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Comment by ique | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting article. Can't help but to think about the differences in countries educational systems. I'm Swedish, here we start studying English in second (numbers and such) and third grade (start with words and grammar). And then study it all the way up and through high-school.

Pretty much every Swede of a younger generation is fluent in English. Almost all people also spend several years in grades 6-9 studying a third language (Spanish, French or German is required to take if you don't have a learning disability, then you focus on English with that time instead).

It's easy for practically every country in the world to offer education in English because you can't live in a modern world without English. But it seems hard to motivate English speaking nations to study other languages. What languages would be of enough importance for, for instance, Americans, to make it obligatory education?

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It's not much of a perceived advantage to study a 2nd language as an American, because no matter where you go there's probably someone who speaks English, and chances are that wherever you go few if any speak the 2nd language that you studied as a kid.

There's small payoff for an American to study a 2nd language. There's large payoff for people from non-English speaking countries to study English; it must be true or perceived as such, because it's such a widespread practice. We already know English.

I'd like to see Spanish mandatory or commonly studied to fluency, given the demographic changes in America. It might also encourage us to have closer relations with Central and South America. I doubt it will happen.

Note: I understand there are many benefits to studying any 2nd language.

> There's small payoff for an American to study a 2nd language.

If you are only looking at economic payoff.

I've been to countries/cultures (Latin America) where I feel that if you don't have a grasp of the language - you can only be a tourist. Reusing cliches but not being able to speak a language - you lack the passport to truly immerse yourself - you'll only be a tourist if you can't speak (to a point) the language.

I'm really looking for an app that will find Spanish texts for me to read that have words that I don't already know (e.g. smart enough to learn what your working vocabulary set is). Since I'm starting out - almost every text will have words I don't know. Anyone know of an app geared towards reading and vocabulary building (and possibly reading material discovery)? Or do we have to build one (it will be a little harder because of the conjugations, m/f variants of words)

I don't have an app, but here's a book that I've been liking:

Easy Spanish Reader: http://www.amazon.com/Easy-Spanish-Reader-William-Tardy/dp/0...

same, with CD: http://www.amazon.com/Easy-Spanish-Reader-CD-ROM-Three-Part/...

It's for beginners. You just read, simple stories. Some words are defined in the margins, some in the glossary, and some you just get from context. I like it a lot.

I think learning a second language in school has enough ancillary benefits to make it mandatory, but there is no language other than English that is so widespread to make that particular langauage dominant. I think that within the limits of the resources, schools should try to offer a few choices and let the students choose.

Sometimes a language will appeal to a student because something they are interested in is heavily tied to that language. A serious student of judo would likely benefit from speaking Japanesse if only to be able to talk with other practitioners. A serious student of Go may be interested a language from a country where that is common such as Japanese or Korean, etc. On the other hand, someone interested in philosophy is likely to benefit from French more than most other languages.

If we absolutely had to pick one, I would focus on Mandarin Chinese. China is a rapidly rising power that is becoming ever more important in the international scene and houses a huge percentage of the world population.

>learning a second language in school has enough ancillary benefits to make it mandatory

Would you include in this those who can't use a first language to any reasonable degree. Or those who already have the main language of the country (English say) as their second language? I'm generally against mandatory subjects in education as it tends not to reflect the vast differences in experience and background, motivation and ability of the students.

I'm generally against mandatory subjects in education as it tends not to reflect the vast differences in experience and background, motivation and ability of the students.

At a higher education level (say College on up) I would be strongly inclined to agree with you. Give the students freedom and they will make the right choices for themselves, and they will be the only ones to live with it if they don't.

At the basic education level (high school and below), this is precisely when society is teaching its children what it needs to continue its culture.

Most students at this age do not have the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about what they should learn, and moreover society has a vested interest in ensuring that its young people meet certain minimums. My argument is that a second language should be one of those minimums, but that the choice of which language should be given (within resource limits) to the student or their family.

To answer your direct questions though, someone who cannot use a first language to any reasonable degree either has a learning disability or has been failed by the education system. In that second case, the education system has failed them and should take extraordinary measures to correct that without lowering the standards (my argument is that a second language should be part of those standards). And for people who are already fluent in a second language, they have already exceeded that requirement.

Aurgh! Your comment is on one hand something I really want to respond to, yet on the other hand difficult for me to respond to well.

> At a higher education level (say College on up) I would be strongly inclined to agree with you. Give the students freedom and they will make the right choices for themselves, and they will be the only ones to live with it if they don't. > At the basic education level (high school and below), this is precisely when society is teaching its children what it needs to continue its culture.

