My kids are bilingual (but not biliterate) in English and Japanese. English loses out in the reading and writing stakes.
My elder son is learning Korean but my younger son is not doing any extra languages until he can speak to me freely in English without struggling to express himself. (He’s not verbally orientated, that one…)
I think it depends where you live and what kind of future you envisage for them. (Or they for themselves!)
ANY extra language is a HUGE advantage, simply in the way a multilingual person thinks and the flexibility their brain has.
My incredibly biased response for those living in the U.S.: Spanish!
It has absolutely amazed me what an edge I have in just about everything I do, simply for the fact that I can speak Spanish. I get paid more than English-only speakers, I’m considered a higher priority for promotions, hell it was even considered an asset when I worked at a restaurant. I have a B.A. in Spanish which got me into a customer service job. Not four months into the customer service job it looks like I’ll be moving up within about two months into a business/finance position that normally requires a social science/math degree and a minimum 2 years experience.
I don’t even think I’m particularly good at Spanish. When I started learning in 8th grade there really wasn’t as big of a demand career-wise. I read Spanish literature in college because it was more of a challenge than English, and I love literature. I never gave a second thought to how employable I would be, and I am honestly just flabbergasted at the need and opportunity here.
Considering how fast the Latino population is growing in the US, I think Spanish is the language they would have the most occasion to speak and would probably create the broadest potential for career advantage.
Other than that, I’d encourage Latin. I’ve found it very useful in helping me suss out meanings in Spanish, French and Italian just by knowing the Latin roots.
There is also a demand in the military and in the foreign services like the State Department and in no small degree of private enterprise for anyone who can speak Arabic.
ETA, my oldest kid is taking French right now. I wish she could take Spanish but her school only offers French right now. I guess Spanish will have to wait for high school.
It all depends on the pedagogy. Are you going to enroll your child into an after-school class or send him/her to another country?
Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic would really broaden your child’s horizons, for specialized employment. Spanish, however, in the southwest U.S., is practical for basic jobs.
Spanish is pretty easy to learn. Chinese or Arabic? They’re a lot different.
I agree – for the US, definitely Spanish. Whoever said that Spanish only helps in the service industries is sadly mistaken. In separate experiences as a lawyer, tutor, and counselor, knowing Spanish has helped me immensely and given me opportunities I never would have had.
Since my husband speaks French, Spanish, English, four African languages, and some Mandarin and some Russian, we have some deciding to do. I think he is going to speak to our kids in French, and one of the African languages, I’ll speak to them in Spanish, and we’ll both speak to them in English. Whew! We’ll see how it goes…
I have outright insisted they learn English. Ask 'em, I’ve been very pushy about this
Other than that, we mostly care that they gain some fluency in some third language. Elder Son has chosen to study Spanish, but has also picked up more German than I thought he would on his own. I think that’s great - it may be that neither of those languages will turn out to be the most useful he could learn, but both my husband and I firmly believe that the experience of learning a language is good practice for learning another language later.
I suggest American Sign Language. I know its not really a foreign language, but it is useful. There are millions of Deaf people in the United States. There is always a massive need for interpreters. Also, studies show that students that are bilingual English/ASL learn faster and understand more than a student that has no second language background at all.
Besides, how cool would it be to be able to talk to your friend across the room without making any sound?
I would encourage them to go with whatever strikes their fancy. I had a friend who once was agonizing over whether he should take the seemingly more useful Spanish or his own personal interest, Swedish. I advised him that if he studied Swedish, he would gain more work/job/life opportunities to follow his interests, but if he studied Spanish, he would eventually be expected to use it, something that he didn’t particularly want to do (meaning he would have just taken the language to have something “useful” under his belt).
Plus, for all the talk of Spanish being the second language of the US, it’s really not all that practical. It’s practically a requirement if you want to work in social services or the restaurant industry. It’s helpful if you want to be a teacher. It’s useful if you live in a heavily Hispanic area and no one speaks (or is willing to speak) English. But as far as go-get-em high-power business languages, it’s not quite the key to the kingdom that a lot of people seem to think it is. But it’s definitely good to have a basic knowledge, if for no other reason than to know when someone is cussing you out to your face, thinking that you don’t understand what they’re saying.
