How come in American classrooms they make another language an elective. Why not teach our kids as many languages possible that way if we go somewhere we will kind of have uper hand?
from Patnou@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 24 Feb 21:05
https://lemmy.world/post/43538097
from Patnou@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 24 Feb 21:05
https://lemmy.world/post/43538097
I mean the whole school I went through kept nailing in our heads how much a foreign language would benefit you. I guess this went under the noses of whoever like teaching kids to balance a checkbook.
#nostupidquestions
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Go on radio.garden and try to find non-english music. My point is it’s wild how much English has become a common language worldwide, even if it’s not the first language
If every state had a different language they’d be more like europeans that have second and third languages as a normal thing. But it’s almost all English, everywhere all the time unless you are near Mexico.
Do you guys not have any language classes in the public school system at all in the US? Not trying to be rude I just dont know how things work there
We do, but like anything else you learn the basics and a few classes won’t make you fluent. You need immersion to get good and if you don’t use it you lose it.
The people that use it are already in a multi language home and took the class because it’s super easy for them. Just about everyone else won’t really have a chance to use it outside of the classroom so everything we learn fades quickly
Because the system is designed to make it so you never leave and you never have the upper hand.
English has 1.5B fluent speakers spread across the entire globe. Hardly an insular language.
This is far more about discrimination - freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services, segregating English speakers from minority speakers, abolishing First Nations language and culture.
Also very important to keep Americans from reading foreign language press.
Sorry, but I really am failing to make the connection between how learning a second language as an optional class leads to “freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services”. You don’t even need to speak English to access those most of the time. In my city, nearly all public services are available in English and Spanish at the minimum, and frequently Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian as well.
American public school kids don’t normally get access to electives until at 6th grade (sometimes not until 8th or 9th grade depending on the state and district). So “optional” in theory is a deliberate effort to delay bilingual learning in practice.
Mono-lingual populations are more easily primed towards hostility against minority speakers. So your senior staff is biased towards English as a primary language when hiring the next generation of public workers. And these workers are increasingly both unable and unwilling to provide services in secondary languages. This creates a natural barrier for any minority speaker from even interacting with public bureaucracies.
Bigger and more egalitarian cities, with large minority-language populations can staff their departments with fluent minority-language speakers. And under more liberal and egalitarian governments, they do. But as the population grows more reactionary, these kinds of skills get drummed out of the bureaucracy.
This isn’t even a new problem in government.
But it has become an increasingly domestic issue, as fascists take command of the bureaucratic core.
Ok so well then all the work is on OUR kids then and not the rest of the worlds kids to learn American? Why is the world so unfair to USA? We are too big of a country, it is unrealistic to learn languages, even one is hard given how rural and unique the American countryside is. The only hope we have is if pickup trucks evolve to be able to speak for us and keep us connected when we finally become unable to learn even a single language.
It hasn’t really been an economic necessity or cultural priority like other countries.
Most countries who have a population who speak more than one language usually either have a variety of languages spoken within/near the country or rely on ESL speakers to participate in the international workforce.
With English being the current lingua franca, Americans already know the current dominant language. There is really only one major language which is relevant to neighbors, but Americans are usually in the more dominant economic position and there is a cultural aversion to adopting Spanish more.
This is the correct answer.
If you live in SE Asia for example you speak your local language at home but you need to learn English for work.
If you already speak English at home then you already know how to speak English at work.
French Canadians would like to have a word with you
They could, if they were economically relevant on the continent. Spanish and Portuguese are far more relevant when interfacing with international trade in the Western Hemisphere.
I pointed out cultural reasons for maintaining a language as well. The USA, as a country, has no current cultural reason to have portions of the country maintain a different language.
Is Canada not economically relevant to the continent? French is an official language of Canada, on equal footing as English. By law anything sold in Canada must include both English and French labelling, software, instruction manuals etc. For parts of the US that trade a lot with Canada, French is at least as economically relevant as Spanish.
Quebec isn’t Canada.
