Hacker News Reader

Comment by barredo | Hacker News Reader

If someone starts learning a foreign language at 7th grade something is wrong I think.

Question: Is this the general case for US Education?

US education in regards to foreign language varies widely. I was not presented with the opportunity to take a foreign language until 9th grade (~14 years old), while the district I currently live in offers Spanish education to children age 7.

Edit: This is in Illinois. According to Wikipedia, we have the 7th largest Spanish speaking population in comparison with other states. In my experience, Spanish is the most widely offered secondary language, followed by French. More uncommonly taught languages include Italian and German, and rarer still are Eastern languages such as Japanese. Latin may still be offered in select places, but has been largely phased out.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_in_the_United_States#Cu...

Just adding that I also wasn't exposed to foreign languages in school until the 9th grade. This was in a private school in Chicago, Illinois.

Meant to upvote this. Started learning German in 2nd grade, but that's only because my dad was in the US Army and we were stationed in Germany at the time. Learning a language at that age (and younger) should always be an option for kids as their minds are like sponges at that point. That early exposure always kept me interested in foreign cultures and their languages, too: Japanese, French, and of course, German.

EDIT: Use of simile vs. metaphor for describing the kid brain when it comes to foreign languages. Semantics...

if your mind was literally a sponge, I think you would cease to live.

...it's a fitting metaphor. Meh.

then it's not literal.

I have an idea for a website.

literalpolice.com (I've already bought the domain name)

A community of people who care about preserving the power of the word "literally."

The site maintains a list of websites and people from the community who are assigned to them. When you are assigned to a website, your task is to have an account with as close to a variant as "LiteralPolice" as possible. You simply read the website as you normally do, and whenever someone abuses the word "literally," troll them for it.

With enough community members, we could have literal police on every website!

What do you think?

Check out the literal web log:

http://literally.barelyfitz.com/

Sadly, it seems to be dormant.

I think it's more fun to make emphatic use of "figuratively." As in, "wow, we FIGURATIVELY kicked their butts!"

@AndyKelley - literally the worst idea since bagpipes.

8th grade for me in the 80s, and it was quite possible to go through HS without a foreign language at all.

During the 70's/80's in my home state, 7th grade would be about normal to start learning a foreign language if you were seen as college bound. Otherwise, you had to wait until 9th grade. In my area of the US, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian are the predominant languages taught. The choice of languages goes strictly according to the immigration patterns.

Maybe you were in a public school. Because I was in private schools, I had French in kindergarten and first grade, and then Spanish in fourth and fifth grade. (In between, I was in public schools, you see.) After that, I took French in 7th grade, Spanish in 8th grade, Japanese and French in 9th grade, and then Latin and Classical Greek in what would have been 12th grade, except that I had dropped out in order to go to college.

This was in Texas and then in New Mexico, which has one of the two or three worst public school systems in the US.

This might sound like a "nyah nyah my family is so rich" except that in fourth and fifth grade I was living with my dad in a converted school bus parked on a friend's lawn, while he was fixing cars at the garage on the outskirts of a small town, and then later we upgraded to a trailer in a trailer park. Obviously we weren't the poorest of the poor, since we did have enough money for housing and to send me to a private school, but we were far from rich in US terms.

"Maybe you were in a public school." Through 8th grade I was. For high school I went to a private school with religious affiliations. I'd qualify the private school as antiquated at the time, so my education was better in the public system.

The private schools you attended sound above average. Friends of mine in private schools through elementary (grades K-6) took French - no other options were available.

Out of curiosity, do you still speak any of the languages?

Oops, I lost my longer answer in a power outage. The short answer is that I only speak English and Spanish fluently, and Spanish only because I've been living in Argentina since 2006. I can get by in Portuguese and French under some circumstances, and my Japanese is sufficient to make Japanese people giggle before they talk to me in English.

Far better than I. I can read French and German but my speaking French makes native speakers cringe. German is easier for me but I've lost too much vocabulary to hold a long conversation.

Tolerant native speakers make a huge difference. Backpackers and people from Couchsurfing are great for this. (Also it helps if you can tolerate people cringing when you talk, some.)

Depends on the school. One that I went to in AZ had a Spanish class in 7th grade, which many people took, whereas another on in IN did not have foreign language classes. High schools usually do.

I started to learn my second foreign language in 7th grade, I started to learn the first in 4th grade.

To this day, I cannot play a musical instrument.

I went to a public elementary school in Sacramento, CA, and in 2nd grade we began basic spanish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com