My high school offers French, Spanish and sometimes German. When the last German teacher retired, he was replaced by a part-timer. Enrollment in German has been dropping for years (no surprise, really. Not a language that is even remotely interesting or necessary in the modern world). French enrollment is more for the social atmosphere of French Club than any need for the language. Despite the efforts of the French Government, unless you are planning on living in Canada, French is a luxury at best. Spanish, OTOH, is essential and growing. I wish we taught Arabic.
I’m just not convinced that taking any further action to teach foreign languages to children is the best use of limited resources in the United States. If you’re born in many European states you’d be severely handicapped if you only knew one language, but in the United States there’s not that kind of need.
“Absolute worst time”? Don’t exaggerate. The mind is still pretty plastic in the teens. It may not be the optimal time for learning languages, but it’s not a * bad * time.
You’re asking and answering the question in the same sentence. Few Americans remember their foreign language instruction, not because they learned at the wrong time, but because they had no need or opportunity to practice that language.
So let’s imagine motivating an eight year old to learn French or German. No one at home speaks it. No one in the neighborhood speaks it. In fact, the nearest people that do speak it are five thousand miles away. Without immersion in the language, classes are just going to be wasted – forgotten as soon as the school year is over.
Yeah, I can’t figure out why the offered German other than they had a German teacher.
But French is still useful in many parts of Africa and Asia- it is quite useful to a traveller. It can also be very useful in some admittedly specialized situations- as a film student it was invaluable since most of the language of cinema is in French. Anyway, most of the French students in my high school were from Vietnam, and used their French skills fairly often.
And once you do learn the language there’s no outlet for using it other than reading, unless the language in question is Spanish, or perhaps French (if near Quebec), or an Asian language.
I never had that from studying German or French. Is English also not your first language?
I had an odd experience stemming from spending my junior year in Germany, where I took my first class in historical linguistics. There’s a term used in linguistics, Metathesis, which refers to two adjacent phonemes swapping positions in a word, over time. Chaucer said brid, we say bird–that’s an example of it. The German word is Metathese, which is obviously amost the same word but pronounced quite differently. After returning to America, I was always prone to stumble over that term, because it had been introduced to me as the German word.
It might be getting worse. I started Spanish in third grade (only my class did it) and in New York when I went to school all junior high students (7 - 9) had a foreign language. In New Jersey my daughter had a foreign language in junior high. When we moved to California, she was a year ahead of her peers, and had to go to the high school when she was in 8th grade to be in a class at her level. Thanks to the cut in number of periods due to Prop 13, my younger daughter just couldn’t fit in a a language and science. She managed to take German in 8th grade, but it was taught in the high school. The German program got killed recently, why I don’t know.
So, here at least language got sacrificed to the tax cutters.
Why, out of all the languages there are, should we teach kids Latin? Icelandic would be more useful than Latin.
My high school only had Spanish and French, and there was only one section of French a day so not many people took it. There was Russian a few years before I went there, but it was not a popular choice. Too bad, since that’s the one I would have picked, but there you go.
I’m all in favor of learning for its own sake and it would be nice if more Americans spoke other languages but English but I think it is kind of a luxury. English is the language of everything from business to aviation and it’s the predominant language on the Internet, which is where a lot of kids spend the majority of their time researching and even socializing. Another language just isn’t something you NEED unless you live in a bilingual place like California and even then you can certainly get by with one.
If we’re going to teach languages, we should focus on those ones that people will be most likely to encounter someday. Spanish is a definite one, and so is American Sign Language, I think. But it’s rare you’re going to run into a situation where you may need to speak French or German unless you actually go to France or Germany or Quebec, and even then there are ample translators. They’re just not international languages anymore. I think Mandarin is going to be more useful than both those languages in the future, but I don’t know of any schools that teach Mandarin.
Not true. While you are unlikely to strike up a conversation with someone or ask for directions in Latin, a language can be more useful than just immediate or proximal communications. Latin is useful because it’s a very highly organized, precise, and logical language. Learning it (at least as a second language) helps you think when you communicate.
English by comparison is highly simplified (even modular) and on its own doesn’t confer any special advantages over other languages (in fact, its simplicity may actually be a handicap, much as Chinese is).
Latin influence is found in most European languages, either directly in the Romance languages --Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese-- or less directly in languages with Latinate characteristics (which is almost all of them, including English, Serbo-Croat, German, Icelandic, etc.). Thus if you speak Latin you will find it correspondingly easier to learn or at least infer meaning from many other languages.
Although English grammar doesn’t follow Latin structure, the majority of words in English are derived from Latin one way or another. That means a more intuitive grasp of the meaning of words and a significantly expanded vocabulary in English.
Latin may even aid, amazingly, with some entirely removed languages. When I was learning Arabic (definitely not a Latinate tongue) I noticed that verb conjugation would come to me surprisingly easily, and that I kept comparing what I was learning to Latin - not to my mothertongue or other languages.
Latin may be dead (well, outside of the Vatican, where it is the national language), but it nonetheless remains remarkably useful. Kids who learn it in school at a young age are very likely to draw significant benefit from it. If not Latin then I would still think at least one other language would be useful – though ideally kids would be taught English, Latin, and a current language.
There is one thing to be said against Latin though: it is difficult.
My high school (in Shagnasty’s town) was considered one of the best public schools in the area, and we didn’t have foreign language as a graduation requirement. Which, honestly, is how I think it should be, as learning a second language is a luxury. There’s no reason to force it on people.
Japan’s pretty much in the same boat as the US, btw. They start English instruction in 7th grade (though there’s pressure to change that to 6th). Like most Americans, a Japanese can go through his life absolutely unhindered by the fact that he only speaks his native language.
