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Comment by learc83 | Hacker News Reader

A word of advice. Stop and think about your tone before you write.

To answer your post:

This has nothing to do with excuses or perceived difficulty. It has everything to do with cost benefit analysis. When forcing a group of students to learn a language, usefulness vs difficulty is a valid concern.

The State Department estimates that it takes only around 600 hours of classroom instruction to learn Spanish, but 2200 hours for Mandarin (for a native English speaker). They also recommend that half of the hours learning Mandarin occur in country.

30 minutes a day for 13 years of school won't provide enough instruction for these kids to become proficient, but it could provide enough to become proficient in 2 category 1 languages.

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I did stop and thought about the tone. There were more comments (quite) similar to yours, so it was more at random that reply was to your comment.

Usefulness? Ability to communicate with more than 1.7 * 10^9 people is not enough for you? Also once you know Mandarin learning Japanese is much simpler.

... for simplicity I will assume 364 days/year 0.5 * 364 * 13 = 182 * 13 = 2356, which is more than those 2200.

It is generally advised to learn language in place where it is being used on day to day basis, no matter what language you are using.

>... for simplicity I will assume 364 days/year 0.5 * 364 * 13 = 182 * 13 = 2356, which is more than those 2200

In Most of places in the United States kids only go to school for 180 days per year.

>Usefulness? Ability to communicate with more than 1.7 * 10^9 people is not enough for you?

Where did you get 1.7 billion from, that's way too high.

Usefulness is relative. If I can communicate with a billion people on the other side of the world, is that more useful than being able to communicate with a few hundred million people whom I'm much more likely to contact?

>It is generally advised to learn language in place where it is being used on day to day basis, no matter what language you are using.

Yes, it makes it easier for all languages. But for category III languages, it is nearly impossible to become proficient without spending time in country.

>Also once you know Mandarin learning Japanese is much simpler.

Apart from a bit of the writing system, Chinese and Japanese are not similar. They are from 2 completely different language families. They are more distantly related than English and Russian.

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