Having to get documents translated is a cost of doing business in Canada. You don’t have to speak both languages to conduct business in Canada.
Quebec is in Canada, it’s also not the only Francophone region in Canada. There are also most certainly major economic zones in Canada where you would need to know French to conduct business. And I assume you could also hire a translator for Spanish, no?
But we’re talking about economic utility. Quebec isn’t Canada; it is much smaller.
In contrast, Mexico has a GDP near Canada as a whole and there isn’t a bilingual legal framework to support business deals. Furthermore, there are more Spanish speaking countries to make deals with in the Western Hemisphere; the closest that French has is Haiti.
Quebec is one of the most economically active regions in Canada. But we can out that aside for now because, again, Quebec is not the only francophone region in Canada. The province I’m from doesn’t even recognize French as an official language, yet there are people who live here who are born here, are educated here, and work here, and die here, all without ever achieving more that basic English proficiency because they are so immersed in the Francophone subculture here.
So if what you are worried about is legal frameworks, then yes, you don’t need your lawyer to be bilingual to do business with Canada in some cases. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that the people who you hope to do business with, and your potential customer base, might not know anything beyond broken English (if they know any English at all).
But if you’re looking at an American choosing a language based on potential job opportunities, Spanish is likely going to offer far more upside than French unless that American has certain ties which would make French more relevant to them. For large parts of the USA, knowing Spanish will be more locally relevant than knowing French.
It isn’t saying that French is a bad language for Americans to learn, but that most of the country would likely see Spanish as more economically useful.
Well I think that would depend, right? If you’re from a region of the States where there’s more economic activity with Mexico, then sure it makes more sense to learn Spanish. But there are also areas in the States where you have comparatively more economic activity with Canada, then it makes more sense to learn French.
Can we at least agree that it makes more sense for an American to learn French than Portuguese, contrary to what was suggested earlier in the conversation?
Because it would upset the racists (republicans)
I’d say because half of america’s goals involve not understanding other cultures and believing whatever nonsense the corporate overlords want to say about them.
I still have to laugh at when american’s went on chinese tiktok to work around the possible bans, and the chinese were all like “wait, you really do have to pay out the nose for an ambulance ride, I thought that was propoganda by our government” meanwhile a lot of american’s were learning half of the horrors of china were extremely overstated or manipulated.
Rednote’s been a fascinating natural experiment in cross cultural communication that we need to repeat at scale
Crazy how quickly the Chinese travel vlogs get demonetized on YouTube. Google execs really do not want you knowing how nice East Asian cities are.
As someone who is Chinese and living in the US, Americans who have not been to China overestimate its shittiness and people who have been to China once or twice overestimate its glamour. Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes. I’ve been to a tea plantation where there were a total of six electric plugs in the entire village and the toilets flushed with a bucket which had to be filled from a pump outside. It’s not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it’s a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US, where at least people usually have electricity and running water.
One of the more notable achievements of the last two decades of Chinese economic improvement has been the degree of urbanization, particularly in the western end of the country. This used to be a point of criticism among western economists (Chinese Ghost Cities being a popular meme during the '00s/'10s). Now we just don’t talk about Chengdu or Lhasa or Lanzhuo at all.
In my experience, having done a little traveling through Appalachia and the northern end of the Gulf Coast, urban migration has solved a lot of the back country issues by hollowing out the country’s interior. If we didn’t build a highway through a chunk of the state, people just stopped living there.
Chinese rural communities have experienced a similar hollowing out, particularly in the 80s and 90s when the prosperity on the coasts fully eclipsed the poverty of the western interior. But because agricultural labor was seen as critical to social stability, the state simply refused to let people leave. The end result was an enormous black market population that became a nightmare to manage. And so the late Deng and Hu governments (and early Xi government - although by then much of the work was done) spent a significant amount of resources and labor back filling rural development. Hu, in particular, was a champion of the rural west thanks to his policy of low taxes and high investment.