The Japanese don’t have the best reputation when it comes to dealing with other cultures. I think America would benefit from having a more worldly, literate and connected voting populace. I think if we travelled more and exhibited more interest in other cultures, we would be able to make better foreign policy decisions. And since the entire world has to live by the our foreign policy decisions, I think we have a duty to humanity to make sure our voters are as capable as they are. Frankly, I wouldn’t want Japan running the world. They arn’t the ones we want to be emulating here.
So if learning a second language is a luxury, what isn’t? I mean, we have to have some requirements, right? Kids go to school for six periods. What do they think they ought to be doing in these six periods that is wasted on foreign language? Even if you think they should increase math and science (something that I personally think comes up way less than foreign language) there are still four more periods to go.
I’m sorry, it dawns on me that might have come off as pretty offensive. In America, Japan has a reputation for being fairly insular and having a sense of cultural superiority (and I’m sure plenty of people say the same to us). I am equally uncomfortable with America (or really any one country) running the world and I didn’t mean that as a direct attack on Japan.
Japan is a bit extreme if you do not speak and read Japanese (or have a good guide), though things have definitely improved in the last decade.
Beijing used to be Putuongha only (and obsessively proud of their superior culture) until they won the rights to host the Olympics, and now they are scrambling to teach everyone English to welcome the hordes of foreigners and put on a god show. A pretty funny about-face for the nationalists.
But in general, almost everywhere you go in the world you are bound to find someone who speaks English as a foreign language. Anglophones, who are born to the world’s lingua franca by default, might find themselves at a disadvantage unless they develop better multilingual skills.
cckerberos, why do you see language acquisition as a luxury? Can you not perceive any advantages at all? Quite aside from exercising the old brain muscle, knowing multiple languages helps overall language skills, broadens your perspective, and gives you the ability not just to communicate in another language and avoid getting lost in foreign environments, but also to absorb information whenever you want (in the age of literacy and multimedia this is especially important).
There also seem to be a number of positive cognitive gains associated with bilingualism.
Much of your ability to absorb languages easily disappears that the age of 4 - 5 IIRC so primary school is already too late. The main benifit I found from learning a language in HS was that it helped a lot in figuring out how languages are constructed which gelped a lot in my understanding of english. I think the end of HS is a good time to teach such concepts.
Luxury doesn’t mean useless. I see foreign language acquisition as a luxury for Americans because I think that most will go throughout their life without the need/opportunity to use one. I can certainly agree that learning a foreign language has many advantages, but I’ve known far too many successful and happy monolingual Americans to believe that it is essential.
I see what you mean, but I think there are many crucial uses for second language acquisition that make it a plausible argument to teach to young kids (and not as an optional luxury).
For example, it seems that learning a second language improves general language skills. That would seem to be a relevant advantage given, for example, the low high school reading skills in the US (the US ranks below most of the advanced European and Asian economies).
Knowing an extra language or two at worst is a valuable cognitive exercise that will improve some of your communications skills, and at best - well, the sky’s the limit I suppose. Multilingualism makes one a better learner, opens more opportunities and usually increases one’s competitive value.
I agree with Abe about Latin. Even my one year of Latin 1, with a C, has helped me tremendously in puzzling out word meanings, identifying roots, deciphering scientific names, etc. But short of immersion, any language instruction is going to fall short. In the U.S., you never have to speak another language. If a European traveled 500 miles, they would encounter 14+ languages. In the U.S., we can travel 3000 and never encounter anything but English. Therefore, foreign languages in this country are a luxury, just like my yardman (who, BTW, I speak to in Spanish. 
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“All the crap I learned in high school”-------
Reminds me of a song somehow.
Most people will NEVER use algebra or plane geometry. They will forget most of their chemistry and physics. English courses? What the hell for? We all learned English by the age of 4 or 5— didn’t we? History? You have to be kidding. High school history is the most watered down PC crap imagineable. And boring too.
What did I get out of high school that has always helped me a little bit in a practical way?----
–Strangely enough my 2 years of Latin and my 2 years of French. The rest of high school was a complete waste of time.
Foreign languages a luxury? I think most of the rest of the curriculum is a luxury.
Admit it you all. High school is “baby sitting time”. You don’t learn crap really.
I think foreign language instruction is the best thing high schools have going for them. Too bad they don’t realize it.
OK—We all have different experiences in life and we all value those experiences differently-----------
So —What did you all get from all the “crap you learned in high school” that was important to YOU?
For me the teaching of English as a course —for Gawd’s sake 4 years in high school of that shit—was a little bit much. Hell —I knew English when I was 4.
I learned to add, subtract, multiply, and divide and fractions when I was 11 years old. Still remember most of it.
There is a very good reason for the fact that in the 1800’s kids left school after the 6th grade-------there wasn’t anything after that educational wise that was of any value for most people. ----------Still true today.
What do I remember from high school algebra, and plane geometry? ------------ Shit poops. Thank Gawd I didn’t overdo math—I would have still more crap to have thankfully forgotten.
I still say that of all the shit poopy couses I took in high school---------those of the most value to me to this day were the foreign language ones.
Luxury my ass.
It’s useful to a traveler going to Africa or Asia, but most Europeans speak enough English to limp along (and some speak it very fluently). And you don’t need to be fluent in French to learn film terminology or Italian to learn to read music. You just learn the terms you need.
That said, I think some of the hesitation to teach younger children a foreign language is that we expect foreigners to learn English. We get impatient with people who don’t speak it fluently enough for us. For example, how many Pit threads have been started about Indian customer-service workers? And how many states have laws making English the official language?
I think we need to understand that America is no longer a sea of white faces with small islands of brown and black and yellow, and the sooner we accept that, the better off we’ll be.
Robin