I mean the whole school I went through kept nailing in our heads how much a foreign language would benefit you. I guess this went under the noses of whoever like teaching kids to balance a checkbook.
In my own experience, if you pick up another language but don’t use it on an at least a semi-regular basis, your skills in it get real rusty real fast.
That’s why it’s a fucking robbery when bilingual parents refuse to teach their kids a second language. Sadly happens a lot in the US with Spanish
Everyone coming up with conspiratorial reasons why this is not the case but it’s much simple than that. It’s not feasible and it’s expensive and the returns aren’t really worth it.
Kids in school have a bunch of other subjects they have to learn besides foreign languages. You can add one or two languages but then at some point you will need to remove other subjects to add more or you need to keep kids in school even more. Both are not really feasible. Then you need to hire teachers for all these new languages which most places won’t do.
Another issue is with the way they teach languages in schools. They expect you to pass a test and not actually learn the language so a lot of the languages will not “stick” as the students lack immersion and practice with that language. I can speak for myself, I have learned two languages besides my native language in school: French and English. I had French since 2nd grade, which is 10 years of French classes and English since 5th grade which is 7 years of English classes. Today I can speak English fluently and like 3 words of French. The difference was that I was always immersed in English, though video games, movies, songs and so on. Not so much with French. I have noticed the same pattern with most of my friends and family members.
Do Americans really not learn any other languages in school? I was under the impression that Spanish lessons were part of the public school system down there. I’m not trying to be rude I’m genuinely asking
They tried teaching Spanish in my elementary school with videos that no one paid attention to. A lot of schools don’t even go that far.
Even for a wealthier state like New York, often thought of as more progressive on stuff like this, the actual requirements are a joke. You can just take a year of a language in 8th grade, pass the local test that meets the curriculum’s criteria, and never touch it again all the way to graduation from high school. At least when I was in school, they would at least try to dissuade you from not continuing it at least one more year to get on track for some sort of special diploma, but you could just opt out if your parents gave the okay to your guidance counselor.
Wow thats honestly pretty crazy to me. To me this is like learning Americans don’t learn geometry in school or something. Language learning should be an essential part of any public education system
Guys should we tell them?
You guys don’t learn geometry either?
Generally not till highschool or college.
So you’re old enough that it doesn’t come easy and generally no one retains much without a lot of effort.
I see thanks for clarifying
We didn’t have any foreign language classes until highschool. We had one month in 5th grade (~11 years old) where we went over some French, Spanish, and German like once a week. By the time I got to highschool, the only options were Spanish and French and I was only able to get into French due to the way they sorted people. That was fine for me, though, since I went to Canada basically every year. These were not, however, required. Some tracks would have things like Ag Sciences and more vocational classes instead. I graduated in the late '90s.
I see. That’s a little surprising to me. I didn’t realize that there is basically no language education there
At least in my time, people going the “college prep” route generally were expected to take two years of a language in highschool. I moved for my final year to a bigger city and more affluent area and they had French, Spanish, Latin, German, and Japanese, though at least some of those were being phased out the next year (I think Japanese may have been phased out the year I moved there, but I had already had 3 years of French and was more focused on music classes as I thought I wanted to be a music teacher).
So in high school languages are just an elective, not a requirement?
In my generation, yes. I doubt that’s changed in the last
51015really?20ohno2530ish years.Edit: Rural Ohio for the first part of my schooling, but not really different from what I could tell in the big city when I moved for my final year.
Okay. I didn’t realize that’s how it worked over there. Thanks for sharing.
If you don’t live in a border state the chances of using a second language enough to really learn it well and become proficient are really small unless you have close family members that speak it.
I took a couple of years of Spanish in high school but live about 12 hours from the Mexican border so I didn’t use it enough to retain much.
Hah!
We can barely teach kids English.
Why?
The answer is Republicans want to fund Christian schools instead, with various variations of extra steps.
Learning a second language might open perspectives and expose children to ideas. The GOP can’t afford such smart kids.
Because education in the USA is a sad joke? Republicans have been hollowing out education for the past 5 decades or so and they worked hard trying to shove fundamentalist christianity in schools and science classes specifically
The US is tucked and can get fucked
When I was a kid in public school, everybody had to take a foreign language, the elective part was that we had a choice as to which language we took. Some chose French. Some chose Spanish. If you came from money, you also had the option to take foreign language courses at participating colleges, which opened up a lot of other options like German, Japanese, and Latin, amongst others.