This didn’t eliminate the developmental black holes on the Chinese map. But the expansion westward was its own kind of economic revolution. One that culminated in a virtual elimination of the poverty the country had become known for during the Reagan Era.
The difference in approach - demanding people move to the cities rather than demanding public spending move to the country - is a critical point of divergence between American Neoliberal and Chinese Socialist domestic policies.
I do have to agree with you there. Though too much urban migration does come with its own problems. Chief among them that I observe is that it severely depressed wages and lack of work. China is moving through its own sort of gilded age right now with rapid technological advancement and extreme inequality.
For a purportedly socialist country, China lacks a lot of state infrastructure that comes along with that. The USSR guaranteed work and bread, at a minimum (mostly), but in China, a curious sight emerged which I observed in some of the poorer neighbourhoods of Hangzhou: old people pushing around carts of discarded cardboard boxes and tin cans. They weren’t employed as cleaning workers. They were collecting these to sell for their recycling value. And even though the Westerner might laugh at the notion of making a living collecting literal garbage for pennies, it only takes fourteen pennies to make a yuan and ¥5 will buy a bowl of rice, fending off starvation for another twelve hours. Now, homeless people collecting rubbish to sell for scrap does also happen in the US, but the US at least doesn’t claim to be a socialist country.
China has no functional social safety net, government assistance is minimal, and workers are exploited by a ruling class of wealthy elites with minimal interference from the state, in a shockingly similar way to capitalist countries. You cannot even form a real trade union in China, because all big companies are already “unionised” with workers represented by farcically corrupt organisations which work in tandem with the capitalist bosses.
I will give one more example: Coco is a nationwide chain of beverage stalls which sell tea, coffee, and juice drinks. I walked past a location in Shenzhen which was advertising that they were hiring. Their offer of pay: ¥200 a day, for a 10-hour shift, six days a week. In one of the most expensive cities in the country. I took a photo of this but I couldn’t find it to post.
The US doesn’t have guaranteed housing. China does. The major catch is that Chinese guaranteed housing is tied to your municipal “home city” and getting that changed is a pain in the ass. So the homeless people you’ll find in major urban areas are residents who left their rural neighborhoods in pursuit of a better life in the city and fell through the cracks.
That said, the low cost of living in China definitely improves the prospects of even the most desperately poor. What’s more, Chinese policy with respect to “internal migrants” is radically different from the US policy of mass criminalization and imprisonment.
The domestic policy around perpetual family ownership of property is critical to limiting poverty in China in a way very few other countries enjoy.
So when you say
I’m genuinely not clear if you know what you’re talking about.
Shocking to hear they hadn’t filled the position.
Okay, so let me put it this way:
Housing might, in theory, be guaranteed in your home town. This is a strength of China’s system, I grant, and it’s one of the few examples of one of their socialist policies which actually somewhat works. Their national pension scheme is the other thing I can think of that functions decently well.
But it’s certainly no Soviet Union where if you go up to local officials and say “I have no job and I want to work”, they’ll find something for you to do pretty quickly.
Idk why you’re trying to couch this as a hypothetical. Imagine trying to talk about Social Security this way - “oh well maybe in theory…” No, brother, the checks are in the mail.
People really do have family housing that really does exist for real in China.
The Chinese Communist system was not organized under the Soviet model. Absolutely true. Maoism-cum-Dengism is not Lenin With Chinese Characteristics.
Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela also had their own district unique models.
If you go to your local Chinese jobs office, you’ll get a bureaucratic exam that determines your fitness for entry level positions.
23% of the population works in the public sector. That’s roughly 300M people - China Is Hiring.
But the private sector is also hiring, often with salary and benefits that outcompete public jobs. The idea that you need to be a trash picker to earn an income is flat out wrong.
and it’s not like this is at all unique to china, i’m pretty sure all the western countries are seeing the same thing happen just to a lesser degree.
Think of all the small towns in the US, they used to be lively places and now most of them are one step removed from being ghost towns. Same thing has happened here in sweden, the countryside is just a big suburb where everyone commutes to work in a city and barely any businesses survive.
