Should I ever have kids, I will definitely have them learn Spanish from an early age. Close friends of our family had their three daughters in an English/Spanish bilingual school (public, this is in San Francisco) and all of them are completely fluent in Spanish now. The parents are British and not in the slightest bit Latino, they just thought it would be an advantage for their kids, and it has been. I would like to do something similar with my hypothetical kids.
Beyond that, it would depend on the kid’s interests and what’s available in the area. Of course, I could always teach them Bulgarian. Seriously, who DOESN’T want to learn Bulgarian? It’s the most useful language evar!
I used to be able to read and write about 5 or 6000 characters. My hand writing now is terrible (I use a PC to write instead of by hand). My reading has slipped a lot as well. If I absolutely have to, I can wade through a newspaper article, business piece or a contract.
Chinese is different from most languages is that you really have to work at it. Few people reach any kind of spoken fluency just by picking it up. To get good Chinese, you have to master at least 5 thousand characters. And that takes a long time for most people.
My boy’s school is teaching him French. I really wish they’d teach him a language he’ll find useful, like Spanish. Plus, I suspect the selection of French was made for the sake of the school’s reputation, because it sounds snootier, than for any practical reason.
No offense to French speakers intended, but I can’t see who the heck my son will speak French to around here, where there’s a plethora of Spanish speakers everywhere in this state.
ETA: I am glad that my son is learning a second language, any language. That’s a good thing. I’m just quibbling about the choice they selected.
squeegee, if I was in the States, my choice for a second language to start learning would be Spanish, hands down. In California, even more so, with Mandarin or Japanese as a third language… but only after Spanish.
When I was in school I slept through French class because I figured it would never be useful.
One of the more stupid moves in my life. Somehow it ends up that I use it every day. It’s probably a long shot that your son will end up in West Africa, but it’s there. At the very least, he will never have a hard time if he decides to join the Peace Corps.
Seven year old son is pretty much 100% bi-lingual in English and Spanish. Since the age of 4 or 5 he’s been saying he wants to learn French but I haven’t been able to find a class for his age group - so he may end up waiting until 4th grade when it is mandatory at school. It is a missed opportunity because the older he gets the more difficult language acquisition becomes. French would the obvious third language for him, but I would also consider Hebrew or Mandarin if the opportunity arose.
I work for a decent sized Indian company. Here in the USA learning an Indian language is probably useless, for the most part, as my overwhelmingly Indian colleagues speak nothing but English, all of the time. Sometimes it’s very heavily accented, but it’s still English nonetheless. This is because they all come from different parts of the country and speak different languages or dialects, so it’s more practical for them to speak English with one another. Might be different if you were to go to a specific place in India.
To answer the OP, living in Florida, and in a community with people of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican and Colombian ancestry, learning Spanish would be useful.
Given that their mother is a native Thai speaker (she and my daughter are planning to take a trip to Thailand this summer), I hope that they eventually learn some Thai. This will also give them a leg up if they ever decide to speak another tonal language, such as Cantonese or Mandarin.
Since they both lived in Switzerland and Germany when they were small I won’t be surprised if they want to learn German or French.
I would try and find out if the kids have any particular languge or culture they are interested in and encourage that. Foreign language in this country is taught so poorly that shoving a particular langugage down a kids throat makes it harder.
American here. A variety of science and engineering professionals I know like Russian because the Russians and other Soviets have such a rich technical environment - these people put the first man into space after all - and as a sad consequence of the evolution of their economic system many Russian speakers are attractive colleagues for people hiring or looking for partners. I learned Russian and quite enjoyed it. One odd experience - a man visiting New York City from Russia was riding the subway and asked me for help. He wanted to get off at Roosevelt and didn’t know what the sign would look like, so he asked me to tell him when we got to Roosevelt. He had “Roosevelt” written on a scrap of paper, but not in English; it was sounded out in Cyrillic characters. It looked like “Pycub3nt”, more or less. And he didn’t say “Roosevelt”, he showed me the paper. I presume somebody wrote the note for him to read aloud, and he got muddled about it. Anyway, I was the first person he asked, and he just happened to get lucky. For a minute or two, he probably figured most Americans spoke Russian.
>For the sake of Californians, I offer an example. “Au jus” sounds like “O joo.” It does not sound like “ohn juice.”
Another useful tip. “Rheims”, a region of France, isn’t pronounced “Reems”. It’s pronounced “ghghGHghgh”, but the “gh” is silent.
