Why waste time on a foreign language?
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This is my experience:
* English. Being Swedish, we started with English in 3rd grade, and continued for years. But I suspect that ubiquitous American series and films on Swedish television were way more important than the formal education.
* German. Three years in school, totally wasted. I managed to learn a whole lot of words, and still remember some grammatical rules, but I could not speak German even if my life depended on it.
* French. After university, I decided to take a stab at French. I came up with my own model, that basically consisted in keeping a French novel in my left hand, and a translation in the right.
That worked a lot better than the formal education in German: after a while I could read pretty much anything in French. Unfortunately my method doesn't help at all with speaking and understanding the French. So now I can read Proust, but have trouble ordering a beer in the darned language. I wouldn't recommend that method.
* Spanish. I decided to try another homegrown method with Spanish, basically focusing on listening alone. I listened to Spanish podcasts, radio and TV as much as I could, but not always very actively.
With a little help from some Spanish speaking friends, I am now quite fluent. And it turns out that learning to read Spanish is quite easy, if you already know most of the words by ear. So going from spoken language to written works, but not the other way around (at least not for me).
So, for me, formal language education has indeed largely been a waste of time. But it doesn't have to be. If I could come up with two methods better that the school's, the teachers ought to be able to at least do the same.
Yes, I got practice with conversation partners and two studies abroad. But learning the vocabulary, drilling on the verb tenses, and doing the writing assignments prepared me to start parsing those real-world sentences into words I understood. When I understood 4 out of 5 words, or when I wanted to say something but didn't know a particular word, I would go back to the dictionary for the missing part.
And when I heard a novel tense, like "que TENGAS un buen dia," I'd go back to my professor and ask about it. (That was subjunctive, generally used for hypothetical, doubtful, or wished-for circumstances.)
I think that a combination of classroom and real-world learning is the best way to attain fluency.
Not in this case. There is an elipsis: [te deseo] que tengas un buen día. ([I wish you] that you have a good day).
Edit: OK, I answered too fast. Its use in this case indeed indicates wished-for.
Funny. I'd wager that percentile is true for high school as a whole. People rarely do what's good for them (long term) on their own.
Personally, I think we should be exposing kids to languages much earlier, because they're more capable of learning them and it sets up your brain for not-everything's-one-language pathways, making picking up other ones easier in the future.
Yep. Also, you get a good feel for difficult vs easy sentences.
I only speak English and Spanish, but if someone from Russian or Korea or Bangladesh with minimal English skills showed up to a party, I'd have a much easier time choosing phrases he could understand than folks who didn't know a second language would.
This is partly seeing what it's like to be a beginner in a language, and partly from negotiating around the things you don't know as you learn. If you don't know how to say "it's in the trunk," you say "it's in the back part of the car where you put things, that you open with a key." And the other person will say, "oh, the trunk!"
I suspect that this "ability to rephrase" also helps me explain technical things to non-technical people.
When schools (and universities) moot the idea of phasing out foreign language instruction, I think that's more than a little sad, but in a world of limited resources to be spread across instruction of many subjects and limited genuine interest, it may well be the best choice pragmatically.
Why 'waste time' with languages? I can rattle off a few reasons: the goal isn't to teach only subjects that people enjoy, but to help create productive and responsible citizens of not only our country, but of the entire world. Particularly in this age of globalization, it's increasingly important for people to have knowledge of languages other than English.
Further, the earlier one starts with language education, the better one is at learning _all_ languages later in life. It also makes traveling vastly easier.
It's also usually the case that by learning the language of a people, you begin to have a much better understanding of their culture. Even for people who have no intention of leaving the borders of the United States, it's becoming harder and harder to count on English being spoken in all parts of the country.
Or, shorter: because it makes you a better person. Screw getting into college.
I think in order to create more understanding throughout the entire world we should promote a common, single language. I think we could do more good to set up free English schools throughout the developing world than to take on 2-3 year graduation requirements that are hold-overs from a centuries old idea of education.
And it's not a matter of "third world countries". I'm from Mexiko and started learning german at the age of 4, spanish (at school) at 7, english at 11, and french at 16. Thanks to that I could study Informatics at Germany. I think learning languages gives you another perspective of the world, helps you to communicate with others in different ways (not only in theri native language), helps you to "understand" their logic, etc. Sadly my english is bad and my french worst. But I'm able to read/speak three languages and has helped me in my labor life.
Every first world country teaches English to their students, so who do we focus on? Every quickly developing nation has a culture which encourages English (by her grandparents suggestion, my neice in Beijing is only allowed to speak English when I visit). And by having English language education in developing countries you get past the cultural disparity much quicker. The point here is the difference between missionaries and ex-pats, who helps a country more? If India is an example, the answer is clearly expats.
Language as identity does not explain the failure of Esperanto. Heres the difference between Esperanto and English. In comparison to working through Unua Libro, the benefits of learning English actually exist. If I know Hungarian and Esperanto, I can not find a job as a taxi driver in London no matter how long I spend driving around town. If I know Hindi and English, with a few trips to the library and a couple years of practice I can work at any tech company in the world.