Americans always have the upper hand in other countries by simply speaking English louder and slower until our needs are met.
Back in the renaissance ancient Greek and Latin were needed to study ancient texts, so knowing them was needed for university. These requirements lasted into the 20th century so high schools taught it for college track students. These days they’ll take any language. The methods of teaching and the structural contours of this shape how language learning is thought of to this day
We needed ~“3” levels of language classes to graduate in my school (7th and 8th grade effectively counted as 1 level, so it was really 4 years). You could elect to take extra if you wanted.
In my own experience, if you pick up another language but don’t use it on an at least a semi-regular basis, your skills in it get real rusty real fast.
That’s why it’s a fucking robbery when bilingual parents refuse to teach their kids a second language. Sadly happens a lot in the US with Spanish
Learning a second language takes a lot of time and effort, and I don’t think the US likes either of those things, not the funding required for them.
but that applies to literally all subjects, by this logic the US wouldn’t have any education at all, which clearly isn’t the case even if the education sucks.
I know it varies from state to state, but where I’ve lived it’s an “elective” in that you got to pick which language to take of the available options (some schools might only have two choices, others four or even five), but taking a certain number of foreign language credits was required for graduation. If you wanted to go beyond the minimum and had room in your schedule you could.
Same way where I grew up in South Dakota, except each school only taught one language.
Everyone coming up with conspiratorial reasons why this is not the case but it’s much simple than that. It’s not feasible and it’s expensive and the returns aren’t really worth it.
Kids in school have a bunch of other subjects they have to learn besides foreign languages. You can add one or two languages but then at some point you will need to remove other subjects to add more or you need to keep kids in school even more. Both are not really feasible. Then you need to hire teachers for all these new languages which most places won’t do.
Another issue is with the way they teach languages in schools. They expect you to pass a test and not actually learn the language so a lot of the languages will not “stick” as the students lack immersion and practice with that language. I can speak for myself, I have learned two languages besides my native language in school: French and English. I had French since 2nd grade, which is 10 years of French classes and English since 5th grade which is 7 years of English classes. Today I can speak English fluently and like 3 words of French. The difference was that I was always immersed in English, though video games, movies, songs and so on. Not so much with French. I have noticed the same pattern with most of my friends and family members.
Do Americans really not learn any other languages in school? I was under the impression that Spanish lessons were part of the public school system down there. I’m not trying to be rude I’m genuinely asking
Generally not till highschool or college.
So you’re old enough that it doesn’t come easy and generally no one retains much without a lot of effort.
I see thanks for clarifying
We didn't have any foreign language classes until highschool. We had one month in 5th grade (~11 years old) where we went over some French, Spanish, and German like once a week. By the time I got to highschool, the only options were Spanish and French and I was only able to get into French due to the way they sorted people. That was fine for me, though, since I went to Canada basically every year. These were not, however, required. Some tracks would have things like Ag Sciences and more vocational classes instead. I graduated in the late '90s.
I see. That’s a little surprising to me. I didn’t realize that there is basically no language education there
At least in my time, people going the "college prep" route generally were expected to take two years of a language in highschool. I moved for my final year to a bigger city and more affluent area and they had French, Spanish, Latin, German, and Japanese, though at least some of those were being phased out the next year (I think Japanese may have been phased out the year I moved there, but I had already had 3 years of French and was more focused on music classes as I thought I wanted to be a music teacher).
So in high school languages are just an elective, not a requirement?
In my generation, yes. I doubt that's changed in the last
51015really?20ohno2530ish years.Edit: Rural Ohio for the first part of my schooling, but not really different from what I could tell in the big city when I moved for my final year.
Okay. I didn’t realize that’s how it worked over there. Thanks for sharing.
Glad I could help. I guess the one gotchya here might be if some state has a board of education with more strict requirements, but I doubt that (especially in the era of national standardized tests and teaching to pass those).
They tried teaching Spanish in my elementary school with videos that no one paid attention to. A lot of schools don’t even go that far.