Background: I am in high school.

Anyway, I've come up against this barrier so much and it drives me crazy. Here, like in most American high schools, society isn't teaching us anything. It's teaching us to hate the 'mandatory' subjects, because everyone has to take them, and thus the teachers can't teach it well because 3/4 of their classes are utterly uninterested. To be honest, I despise my world history class. And it's not because it's history - I'm fine with history, in face, I enjoy learning about it. It's because it's mandatory, which means everyone takes it, so in the end, everyone suffers.

With the AP level course system that exists in the USA, you're taking college-level courses in high school. Why should high school students have to suffer any more than college students?

> Most students at this age do not have the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about what they should learn, and moreover society has a vested interest in ensuring that its young people meet certain minimums.

This is even harder to argue with, because of the "most". I guess it's that old argument: would you rather allow the more gifted to excel, or everyone be held at the same level (with that level being slightly higher than had you went with the other option)? And, honestly, it isn't 'society' - society isn't doing anything. It's the school system, a bureaucratized administration incapable of seeing the system from the students perspective and incapable of creating a true institution of learning in which the students who want to learn at a decent rate can.

Ugh, sorry for this rant. It's just been bothering me for the past two years, because high school is so goddamn constrained and mandatory it's angering. Instead of learning, I have to sit through things I already know and listen to incompetent teachers talk about irrelevant topics.

I guess I should add something related to the original topic. I speak two languages fluently, and learned Spanish in high school for four years, then promptly dropped it. Why? Because even though I live in an area with easily 30% Spanish-speakers, I don't ever need to use it. Ever! And if I try to practice it, the Spanish-speakers would just rather speak English, because a lot of them are more comfortable talking to me in English. My point: in almost all places in the USA, other languages are useless. Now, in my own time, outside of school, I've learned some Portuguese, because I play capoeira and my instructor and students learning it along with me speak it all the time. My second point: when you need to, you will learn a language.

You make a lot of interesting points.

It's teaching us to hate the 'mandatory' subjects, because everyone has to take them, and thus the teachers can't teach it well because 3/4 of their classes are utterly uninterested.

I ran into this as well. I was fortunate in having a high school with a high percentage of AP classes and those were much closer to collage classes than high school classes. But remember in college they have mandatory courses too.

If a course in high school is mandatory it means that someone has decided it is beneficial for most of society to understand that subject and I disagree with some of the details, but there is obvious benefit to having an educated society.

One way to at least help alleviate what you are describing is to offer more classes, more AP style classes, develop cooperatives with local community colleges so some students can take classes there instead of at the high school, and to let people test out of classes if they have already mastered the subject.

You can allow the gifted(loaded term, but that is a different topic) to excel while ensuring everyone has every opportunity and incentive to meet the minimums. They are not mutually exclusive.

The sticking point of course is that to do that we would need a lot more resources in the education system than we have now, but I think that as a society we should spend a lot more on education.

My point: in almost all places in the USA, other languages are useless.

I think that is going to far, but I would agree with in the US another language is of limited value. And for an English speaker, you will find a relatively high percentage of people in most other countries speak at least some English.

But, as the original article pointed out, learning a second language helps develop your mind. It can also give you better perspective on another culture.

It is the ancillary benefits that are highly valuable rather than the skill itself for most English speakers.

>But, as the original article pointed out, learning a second language helps develop your mind. It can also give you better perspective on another culture.

I never did Latin at school (my wife did, but I think I know more Latin vocab now than her!) but this can be a good argument for Latin or Greek - except instead of learning about a modern culture you're learning about a relatively ancient one; but crucially (at least in Europe) one that is still having a big impact (particularly Roman/Latin).

>To answer your direct questions though, someone who cannot use a first language to any reasonable degree either has a learning disability or has been failed by the education system.

Or, isn't bothered about learning anything. Without being over manipulative you can't give some one an education unless they are an active participant in that process. Also parenting is a key element.

I still consider that the fix for those who have not been taught or have not learnt a first language well is not to burden the [broken] system and the student with attempting to learn a further additional language.

Minor side point - I see quite a lot of kids who if they make a noise have a dummy stuffed into their mouths. I'm sure you can recover largely from no language practice for the first few years of life but I can't help thinking that most in that situation don't.

Mono-lingual Canadian here with a question for both of you:

What do adolescents in your countries think of learning english?

Most anglophone Canadians start learning french in grade 4, unless their parents put them in an immersion program at a younger age. In Ontario we were required to take French until grade 9 and after that the VAST majority of us stopped because we hated it.

