Since when was there a law stating you HAD to communicate with anybody? If adults choose not to learn other languages that’s their business or disadvantage, as the case may be.
The fact remains that your assertion of a contradiction just doesn’t hold water.
Isabelle my two cents is for Spanish. How I rue my decision to take french in High School. I could have taken spanish and today still have at least a basic vocab since there are a lot of opportunities to use it in the US.
I finally made it to France about 20 years after my last french class and struggled with remembering about a dozen words . it was pathetic.
second point is that your son will be a much better student of foreign languages if he takes one now. So, it’s kinda moot in a few years he may have an interest in something like Chinese and drop the spanish or french. The current studies won’t be wasted time.
again IMHO learning Spanish is a great choice because he’ll be able to use it reasonably regularly.
Any of the latin based languages is useful. I prefer Italian, but then again I travel to europe, so it’s more useful to me to learn it and German.
Biases aside, I’d simply point out that if your child learns a second language then they are more employable. Not simply as a translator either. Having the ability to communicate (at least basically) in another language is a damn useful skill. Especially for technology related jobs or other jobs requiring international travel. It opens up entire new countries of employment opportunities and fast tracks people for better paying jobs, precisely because they can communicate more effectively with a wider group of clients and employers.
Consider it from that perspective.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
There are dozens of cases where this isn’t true. What if you get into a car accident with someone? What if you need to conduct business with them? What if you teach their children and you need to communicate with them about their children’s needs? Have you ever held a parent teacher conference where the parents don’t speak English?
I lived next door to someone who didn’t speak English for four years. Of course I had to communicate with her. This was especially imperative as she was often late getting home from work and her eight year old daughter was left stranded at least once a week in our hallway with no key to their apartment and no one to watch over her.
I think that a second language should be compulsory much earlier than High School, though if they haven’t got it by then, I think it’d certainly still be useful. I studied Bahasa Indonesia for a good ten years, and Thai for three, and while I have moved to a place where they’re not terribly useful in terms of my career, the extent to which learning two related but different languages other than English broadened my thinking is immeasurable. If I had leisure to do so, I’d like to learn sanskrit next, since it’s a shared root for so many languages, including, partially, for both of the languages I already studied. While obviously there are entirely practical reasons to study a language, I’d probably recommend it whether or not you were going to have a use for that language later, simply because in my experience it is likely to teach you new ways to think.
There are cultural concepts that are expressed linguistically that in my opinion are difficult to grasp without learning the language itself. I think that studying foreign languages can improve one’s ability to think laterally and to think from different cultural points of view. I don’t think I’m expressing the scope of how I felt learning foreign languages changed me particularly well. It was not simply a matter of having attained more knowledge, i.e. vocabulary and grammar, it was a matter of having attained different paths of thinking that remained open when thinking in English, although they came about through comprehending one of the other languages.
I agree there is a benefit to being familiar with more than one language. I think such a familarity would be better served by a course in comparative linguistics than a foreign language, but I don’t expect you find a lot of people willing to teach that in a public school setting.
I also think highschool is way too late to try to require people to start trying to rewire their language processing centers. Add in the fact that the people in highschool are teenagers, are unlikely to be motivated to learn or retain a foreign language, and you’ve just compounded the problem. You get a lot of warm bodies in seats trying to fill a credit requirement, nothing more.
OTOH, I doubt I would have taken a foreign language in HS if it wasn’t mandatory, even if they had offered one that would have interested me, simply because there were other courses available that interested me more. I dunno, I find the whole idea of mandatory structured public education pretty hokey, but I developed a hostility to the institution pretty early on…
Requiring a foreign language is no greater a waste of a child’s time than half of the other things they require, so, meh…
Isabelle:
“We have a relativly new phone number here at work. The old number apparently belonged to a dr. I get calls all the time from people THAT CAN"T SPEAK ENGLISH!!! They don’t even know enough English to understand they have the wrong number when I explain it over and over again!”
Again, Isabelle:
“I did learn some Spanish…enough to often get me by in a pinch.”
Apparently not. If you cant explain in Spanish that they have the wrong number you have clearly overestimated your facility.
As a German tutor in the U.S., I see this all the time. I regularly get students who tell me they are “intermediate” and can’t even say the most basic things.
A short trip to Europe will give you the opportunity to meet tons of people who can speak two or three or more languages. Name for me a non-developing country that values foreign language education as little as the U.S. does.
RK