Even for a wealthier state like New York, often thought of as more progressive on stuff like this, the actual requirements are a joke. You can just take a year of a language in 8th grade, pass the local test that meets the curriculum’s criteria, and never touch it again all the way to graduation from high school. At least when I was in school, they would at least try to dissuade you from not continuing it at least one more year to get on track for some sort of special diploma, but you could just opt out if your parents gave the okay to your guidance counselor.
Wow thats honestly pretty crazy to me. To me this is like learning Americans don’t learn geometry in school or something. Language learning should be an essential part of any public education system
Guys should we tell them?
You guys don’t learn geometry either?
Wait…
The problem in the US is that besides English, you might be exposed to some Spanish. And not much else unless you seek it out. Or have immigrant friends. Without consistent practice, and some more native speakers, any learned language just rots away.
I learned German for several years in college. It was fun. Went to a local brewhouse with my classmates and talked in simple german while we had dinner, it was a good time. Now, other than my own attempts at saving my whithered skill, and a couple bedtime songs for my kids, I don’t use it.
And even when I was better at it, using it as a tourist in germany was moderately helpful, but it wouldn’t have been nearly enough skill to pass any kind of immigration language proficiency exams.
this makes no sense to me, aside from english we don’t teach languages because it’s immediately useful in daily life, we teach it because it’s good for your brain and it’s good for the entire population to have some ability to use more languages.
Like, how useful do you think spanish is in northern europe? Not very! and yet most people here learn it in school.
And I’m with you. I think learning languages and other cultures is essential to a well rounded individual. I think more languages should be taught. I was just offering up a possible explanation as to why it may not be emphasized here in the US.
A lot of the bullshit here stems from a capitalist utilitarian mindset (ignoring the “fear of melanin” bullshit). If it doesn’t observably generate profit it’s looked down on. It’s why many of the good things we had are being systemically torn down by rich fucks.
Because school in the US isn’t about creating a well educated population.
I’m 1.5 Gen immigrant to the US and idek Cantonese/Chinese volcabulary outside of basics, like 2nd grade level words, so I’m probably gonna be speaking a weird Canto-glish to my future children, or maybe just English only 🤷♂️
I even struggle to talk to my parents lol
Around me, the only language spoken with any frequency other than English is Spanish. In a half dozen different varieties. Even that wasn’t all that common until, maybe, 10 years ago. About midway through President Trump’s first administration.
Most schools encourage kids to take a language, but they are kinda a use it, or lose it thing. Unless you just happen to be part of a community or household that speaks a language other than English, you are unlikely to need it.
i mean… how often do you think spanish is used in the nordics? and yet a third language is mandatory, and most people pick spanish.
Sure it’s not like most swedes can speak fluent spanish, but it’s also not like they completely forget it. If they go to spain they’ll have a hell of a better chance at being able to talk to people than those who picked german.
A point. However, how far do you need to go to reach an area, that doesn’t speak your native language commonly?
We recently moved a fair distance, not too far as things go here. Roughly 2000 km. English language spoken by almost everyone throughout the entire trip. Plus 15 random languages from tourists and immigrants from around the globe. I could have gone another 2000 km and I still would have had to dig to find a community that had a common language other than english.
I would have had to travel 2000 km the other way to reach an area where a single language other than English was spoken by more than 5% of the population.
Maybe 1000 km, I forget about Creole in Louisiana, though I’m not sure how common that language is in the State. I just remember running across the language frequently while driving trucks in that area for a living.
We are a truly massive nation that largely shares a single language. Most of us, rarely ever leave a 250 km radius from where we were born. Most of us don’t have passports and will never leave the US.
Hell, I’m well traveled. I’ve been to 45 on the 50 States, and in all my travels I’ve only needed another language once. In Larado, TX, which is right on the border with Mexico.
There are small enclaves that speak an alternative language, but they are few and far between.