Is it like that with English in other parts of the world? Or is English enough of a prestige language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prestige_%28sociolinguistics%29) that young people enjoy learning it?

In Sweden I wouldn't say that kids enjoy learning it, but everyone sees it as absolutely necessary. It's also used every day because all music, all TV-shows (except some really bad Swedish shows) and all movies are in English.

Since we start so early and never stop until we're 18, everyone just kind of accepts it as something part of life and by the time you're 18 you're perfectly fluent.

I think it's both at the same time. It's something they thrust down your throat in school from an early age and it is hated accordingly. But contrary to some of the other subjects, school is not the only place in which you're confronted with english. There's also games, music, movies, the web, talking to people from other countries and later science. So I think necessity and inevitability has replaced prestige as the dominant motivation over the past 15 or 20 years or so.

It's definitely a prestige language in Scandinavia, remember that most of our pop culture is in English.

In South Africa we have 11, yes, eleven, official languages, with English being one of them.

It's easy for most people who's mother tongue is not English to learn it, as it's everywhere - government, media, advertisements, entertainment, you name it. So it's a necesity, not a status symbol.

It's also interesting to note that English kids generally struggle to pick up a second language, even if they live in a community that speaks another language, just because English is so pervasive, and there's no need for them to pick up a second language. This despite the fact that you have three languages at school, at least up to grade 9.

South Africa's national language is bad English :)

While I do think that everyone should learn English in SA, research has shown that mother tongue education (especially at primary and secondary levels) are extremely important.

There are a lot of parents doing their children a disservice by sending them to English schools.

Finland has two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. Schoolchildren start learning English at grade 3, and Swedish at grade 7. Swedish is widely hated and outright despised, while people just Generally learn English and consider it a part of the education.

Perhaps the difference is that there is so much English culture everywhere that you can't avoid it, while if you are not from near the Swedish-speaking areas, you will never actually use the language.

I'm betting this is going to flip around in the next eighty years or so, and not towards Spanish.

If China's economy doesn't crash and burn (and, if it does, if it does not fail to rise again from the ashes like ours did after the Great Depression), Chinese is likely to become an important trade language. It's a difficult language, but then again - for different reasons - so is English.

I'm placing my bets that within a century, there will be two primary trade languages (Chinese, probably Mandarin but also likely Cantonese), and English. And perhaps, a century or so after that, simply a pidgin of the two.

The way global communications is bringing people closer cognitively will effectively starve out other languages. People will still speak them - likely limited to their local social groups (family, friends, et cetera), but fall to a global trade language (pidgin of English+Chinese) for nearly every other encounter.

In some ways, this may be extremely interesting from a linguistics standpoint: Everyone will speak a common language, but there will be more and more language-isolates, as individual social circles become more insulated from each other by the global trade language.

Interesting. But I doubt it will be that simple. Even if the Chinese will overshadow everything else in a few years, English will stay the dominant language in the western world. Latin limped on far over thousand years after the fall of its empire.

Yes, but French is arguably fading much more quickly. It's easy to overlook where the words lingua franca originally came from.

Not from French. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca)

I can't say much about French. I do know that German is alive and kicking.

You may be right, I'm not so sure. Chinese is difficult, not just because tones (~4 in Mandarin, ~8(?) in Cantonese) are important for meaning, but because you can't easily fake it or guess when you're reading or writing. The written language is character based, so you can't just spell out the sound of a new word, you have to know it. There are structural parts of some characters that can help you guess, but that's it.

So, I think, China is going to have to be almost as powerful in the rest of the world as they are in their own country before people are going to feel it's worth the effort to learn Chinese.

It's hard to be objective about these things as someone who only speaks one language natively (like me), but I suspect that English does have more advantages as an international language than simply being the tongue of the world's biggest economic power.

There are many things about English that are difficult, if not infuriating for those learning it (spellings, irregular declinations, phrasal verbs, etc), but it is also a language that is quite easy to gain a basic grasp of. It has much more simplified grammar than most other European languages, for example, and even if spoken badly it is quite often intelligible.

I had a friend who taught English in Greece, and she used to say that learning English was like trying to hold sand in your hand: cup it lightly and it's easy; try to hold it tightly and it's apt to slip through your fingers.

I'm sure many East Asians would disagree with me on how easy English is though, so maybe I'm being parochial.

I'm posting as a Chinese (second-language) speaker here who grew up speaking English and who has endeavored to maintain a bilingual home in the United States. Amazingly, only just more than half the population of China itself is conversant in Modern Standard Chinese.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

So Chinese still has to gain a lot of use at home before it can gain major use abroad.