Seriously, if I had kids, I’d want them to learn French. It’s useful here in Canada even if you don’t speak or hear it very often (doesn’t matter which way the cereal box or can of beans is turned in the supermarket, for example); and as a Romance language, it can be used as a foundation for learning other Romance languages should the need arise.
Babyrian is already fluent in English in French, and she turns three in a few months. It hasn’t been particularly hard – MrsB speaks nothing but French to the kid, I speak nothing but English. When we moved back to Montreal from New York, the kid went through six weeks of speaking a heckuvalot less, but then her vocabulary exploded. She’s now at the stage where she’ll speak French to Maman, then switch to ask me the same thing in English.
Se habla muy pequino Espanol, so maybe I’ll brush up on that and start using it more. Or maybe some German, since I know enough to order soup and get on the right train.
For those who will go the multilingual road, be aware that experts say that up to 2 to 3 years old your kid might be behind his peers in fluency, then it will all comes together with the added advantage that they will be perfectly fluent in more than one language.
Mighty_Kid speaks English, Spanish and Danish. English is the official language at home, and the one I speak to her. Everybody else speaks Spanish, including daycare. Her dad speaks Danish to her. She was a bit behind on her Danish but after 2 weeks with my husband’s family she is doing just as well.
She’ll go to a bilingual (English-Spanish) school next year. They will teach French some time ahead (it’s required) and we’ll try to keep her Danish on level by frequent visits back to Denmark and a year of education there.
My daughter is bilingual in Mandarin/English but she’s not even 4 yet so the goal is to make sure she keeps with the Mandarin and also learns to read/write. We’ll want the same for my son.
For the third it will depend on where we reside. If we remain in the U.S. it will be Spanish. In the unlikely scenarios we move back to one of our homelands it will be French if Canada and Japanese if Taiwan.
Our future kids will speak English and Spanish at a minimum. I’m aspiring for us to have Spanish and English spoken equally in the home (maybe even more Spanish since they’ll get English everywhere else (except for at the ILs)), but that will depend on me becoming fluent again.
Other languages will probably depend on what they pick up in school or if their dad feels like brushing up on his French.
Spanish, without a doubt. It doesn’t matter if you have increased international job prospects or can travel to cool places if you can’t have a conversation with your neighbors.
If we end up living here, English will be the priority. If we move back to the US (our goal for 2–5 years from now) then Japanese. My sister in law is married to a guy from Ecuador, was married to a Spaniard before that, and I speak enough to BS with them in Spanish too. To speak with that part of the family Spanish is pretty much on the menu.
Assuming our kids pick up those three as part of normal childhood learning, I guess Mandarin would be a good fourth language. Classic characters are the same between Japanese and Chinese, so that’ll be an advantage for the writing part at least. Modern simplified forms are different, but not so much so that you can’t learn to read them relatively easily if you know one set already. There’s a lot of loan vocabulary too, though not much of it is from modern forms of Mandarin.
From a purely monetary perspecitive, I’d consider it as a problem of supply and demand. There’s great demand for Spanish speakers, but no shortage of Americans who can speak both Spanish and English, so there’s not a lot of monetary reward in learning Spanish. There’s not enough demand for little-spoken languages like Kickapoo to make it worthwhile unless you’re a professional linguist.
I estimate that the most important languages for world commerce are, in rough order, English, Mandarin, Spanish, German, Japanese, Malay, Russian, Arabic, French, Portuguese, and Hindi/Urdu. Most of these are well represented among U.S. residents who also speak good English. But there are only 58,000 speakes of Malay in the United States, compared to at least 400,000 for each of the others that I listed. Various dialects of Malay are official in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. Japanese at 477,000 U.S. speakers is also underrepresented compared to its importance in world trade. Numbers for speakers from the MLA: http://www.mla.org/map_data_langlist&mode=lang_tops
On the other hand, I’ve never taken money into consideration when deciding what languages to study myself. My favorites are Old Norse and Latin, neither of which ever earned me a penny, but both have brought me much enjoyment.