True. Lack of a large and interesting network (as you say) and some remarkable design blunders
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
are what explain the failure of Esperanto. The MAJORITY of people using English worldwide at this moment have no national identity in common with the English. (I have English ancestry, but it is the smallest part of my ancestry, and the majority of the population of the United States is of non-English descent, and yet uses English as the primary language of communication.) People learn English not because English has any particular virtues as a language, and certainly not because they have an identification with Anglo-Saxon heritage, but simply because English is an available tool of communication with unmatched network size. You and I can have great conversations with interesting people from all over the world in English, as we do every day on Hacker News.
In Europe, where there's a smattering of mutually incomprehensible languages in a relatively small geographic space, trade requires the emergence of common languages. Greek, Latin, French and now English have each had their go at that role.
You see the same in many third world countries where there are local language, national languages and international languages (i.e. Punjabi / Hindi / English).
The US is the seat of the modern lingua franca, the world's largest economy and relatively linguistically isolated since most of the continent speaks the same language. As such there's a negligible amount of pressure to learn additional languages and, well, people don't.
I did try and learn french in high school and it turned out to be a waste of my time.
My learning of languages is influenced by 2 themes 1. I learn t each of these 3 languages in environments where they were used extensively practically.
2. I learn t them young
The reason i failed in my efforts of french : were precisely the opposite of the 2 points above.
People around the world learning English have advantages in that most of their peers also want to try the world's most popular language and Hollywood and the Internet have pushed English language media everywhere. English speakers learning a foreign language don't have advantages like that. Americans don't have much help at all learning a foreign language unless they're in one of the Spanish-speaking parts of the USA learning Spanish.
Language acquisition is no more difficult for adults than for children. The myth of easy childhood learning is based on their lack of fear, their willingness to ask for help, and the mountains of free time children have for learning. Adults who want to learn a language usually have to commit to spending several months in a row abroad away from job and family. Few can afford to do so.
I did go abroad and learned my second language as an adult. I liked it but it was very expensive and few will choose to do it.
But studying a language in an American high school is unlikely to benefit anyone much. The youngsters would be much better off saving the four hours a week for two years and spending six weeks in an immersive program in Guatemala or Seoul.
In Norway, kids start learning their second language (English) in First Grade, and their third language (Spanish, French and German are most common) in 7th Grade.
It seems clear to me that this is bound to give better results than starting in 9th Grade, as is common in the US.
Personally, I always found languages hard to learn, and I'm still clumsy in my spoken Norwegian, even after 12 years here. On the other hand, my children are completely bilingual, and became so effortlessly. I think it's a shame that the plasticity of young brains is wasted on a single language, in most cases, and that the task of learning a foreign tongue is delayed until such an age as to maximize the amount of effort required.
So I guess we're in agreement - start them young with a second language when they're better able to assimilate it.
I found the article very short sighted. It seems strange to me that a high school kid can choose not to attend a class. If I had to choose, I would have spent all my time in the CS lab. Forget about French, Latin, philosophy, Italian, History! Now, instead, I regret having studied too much CS and only 2 years of Latin.
I'm a Mexican. All the way through high school I attended English classes. I learned nothing from those classes. Nada.
It wasn't until I started getting into the net and finding that most interesting stuff is written in English, and that I wanted to contribute to Open Source projects and that everybody there speaked English that I started caching up in the language.
I'm now trying to learn Italian using the same method. Skip formal courses and just start watching subtitled Italian movies, reading stuff in Italian and hanging out in Italian speaking IRC rooms.
I wonder if it would be possible to teach a survey course of modern and ancient languages, one that doesn't aim to give fluency in any one language but instead focuses on the different forms which language can take, how various languages are interrelated, how English words are related to Romantic and Germanic roots and enough general proficiency to be able to instantly answer questions like "what language(s) do they speak in Kenya?" It might produce a much better person than four hundred hours spent muddling through memorizing French verbs you'll probably never need.
I don't have a link, but I've heard that there's solid research saying that kids who grow up bilingual have a better basis for abstract concepts. This makes sense to me: having two symbols for everything makes you more aware of the difference between the symbol and the thing it stands for, and having two ways of expressing a concept makes you more open to hother ways of expressing (and perceiving) it.
The main point is, if you start taking your first foreign language in high school, you're only acquiring the single skill of speaking that one language, and I agree that skill may not be utile for you. If you start learning foreign languages earlier (even 2 years earlier!), it has an impact much larger than gaining a single skill. Language is fundamental to human thought, and being able to speak more than one language makes it easier to think in different ways.
I would say that teaching kids a foreign language early on is as important as math skills early on, and programming concepts should probably be given the same treatment. Not that I expect every kid to grow up into a programmer, but that style of thinking is useful.
Second, the same could be said of any subject: most students only learn math because they're forced to, or history because they're forced to, and they're not likely to retain that information after leaving high school unless they have a personal desire to do so. Does that mean we should stop putting kids in math classes, or history classes?
We (the US) should probably focus on making language classes more worthwhile, and putting kids in them when they're younger, like the rest of the world.
Being able to speak Texan, Californian, and a couple of other American dialects gets me as far in the US as knowing German, French, Italian, and Spanish would get me in the EU.