Several of the other comments about the importance of network effects in favoring one language rather than another show what a tremendous head start English has as the interlanguage for varied ethnic groups all over the world.

> There's small payoff for an American to study a 2nd language.

Good point - never thought of it like that.

> I'd like to see Spanish mandatory or commonly studied to fluency, given the demographic changes in America.

Really? I'd say going the opposite would have potentially more advantages. Mandarin, Russian, Hindi, Japanese, or Korean - something where you'd be one of the relatively few Americans bilingual in both languages and the country isn't fully bilingual in English speakers seems like it'd be more valuable than something in which quite a few Americans are fluent and bilingual.

Spanish would be of much more use to Americans because there are so many Spanish speakers in America especially in states near the border. I live in a southern state and many conversations here interchange Spanish and English words where best fit when speaking to other bilinguals

Not to mention it would completely reverse the role of immigrant children in the classrooms.

A decade ago (maybe still) there was a debate in California: what's the best way to educate Spanish-speaking kids? Do we start immersing them in English right away? or do we start off in Spanish, and slowly transition them to English?

Meanwhile, I was in High School being taught how important it is to learn a 2nd language, of which the preferred selection is Spanish. High School, especially Jr/Sr years, has got to be one of the worst times to learn a language...

The answer is obvious: (where possible) teach both languages to both kids right from the get-go, which would also have some equalization effect in the schools.

I used to think similarly, but I've been mostly unable to find any real advantages to fluency in difficult foreign languages. NB: I don't want to work for the government or doing outsourcing, the two obvious places to use foreign language skills. So, this is at least partly my own desires, but I think my point hold: I see very slim returns to the time spent learning another language to fluency. Far better to spend that 2-4 thousand hours on programming, math, etc.

I think it's more a lack of opportunity to utilize a second language. If you spend any length of time somewhere where, yes, you can sort of get by with English, but it's not the native language, you really start to want to learn more. In the US, your opportunities are quite limited... Mexico or Quebec are your only major options, and that's a lot of travel for many people. From Padova where I am, on the other hand, I can be in Austria in 4 hours' driving time, Slovenia in 2 hours, Croatia in about 3, or on the other side, France or Switzerland in a bit more than half a day's drive.

The opportunity will come after you've learnt the language. Honestly I live in Italy, and I wish they had spent more time teaching english to me. It's a shame that in north europe most people are fluent in english while here only a few are.

I'm a big fan of bilingualism but if you're living in America and inclined to do business primarily in America, then the advantages of it are not so great next to the prodigious effort required to learn another language. Most Americans study Spanish, but then a) countries and people who speak only Spanish are not typically great economic prospects (compared to, say, Japan or Germany or what have you) and b) supposing one were to study Spanish and use it for one's career, one would be competing with American native speakers of Spanish who probably speak better Spanish than you.

If a country like, e.g., Japan/China/South Korea were a skip over the border instead of a 10+ hour plane ride away, I'd recommend every single person to study Japanese/Chinese/Korean. In Sweden, even if English weren't the lingua franca for Europe, you'd still be close physically and economically to multiple English-speaking countries.

There is one other advantage, being able to read in another language opens up a literary world that is hidden and even a technical world which is difficult to extract with translations.

And one great way to learn a second language is to get a bilingual book, or two copies of your favorite book in two languages :)

I watch TED videos with sub-titles!

I'm from the UK and languages education here is (or at least was when I was at school) horrific. We didn't start learning a second language until secondary school (age 11/12) and the only options available were french and very basic german.

My french teacher couldn't speak french properly - she used to look stuff up in study guides and read it, pretty badly, to us. Much of the focus was on memorising lists of words rather than learning to build sentences etc. I don't think my experience was that unusual.

The argument that native english speakers shouldn't bother learning other languages because everyone else is learning english is common, but ridiculous. We all travel and migrate more than we used to and this trend will presumably increase over time.

Being the odd one out in a group because you only speak english feels like a disability in many places. It's especially embarrassing when the group speaks english to include you thus highlighting the difference even more.

I didn't know languages education was voluntary in the US. I would have assumed that most children, especially those in California, would be required to learn spanish. Maybe some french for those living near the border with french speaking parts of Canada. Correct me if I'm wrong.

It's well established that learning a foreign language is easiest as a child. Perhaps the best way to make a monolingual nation multilingual is to adopt a policy of favouritism in hiring teachers for young children who are bi-lingual.