Has that changed? Or perhaps it’s different in different jurisdictions?
For me personally, I wish Latin had been an option for me, as it’s used extensively in biology and it would have been incredibly helpful. In terms of foreign language courses I’ve taken, I’ve had Spanish, French, and German. I don’t use any of them, except on rare occasion I’ll hear/see something in Spanish that I can vaguely understand the highlights of given enough time. French is pretty much 100% useless in my day to day life. German has been helpful once or twice when watching a movie or listening to music, but otherwise, useless as well.
Keep in mind, however smart you are, most people are not that smart. They’ll never be curious enough or smart enough to learn another language. They don’t have enough exposure to another language to really remember it. It’s basically of waste of their time and educational money. I’m all for teaching these things in schools as electives, but forcing kids to learn multiple different languages? I think we should have universal/single payer healthcare, better medicare/medicaid, free school lunches (and breakfasts), true livable minimum wages, and a myriad other things first.
For me personally, I wish Latin had been an option for me, as it’s used extensively in biology and it would have been incredibly helpful.
My wife and I studied Latin in middle school and high school.
My kids were also able to take Latin in school.
Rather than list all the benefits of learning Latin, I found this, Top 10 Reasons For Studying Latin, which says it better than I could.
I would struggle to translate anything today (although I still know that all of Gaul is divided into three parts), but I know I have benefited from an improved understanding of English grammar and vocabulary.
Fight for Latin in your schools!
In Canada when I was growing up, if you didnt take french immersion, they made you take 1 french language class a year up until grade 10.
They also taught Japanese in my highschool and for senior year if you’d taken them all you could go on a trip to Japan.
Same experience for me. Once in highschool (at an English speaking school) you could choose to branch off from French and learn either Spanish or Japanese (or all the above) if you wanted to.
To be fair it’s tough to be proficient in a language you don’t get to use. In some places in the US, there’s plenty of Spanish speaking people. Other than that not so much.
Although it’s been shown learning another language as a child changes the way your mind works, there’s only so much money in the teaching budget and so many hours in the day. Conservatives want to take both from our kids, for their own ends, so justifying the value of the resources to the student is a perennial challenge.
Given the low proficiency of current grads with their first language, and basic skills like punctuation and spelling, I say we’re a LONG way before we can open a second language in the curriculum.
I know it varies from state to state, but where I’ve lived it’s an “elective” in that you got to pick which language to take of the available options (some schools might only have two choices, others four or even five), but taking a certain number of foreign language credits was required for graduation. If you wanted to go beyond the minimum and had room in your schedule you could.
Same way where I grew up in South Dakota, except each school only taught one language.
It hasn’t really been an economic necessity or cultural priority like other countries.
Most countries who have a population who speak more than one language usually either have a variety of languages spoken within/near the country or rely on ESL speakers to participate in the international workforce.
With English being the current lingua franca, Americans already know the current dominant language. There is really only one major language which is relevant to neighbors, but Americans are usually in the more dominant economic position and there is a cultural aversion to adopting Spanish more.
This is the correct answer.
If you live in SE Asia for example you speak your local language at home but you need to learn English for work.
If you already speak English at home then you already know how to speak English at work.
There is really only one major language which is relevant to neighbors
Spanish
French Canadians would like to have a word with you
They could, if they were economically relevant on the continent. Spanish and Portuguese are far more relevant when interfacing with international trade in the Western Hemisphere.
I pointed out cultural reasons for maintaining a language as well. The USA, as a country, has no current cultural reason to have portions of the country maintain a different language.
Is Canada not economically relevant to the continent? French is an official language of Canada, on equal footing as English. By law anything sold in Canada must include both English and French labelling, software, instruction manuals etc. For parts of the US that trade a lot with Canada, French is at least as economically relevant as Spanish.
Quebec isn’t Canada.
Having to get documents translated is a cost of doing business in Canada. You don’t have to speak both languages to conduct business in Canada.
Quebec is in Canada, it’s also not the only Francophone region in Canada. There are also most certainly major economic zones in Canada where you would need to know French to conduct business. And I assume you could also hire a translator for Spanish, no?
But we’re talking about economic utility. Quebec isn’t Canada; it is much smaller.
In contrast, Mexico has a GDP near Canada as a whole and there isn’t a bilingual legal framework to support business deals. Furthermore, there are more Spanish speaking countries to make deals with in the Western Hemisphere; the closest that French has is Haiti.
