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Comment by zeroCalories | Hacker News Reader

Haha, this seems like something out of a parody. School ranking are kinda nessesary, but are also the biggest victim of Goodheart's law.

If you want to teach more stuff, then how about you just make the day longer? This decision seems less like something that was done for the children, and more for having another checkbox filled while keeping the kids easy to process.

I'm not even convinced that foreign languages are worth teaching at school. Bryan Caplan writes about how in terms if effort/reward, English is the only foreign language that will be worth studying. Personally I spent many years in Spanish and French classes, and I've pretty much forgotten everything. Complete waste of time. Another thing that makes me feel like this is just another checkbox instead of something done for the children.

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I am native from a non-English speaking country. Went to a bilingual school, picked English with A-levels and the works.

Picked French at 15, but really got serious in my early 20s. It has allowed me to re-read a lot of my favourites (Dumas, Verne, Flaubert) in their original language. Also a lot of what I consider cornerstone of modern society in their original versions (Zola, Le Bon).

Had to pick up Portuguese on the job at 25, my previous experience learning languages made it fairly easy to do.

I discovered new songs, movies, plays, and authors with each new language.

Now I speak 4 languages, and I want to get to a fifth in the next decade (some Chinese, Arabic or German).At least to me it has opened my professional and intellectual viewport. It has made me better at abstraction, and while travelling across wide parts of the world, I never feel too disconnected (Americas, large parts of Europe, Africa and Oceania feel very accesible to me.)

I can see how if English is your native tongue the value of learning other languages might seem marginal, but for the rest of the world being at least bilingual is a necessity.

I come from Poland, and before I reached 18 years old I spent about 12 years learning English + full 10 years learning German. I'm completely fluent in English, and I don't remember anything from German, maybe few words here and there. It was 100% waste of my time and I wish I didn't do it.

And I also think the only reason English "stuck" is because it's so damn ubiquitous everywhere, and as a kid and teenager I wanted to be on the internet, to watch foreign films, play foreign games and talk to people abroad - all in English.

So I actually agree with both of you - learning a second language(English) is essential, but if it's a language you don't have much exposure to outside of school, it's a waste of time.

Do you still speak Polish? I've tried and failed a few times trying to learn, have some ancestors from the area.

Now not directed at you, the age ranges in your post did make me do some research. Apparently being a "native speaker" is not so well defined. Learned in childhood yes, but what's the age cutoff? Saw some references to before 5. Any thoughts on this? Seeing as you've lost the German with similar exposure.

Just curious, ignorant single language American here.

I do speak Polish, as does my wife :-)

And I'm not sure - our son is 3 and speaks both English and Polish without any trouble. I myself only started learning English and German at 6 and 8 respectively, which I do think is too late to be trully and completely bilingual - like I'm fluent in English and after years of living in the UK I don't think I have much of an accent left, but I don't think I can ever be as good as someone who learnt English from birth.

> but for the rest of the world being at least bilingual is a necessity.

Sure but the post you’re replying to is stating that he didn’t retain anything from years of foreign language classes in school. Most people learn fluency in additional languages outside of a classroom setting.

I went to a high school that specialised in foreign languages. During my time there I did 6 years of French and German, and 1 year each of Japanese and Spanish. And I can speak none of those. Maybe in German I can just about order a coffee. It's not that I forgot, I just didn't learn anything.

As an adult I have lived in a lot of different countries, including over 12 years in non-English speaking countries. I've been living in my current country for over 5 years, and I speak barely enough to get by in a shop.

Other than my ability to learn languages being non-existent, the issue here is everyone speaks English very well, so it's easy to fall back to it. The other day I went and asked for something in a shop, tried really hard, and the cashier just responded to me in English. In my work everyone speaks English too.

On the other hand, from the time she started speaking, my daughter was fluently able to speak English and her native language. She would come and ask me for something in English, and if I said no, she'd go ask my wife in her language :D

Whenever I pick her up from kindergarden the other kids talk to me in English - they say they learnt by watching YouTube. My colleagues all have similar stories, that they learnt English by watching American TV shows.

I'm guessing what happens is that for a lot of non-native English speakers there is a big advantage to learning English, and once you learn that, your brain figures out how to learn other languages.

But for native English speakers we don't have that, so learning any kind of foreign language is hard. This is probably why countries like Spain or China have low-levels of English speakers (and those that can speak often don't speak well and/or have strong accents), because there isn't much advantage for them to learn it.

> I'm not even convinced that foreign languages are worth teaching at school. Bryan Caplan writes about how in terms if effort/reward, English is the only foreign language that will be worth studying. Personally I spent many years in Spanish and French classes, and I've pretty much forgotten everything. Complete waste of time. Another thing that makes me feel like this is just another checkbox instead of something done for the children.

Myself and I believe all of my cousins took Spanish classes in school. I've hardly used it since then and my Spanish is terrible. However, theirs is much better. I think it largely depends on what type of career you are involved in and whether frequent interaction with regular people is involved. Most of us in the software world only interact with others in professional environments who speak English well.