> I didn't know languages education was voluntary in the US.

It's mandatory, but you get to choose which language to study. Choice is generally either Spanish, French, or German (and sometimes Japanese). Most kids choose Spanish (at least, that's what it seems like).

You take a few years of it before graduating high school.

And, as someone else posted, it's pretty universal that most people forget almost all of it as soon as they've satisified either their high school or else college requirements. I don't have any idea if colleges require foreign language credits or not.

>The argument that native english speakers shouldn't bother learning other languages because everyone else is learning english is common

I'd say that the main argument in Britain is this. That so many lack basic English skills. Thus, any advance in English language abilities that can be gained is going to outweigh any minute slither of ability a pupil might manage to get in some language they never use outside the classroom.

I studied French in High School (from 11) but had already a smattering from family holidays and so realised it was useful and found it fun to some extent. Then age 13 I did a year of Russian (as I was top set for French) which was great as it was a non-European culture and uses cyrillic alphabet. German would however have been more use to me and would have given me exchange trip opportunities.

My problem is that I now live in Wales. The Welsh have this perverse notion that to be properly Welsh you must speak Welsh language; also by self-selection the Welsh language schools cream off a lot of more able pupils making them aspirational for the middle-classes. Welsh medium schools appear to get more funding too. All pupils from 4-16 years have to learn Welsh language in school. Knowing some people who've been through the system confirms for me that this is a complete waste. I have no problem with choosing Welsh for study in high school but forcing those - even with little to no English ability (a lot of Urdu and Bengali first language speakers live in my city) to learn a language that is only _spoken_ by 20% of people in this country...

Gah, I'm ranting. It makes me cross.

tl;dr the Welsh are hobbling their children for reasons of misplaced nationalism with a language only just brought back from the brink of death.

"What languages would be of enough importance for, for instance, Americans, to make it obligatory education?"

My aunt forced her young children to learn conversational Spanish because she was convinced that "they're taking over." It was extremely misguided, but her children actually benefited from it, gaining both a language and some cultural understanding. How many misguided parents actually pull that off?

On a more general note, an internationalization of Americans probably won't occur until a few things happen:

1) The ridiculous taxes+fees on international plane tickets are lifted

2) It becomes en vogue to go to <country or Continent X> for vacation

3) Some famous people move to X and bring reality TV with them

or..

1) America enters a position where it is obviously no longer economically dominant BECAUSE of a lack of worldliness.

2) (1) becomes common knowledge

Until either of those scenarios occur, there's absolutely no reason for Americans to learn another language. Most Americans work and think locally. They're at least 500 miles away from another country, and they're not about to get any closer

Nearly every American has two years of a foreign language in high school, and nearly every college requires two more years. I started Spanish in 7th grade and ended up with 5 years of study. However, I don't use is and as such, I've lost it.

If you're like most Americans, you never really had it. Were you fluent? I've "studied" it in school for 6 years (MS, HS, Univ), and I'm not even close to fluent. I don't think the school system is equipped to do that.

My grammar was advanced, my vocabulary intermediate. I could mostly understand Telemundo and could hold a conversation, but was nowhere near fluent.

Now, I'm not much better off than a first year.

Qué lástima.

I studied German for 4 years in school, and am far from fluent. I can painfully pick out details in a newspaper article, and can usually figure out if people are talking about soccer or food or whatever.

On the other hand, I'm fluent in French, and learned that in France, not in school.

In my experience, school wasn't a very efficient medium for learning languages.

The best (possibly only) way to learn a language on a functional level, is to use it. In my second-year Spanish class in high school, our teacher let us chat during class, so long as we chatted in Spanish and not English. In practice, we talked Spanglish, but nonetheless, that experience made me far better at Spanish than all my other studying before and after. She also taught all of her lessons entirely in Spanish, and required questions be asked in Spanish. While traditional lecturing is not an efficient medium for learning languages, schools can teach language skills very effectively by using alternative methods.

There are also Hawaiian Language Immersion schools available in Hawaii, which I hear very good things about.

I've heard great things about language immersion.

There is an American actress - can't remember her name - she speaks fluent French. I saw her in a French movie and spent half the movie trying to place her face. It turns out that she went to a bilingual school French/English.

Jodie Foster

You're right - that's the one.

I teach German in a (Norwegian) high school, and I think your experience is typical. Most pupils forget everything they have learned as soon as they can after the exams, and only a very very few will go to Germany and make use of it.

And the Germans speak pretty decent English by now, so the payoff is not as great as it was.

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