is “the easiest to learn”?
I do not interpret her post that way. She said it would make sense in Florida and it makes sense to me too as there are many Spanish-speaking people there.
Knowledge of a language is like any other knowledge. You can succeed in life without knowing pretty much any specific piece of knowledge but you cannot succeed if your knowledge is very limited in all respects. Anyone who has succeeded has tons of knowledge he has acquired over countless hours. Whatever knowledge you have that is a tool at your disposal. If you can speak French that is a tool you have. One more. If you do not speak any foreign language that is a tool you lack. You can get by in life without that tool but you can barely get by with no tools. Math and algebra are similar tools. If you can use them proficiently they will com in handy and you will find uses for them. If you cannot then you will just never know what you are missing.
You can find people who will resolve any specific problem you have (for a price) but, in order to make money in life you need to have skills which will allow you to earn money solving other people’s problems. A language is a wonderful tool in that you can learn it as a child with little effort and it gives you a clear advantage over those who don’t have it.
You can have acquired a second language by age 12 with little effort and you have acquired a huge advantage for the rest of your life. people who have to learn the same as adults will have to invest the equivalent effort to getting a college education.
Isabelle: I see you’re still missing the point of my question. The reason I asked you that particular question was to see if you had any actual knowledge on what the official language of the United States of America is. I already know the answer. It’s: There isn’t one.
I’m not going to touch the comment about “easiest to learn” as you might’ve merely considered that to mean that there are more opportunities to learn it rather than that it is easier to learn as far as difficulty in actually picking up the language skills.
I am sorry. I was having random thoughts at one time and did not write my questions in the way I wish them to have been received. I beg your pardon.
Random thought shoiuld have read…I guess being In Florida Spanish would be the first choice I should take but I do not know this for a fact.
My first Question should have been does anyone have a suggestion for the best language (meaning the easiest one for my son to learn at his age). Also if you could include the most beneficial for him as an adult.
I do not know which language is the easiest to learn although a couple people have mentioned their choices. My first guess for Spanish was because of the area I live in. I by no means am saying that is the easiest.
And a short time later the Mexicans will realize that there is no future in working at Labor-Ready and sending money back home, or at least they’ll eventually move up the economic ladder enough to interact with people who won’t bend over backwards to speak their language, and it’ll slowly fade away. Whether you like it or not, English is the language of commerce across the US, and internationally.
There’s no “best language”, of course. Or more exactly, the “best language” would be the language you’re the most interested in for whatever reason, since you would be much more motivated.
Anyway, spanish might be a good choice (all other things being equal) for your son. Since you pointed out that there are a lot of spanish speakers in your area (and more generally in the US), not only it could be more useful in his everyday life but also he could actually practice it, which is by far the best way to actually learn a language. And indeed, spanish is rather simple, since he’s essentially always pronounced the way it’s written (contrarily to english and french), doesn’t have too complicated conjugations (contrarily to french), doesn’t have declinations (contrarily to german), is written in latin alphabet, etc…Beside, the whole of latin america (excepted for Brazil, of course) would be open to him.
As for which language would the more useful for him in adulthood, there’s no way to guess. It depends entirely on what he will choose to do (and also on how the world could evolve. For instance, being able to speak Mandarin could be more and more useful professionnally in the future). You can’t even state that it’s more useful from a professionnal point of view to learn a rather widespread language. For instance, speaking a quite commonly used language, like french, might be required more often, but on the other hand there will french speakers on every street corner. But knowing a rather rare language (say finnish), though I might seldom be required, mean that you’ll be one of the very rare qualified person for a given position (look at the recent example of the american government searching desperatly arabic speakers…and arabic isn’t a rare language at all).
Actually, I would suspect that the best course of action should be to let your son choose the language he finds the most attractive, whatever his reasons could be. And anyway, if he shows enough interest in any foreign language to become fluent in it, he will find ways to use this skill if he wants to. You’re question is akin to asking “should my son learn how to repair cars or how to repair computers? What will be the easiest and the most useful in his future life?” How could we know? How could you know?
Once you learn your first foreign language… learning others becomes relatively easier. New languages and travel broadens the mind… welcome to the global village.
Just about every Brazilian that matters knows a tad of english… you americans could make an effort to learn english and other languages more.
Absolutely! To be honest, I think a foreign language requirement is much more important than an English requirement. I learned a lot more from studying German grammar than from reading books about talking bunnies.
My high school had a year foreign language requirement (and ESL could fit this requirement, if I recall correctly). In general, I’d say it was a good idea. It makes people use their minds differently from other disciplines. It was odd how people chose, though. The majority choice was Spanish, because it was seen (rightly or wrongly) as “easy”. Then French was the next most popular. German was the least popular choice, being seen as “hardest” for some reason. I took German because of the choices available, it seemed the best idea for my planned future in life sciences. Oddly enough, I’ve had more need to use German on the job than the other two high-school choices, although I would have liked Japanese to have been available, in retrospect.
I’m a little boggled, here. For one thing, I’ve never heard of a high school or college that didn’t give you a list of requirements for graduation before you ever made out your first class schedule. I find it incredible that your son didn’t already know good and well that he had to take two years of foreign language.