Would it be to the students benefit to learn a second language, sure. But it’s unlikely that the student would ever use whatever random language they were required to learn. Spanish and perhaps Arabic might occasionally be helpful, but not necessarily, depending on what part of the country (or trade) you’re they are in.
When I was a kid in public school, everybody had to take a foreign language, the elective part was that we had a choice as to which language we took. Some chose French. Some chose Spanish. If you came from money, you also had the option to take foreign language courses at participating colleges, which opened up a lot of other options like German, Japanese, and Latin, amongst others.
Has that changed? Or perhaps it’s different in different jurisdictions?
For me personally, I wish Latin had been an option for me, as it’s used extensively in biology and it would have been incredibly helpful. In terms of foreign language courses I’ve taken, I’ve had Spanish, French, and German. I don’t use any of them, except on rare occasion I’ll hear/see something in Spanish that I can vaguely understand the highlights of given enough time. French is pretty much 100% useless in my day to day life. German has been helpful once or twice when watching a movie or listening to music, but otherwise, useless as well.
Keep in mind, however smart you are, most people are not that smart. They’ll never be curious enough or smart enough to learn another language. They don’t have enough exposure to another language to really remember it. It’s basically of waste of their time and educational money. I’m all for teaching these things in schools as electives, but forcing kids to learn multiple different languages? I think we should have universal/single payer healthcare, better medicare/medicaid, free school lunches (and breakfasts), true livable minimum wages, and a myriad other things first.
In Canada when I was growing up, if you didnt take french immersion, they made you take 1 french language class a year up until grade 10.
They also taught Japanese in my highschool and for senior year if you’d taken them all you could go on a trip to Japan.
Same experience for me. Once in highschool (at an English speaking school) you could choose to branch off from French and learn either Spanish or Japanese (or all the above) if you wanted to.
My wife and I studied Latin in middle school and high school.
My kids were also able to take Latin in school.
Rather than list all the benefits of learning Latin, I found this, Top 10 Reasons For Studying Latin, which says it better than I could.
I would struggle to translate anything today (although I still know that all of Gaul is divided into three parts), but I know I have benefited from an improved understanding of English grammar and vocabulary.
Fight for Latin in your schools!
The college I graduated from required a year of foreign language for graduation – actually take it and pass, not just test out of it.
OK, that’s not quite true. For some reason, the mathematics department was grouped with the languages for purposes of this requirement, so you could take a year of calculus in lieu of a foreign language if you preferred.
Unless you were a math major. Classes in your major didn’t count, so all math majors absolutely had to take a foreign language.
Unless you were a dual major like math-physics. Dual majors could apply classes from both majors towards distribution requirements. I knew several “math” majors who took just enough physics classes to qualify as a dual major for the express purpose of not having to study a language.
Japan tries to teach everyone English and it does not work well. Most people don't want to learn it and the way they teach it is also to a test not to communication. I have no faith that the same wouldn't happen in the US.
The Netherlands teaches everyone English and it works.
You also have a lot more contact with English speakers and media to consume in it. Japan localizes everything and there are few jobs where being multilingual actually matters (and those are usually specialized roles outside of hospitality). There are a lot of problems with the way Japan does its English education which does factor into it, but people do not see it as useful, don't want to use it, and almost never use it (very little overseas travel with most going to Hawaii and Guam which have Japanese language support all over the place).
I say this as someone working on his 5th serious language (with a smattering of Spanish, Albanian, and Hebrew I just puttered around with a bit) and strongly believe that teaching kids languages is a good thing for a variety of reasons.
I have zero faith that the national, state, county, and municipality levels could come together to have something that is justified, works, and is properly-implemented. Tax-payers would also not want to foot the bill for what many would consider useless. Not that many people in the US have passports, either, and a lot that do travel to Canada where English is widely spoken, the UK, etc.
same in all the nordics lol
If you don’t live in a border state the chances of using a second language enough to really learn it well and become proficient are really small unless you have close family members that speak it.
I took a couple of years of Spanish in high school but live about 12 hours from the Mexican border so I didn’t use it enough to retain much.