Also, while I essentially never had a use for the 2 years of spanish I took in high school, it really made my english writing better. Learning spanish made me learn more about the structure of sentences (how to talk about direct/indirect objects, etc.) and learn more latin roots that I never would have consciously been exposed to, which is very useful to me now in the context of figuring out what people are saying when hearing/reading other european languages. It made my grades in english classes go up since my writing was more formally correct and comprehensible. The knowledge transfer felt the same as it does when applying skills learned in the context of one programming language to another programming language.

That's more of an argument for Latin.

Latin grammar feels quite artificial I would say... Maybe it is the nature of dead language that has been locked down. There are things to understand in conventions, but for understanding English Latin is probably not right tool.

Man, taking Spanish in high school blew my mind. I'm a native English speaker with excellent grammar (I missed one question on the reading and writing section of the SAT), but it's all subconscious. I just go with what sounds right when I read aloud in my head, and it's almost always correct. When we started learning about conjugating verbs in Spanish class I was like, we do this in English? I had never thought about it before. I still haven't thought about it, I have no idea what tenses we have in English. But I can speak and write it just fine! Brains are pretty crazy.

Yeah, usage is important. Most people don't need Spanish. It makes you fit to work in low class blue collar jobs. You should spend your time on extracurriculars, or anything else.

Of course, if you're interested in a foreign language, for any reason, I wouldn't discourage you from learning it. I just would not make it a required part of a curriculum.

> It makes you fit to work in low class blue collar jobs.

Go take a tech job in Miami and get back to us…

I dunno, taking a tech job in a red state seems like a giant footgun.

Yes, you are right, it’s simply awful here—perhaps you should stay away and just visit occasionally to pay my taxes for me.

> It makes you fit to work in low class blue collar jobs.

It also allows you to interact with those important people.

The people making my sandwich, cleaning my office, etc. can be more readily interacted with in their preferred language.

They know English better than you know Spanish. Going out of your way to speak to them in Spanish is a silly performance of humility.

Generally I think school is meant to give you the basic foundation and as you progress in life you develop specializations and dive deeper into things you care about. Maybe you don't use everything you learned in school and that's fine, but for the next person it may have exposed them to a subject they found enlightening.

Personally, I do think learning a language is best achieved through immersion rather than brief 45-60min classes. It's not ideal but it still works to a degree.

> not even convinced that foreign languages are worth teaching at school

There is a lot of research showing the benefits of learning and continuing to practice a second language. All the way to dementia risk.

I think the language thing is because it’s part of the meme / romantic idea that learning a foreign language is something everyone should do. I think it’s more for the parents when shopping around for paid schools and to yeah tick a box on some gov list for state schools.

I also regret the time I spent learning Japanese and Italian. There’s limited time to get a lot across to kids. It needs to be thought out. Those hours were completely wasted for me (no side benefits, nothing).

I worry that our local Seattle high school doesn’t offer Chinese while that is what my 1st grader is studying now and needs to communicate with grandma. Yes, he could take Japanese or French, but it seems like a waste unless he plans to use them (well, he might have an advantage in Japanese since kanji is just another form of Chinese character). I was surprised, since my high school in a Seattle suburb offered Chinese in 1991…

It’s worthwhile for getting out of the Anglosphere. I’m currently living in a Spanish speaking country and vastly prefer it.

Maybe this is good for English speaking Europeans or Canadians. Americans that go to public school aren't leaving the country in any real numbers. We're too poor and PTO starved.

Oh is the cost of living to income ratio better in Canada?

Flying to South America because Canada has a couple more long weekends doesn’t make much sense.

And you have to pay tax back to your motherland even though you’re a resident of another country ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Mandarin and Spanish are absolutely worth learning. Anyone who tells you differently is limiting themselves. There is a much larger economy that doesn't speak English.

The two languages I wish I could speak. Spanish is coming along. Mandarin, everything about learning it seems over whelming.

They both would open up huge amounts of the world and make cultures accessible.

International business is done in English. If you find yourself actually needing those languages just find someone that speaks them natively that can also speak English. Spending thousands of hours studying to speak at a child's level isn't useful.

I speak Italian and English, I sadly agree. There is no value in learning other languages, unless the person is interested in doing so.

Maybe Mandarin could be valuable for business?

Not sure if you're arguing against language classes in kindergarten or languages classes in school in general, but I personally had a really good experience with French classes for several years in junior high and high school and one year of Spanish in high school (both schools were public school, too). I don't remember as well as I did back then, of course, but I've by no means "forgotten everything", even though I've been out of high school for over 25 years.

Of all the things I learned up to the end of high school, the foreign languages and all the math are the things I value the most. I still remember French well enough that I could ask for help with various things if I needed to, and I can read it even better than that (well enough to get the gist and some of the detail of something I read, as long as it isn't really heavy with slang). I only had one year of Spanish, but that at least allows me to understand a lot of basic signage in the language and some other reading comprehension. I can watch shows and movies in French and understand some of the lines without the subtitles, and even understand how and in some cases why the subtitles don't match the literal translation.

So if your point was against language education in school in general, I very strongly disagree. I use my foreign language knowledge somewhat regularly, even though I live in the US and have never had a job that required or even used it. There were plenty of kids in my classes who picked it up faster and spoke and read/wrote it far better than me, so I don't think I'm particularly good with foreign languages. This leads me to suspect that you might just not be a languages kind of person, and that's why it's meant so little to you?

English isn't my first language.

I don't think that changes my criticism.

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