And frankly, it’s not like having to manage a D in Spanish is such a horrible pressure. High school language classes move at a pretty damn slow pace. He’ll have to get off his ass and do a little work, but he won’t have to work that hard to pass. It’s no more pressure than the other classes you have to pass in your last two years to graduate. You know, like English your junior and senior years. If he fails them, he’s in deep shit, but I don’t see you grumping about that pressure.
And finally, what’s this about you having a cushion? Near as I can tell, you’re not the student here, so it’s not your cushion. It’s his cushion, and if he wants to dispense with it, that’s his right. He’s nearly an adult, and he gets to live with any consequences of the decision he made. Trust me, he’ll be fine.
If you just try and skate by and get good grades, 2 years of a foreign language class won’t be too helpful, but if you have a decent teacher and you actually apply yourself, and try to actually use the language you are learning, 2 years can definitely be enough to communicate quite well. I know I certainly learned enough vocabulary, grammar, etc. to communicate fairly well in Spanish from just one year, but I’ve forgotten a lot of it because I wasn’t really interested in learning the language, even though I was continuously exposed to it by some friends (and that’s probably why I still understand as much as I do). If I had two years, and kept the info fresh in my mind, I bet I’d be pretty fluent.
It would definitely benefit someone if they were to move to a country such as the US, where a large number of the locals get all pissy if you don’t speak their language when you are here.
So people who move to America shouldn’t have to learn English but people who already live in America should have to learn a foreign language? Don’t you see a little contradiction here?
Immigrants are not the only ones with scant free time. Like most Americans, I, too work my ass off. I’ll be darned if I’m going to devote that time to picking up another language because a small minority voluntarily moved here without full fluency in the dominant language.
I do agree that the only way to learn a foreign language is to either learn in early or learn it by immersion. Giving most a high schoolers a period a day of French for a year or two isn’t going to help them very much at all.
If you plan to immgrate to America you should do Americans the common courtesy of learning their language before you move.
Amen.
I took 5 semesters of Russian at college / university - worked out to about an hour, 4 days a week. While I am by no means fluent, I can certainly get by ok. I sure wish I had grown up in a country where learning a second language had been required starting in grade school.
Just my personal experience of course, but I found French to be considerably more difficult than Russian (I am a native English speaker). French has many irregular verbs and I found the pronounciation difficult.
The Russian (Cyrilic) alphabet was easy to pick up and by being in a different script, there was no tendency to fall into the trap of associating English rules with a new language.
Russian is useful all over Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and as I took it right after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, there was ample opportunity to see it be useful in my lifetime.
In Florida, Spanish would be easier to practice. If I had to pick from a small list I would say: French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese.
Of course nowhere in my posts do I say anything about Americans having to learn a new language to deal with immigrants, but nice try.
Again, please point out where I said you’d have to learn a new language to deal with immigrants. I did say however that “…even if they learn the language they will likely have an accent, which someone on the phone, or even in person, might find hard to understand.” Would you like to make accent reduction part of your immigration plan too?
You want to talk contradictions, do you? So in the first place the only way to learn a foreign language is by immersion, but in your view the only way to get immersion is if you first learn a foreign language.
Interesting, I take it your ancestors spoke fluent <insert Native American language here> before moving to America?
The position of the school board is that CHILDREN should learn a foreign language for two years, which is, frankly, just common sense. A well rounded education includes instruction in other languages. If you will refer to their curriculum you will doubtlessly find that they also insist on all children learning English in pretty much every year - immigrants, too.
On the other hand, nobody here is arguing that ADULTS should be forced to learn anything. So, in fact, there is absolutely no contradiction at all.
Isabelle, on the practical side, I’d say go with Spanish, as you are aware it provides the more frequent opportunities to practice and use in the area, thus the return-on-investment will be more immediate. However, he may want to factor in whether he’s going to concentrate on a particular cuisine – if he seeks to become a French haute-cuisine chef, he may well want French, as he would have to put in quite a bit of an apprenticeship under real Frenchmen (even though the kitchen staff probably will still be South American…)
Amethyst Autumn, you are arguing a topic that is NOT the primary topic of the thread. But then a gain a lot of people here have made the same mistake. So let’s just be clear on this: school boards can institute mandatory-second-language requirements just because “it’s good for you”, with absolutely no reference to accommodating immigrants. Isabelle’s primary question in the OP, as to whether that is fair IRT to utility to the students, would apply just as well if the school were in the middle of North Dakota and the requirement could be met by two years of Icelandic. Or if the math requirement mandated at least 1 year of symbolic logic.
Do I understand correctly, that the school sorta “sprung” the switch from elective to required on the students in the middle of their course stream? Because if so, then yeah, that’s bad curriculum planning.
Learning another language forces one to really learn English as well. You can’t understand grammar in Spanish or Japanese until you first understand it in English. Forcing kids to learn another language makes them more articulate and fluent in their own language. We need to challenge kids more than we do in school. Other countries start mandating foreign languages in elementary school and kids have no problem handling it. The younger the better, I say. American kids are too lazy and coddled IMO. They need a tougher curriculum, more homework and fewer days off. We also need to quit worrying about their self-esteem. Fuck their self-esteem. They either become contributers to society or they don’t. their self-esteem is of no use to anybody. Anyway, self-esteem is a dependant variable. It comes as a result of genuine accomplishment not from artificial, prattling compliments and lowered expectations.