Quebec is one of the most economically active regions in Canada. But we can out that aside for now because, again, Quebec is not the only francophone region in Canada. The province I’m from doesn’t even recognize French as an official language, yet there are people who live here who are born here, are educated here, and work here, and die here, all without ever achieving more that basic English proficiency because they are so immersed in the Francophone subculture here.
So if what you are worried about is legal frameworks, then yes, you don’t need your lawyer to be bilingual to do business with Canada in some cases. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that the people who you hope to do business with, and your potential customer base, might not know anything beyond broken English (if they know any English at all).
I think this is a matter of the microeconomics concept of “scarce resources”? It’d be lovely if everyone in the US learns at least Spanish. But school can only teach a limited number of subjects, so in the US where most people don’t need to use anything other than American English, it might be argued that it is more beneficial to spend more time on, say, STEM and history, rather than getting kids to learn Spanish/German/Chinese… I guess there are foreign language electives for that reason? They are still highly valuable after all
Besides, learning and teaching a foreign language is hard lol. China used to (I’ve heard rumors that some places changed, not 100% sure) require mandatory English education from 1st grade elementary… social issues with the English teacher expats aside, the English literacy rate in China still looks like that. There are even multilingual countries in Europe where a good number of people struggle to learn/speak the other national languages so… Even if the US wants to do it, it’s not that straightforward
the idea that learning languages is particularly difficult seems like an anglophone invention to me, english is a completely standard mandatory subject in most of the world and in many countries a lot of kids learn 2 more languages on top of that.
Here in sweden it’s 100% expected that you speak fluent swedish, english, and can make yourself somewhat understood in at least one other language (usually spanish or german, it’s no different than being expected to know maths and science.
I don’t think it’s an impossible task to get students quality language instruction that gets them on track to proficiency in a given foreign language. It’s doable, and people manage to do so all the time. The issue is more that people often don’t see the benefits of it in their daily lives where English suffices for everything, and they most certainly don’t see enough of a benefit that they wouldn’t collectively lose their shit over a proposed property tax hike intended to adequately fund foreign language instruction in the local school district. They’ll gladly fork over a few million dollars in tax money to trick out the football field, but to hire enough new teachers to have kids start learning French in 3rd grade and continue until graduation? Not a chance in hell. Ditto for French-language media purchases for the school library, or any other auxiliary purchases that would facilitate a genuine attempt at teaching and learning a foreign language.
Because school in the US isn’t about creating a well educated population.
The college I graduated from required a year of foreign language for graduation – actually take it and pass, not just test out of it.
OK, that’s not quite true. For some reason, the mathematics department was grouped with the languages for purposes of this requirement, so you could take a year of calculus in lieu of a foreign language if you preferred.
Unless you were a math major. Classes in your major didn’t count, so all math majors absolutely had to take a foreign language.
Unless you were a dual major like math-physics. Dual majors could apply classes from both majors towards distribution requirements. I knew several “math” majors who took just enough physics classes to qualify as a dual major for the express purpose of not having to study a language.
The problem in the US is that besides English, you might be exposed to some Spanish. And not much else unless you seek it out. Or have immigrant friends. Without consistent practice, and some more native speakers, any learned language just rots away.
I learned German for several years in college. It was fun. Went to a local brewhouse with my classmates and talked in simple german while we had dinner, it was a good time. Now, other than my own attempts at saving my whithered skill, and a couple bedtime songs for my kids, I don’t use it.
And even when I was better at it, using it as a tourist in germany was moderately helpful, but it wouldn’t have been nearly enough skill to pass any kind of immigration language proficiency exams.
this makes no sense to me, aside from english we don’t teach languages because it’s immediately useful in daily life, we teach it because it’s good for your brain and it’s good for the entire population to have some ability to use more languages.
Like, how useful do you think spanish is in northern europe? Not very! and yet most people here learn it in school.
And I’m with you. I think learning languages and other cultures is essential to a well rounded individual. I think more languages should be taught. I was just offering up a possible explanation as to why it may not be emphasized here in the US.
A lot of the bullshit here stems from a capitalist utilitarian mindset (ignoring the “fear of melanin” bullshit). If it doesn’t observably generate profit it’s looked down on. It’s why many of the good things we had are being systemically torn down by rich fucks.