I’ve almost never been in a situation where speaking Spanish was gamechanging…
So yea they’ve been teaching Spanish for like 2 years in middle school, never retained much except basics like uno dos tres cuatro cingco seis… and me llama pizza, and me no hablo espanol…
since I never got to use it outside of class
But yes I agree, its cool to have another language, but then it again you just lose it anyways since you never have the opportunity to use it, most people will never use it.
Also its about a person’s will
I remember school used to make me read boring shakespeare shit or the oddyssey, yeah I just can’t… soooo boring
Same logic with language learning…
Honestly I have more chances of using Chinese (I’m ethnic Chinese living near a lot of Asians) than using Spanish… so yea there’s that
And an average non-Asian that never goes to Chinese restaurants probably don’t need to learn any extra languages at all.
Also a lot of countries teach English because its a lingua franca so I think English speakers just expects others to be able to communicate anyways and so theres a less of an incentive to learn anyways.
Oh btw my high school does requires two credits (aka: two years) of learning a foreign language…
So guess what:
I chose the easy way out and just picked Chinese since I already knew it from two years of school in China 😎 (you can boo me all you want but who wouldn’t just do this for an easy A?)
They actually put me in Spanish at first but all the kids (I know its “high school” but people still act like “kids” so I’m gonna use that word) were misbehaving that I was just like why not just switch to Chinese, a language I already knew LOL
I’m glad I did make the switch, so comfy there lol, literally everyone behaved better (cuz no mishaving kid is gonna choose the hardest language, they’d probably be trying to change out of that class)
Edit: Went to school in Brooklyn, NYC for elementary, never got spanish class, then for middle school and high school it was Philadelphia, PA, and it was Philly that I had Spanish classes for two years in middle school.
Edit 2: Also I’d like to add: Learning a language later on as you get older plus the lack of immersion… for like a one hour class 5 days a week for two school years… yea that’s nearly impossible.
I’m lucky to come to the US as an 8 year old so I had that advantage of learning English. My dad never really learned English, still a non-citizen… 👀
My mom did, but still struggles to express things
So I sort of have a weird language barrier with parents…
Speaking another language is game changing, it doesn’t matter which language it is. It’ll make it much easier to learn another language, for example, because you’ll get a better grasp of grammar. In fact, that grasp of grammar will help you speak your own language better.
You’ll also be more likely to treat people who speak a different language as people rather than things.
Conversely, I sort of have a superiority complex because I’m bilingual, so I sort of¹ silengly judge Chinese Diaspora that cant read Chinese and Speak either Cantonese or Mandarin.
(¹Not that much, like I don’t treat them any worse, I just a “I have more linguistic knowledge than you 😏” moment, and silently “patting myself on the back”)
When I first came to the US, I got discriminated upon by ABCs (American-Born Chinese) for not speaking English… (like do they expect me to know a language the moment I step off a plane? the fuck?)… so that’s probably why I think the way I do.
Even my cousins, who were born in and grew up in the US, didn’t wanna talk to me… like I could just feel the silent treatment and like were so cold to me.
I remembers the kids in school that I “vibed” with the most were Cantonese-speakers.
Didn’t feel like I could confidently talk to ABCs, like its just couldn’t really “vibe” with them until like more than 4 years of learning English… Like even when I already grasped the basics 1/2 years in… I still didn’t feel like I’ve mastered it…
Honestly it’s sort of a ego thing.
Every time I wanna kms, I remind myself that I’m bilingual and most people only know one language, so I just put off the thoughts. Cuz my next incarnation, I might not have this opportunity to be bilingual again. (My knowledge of Chinese isn’t actually that good, but its better than most ABCs, who can’t even read basic characters)
Learning a second language might open perspectives and expose children to ideas. The GOP can’t afford such smart kids.
I think this is a matter of the microeconomics concept of “scarce resources”? It’d be lovely if everyone in the US learns at least Spanish. But school can only teach a limited number of subjects, so in the US where most people don’t need to use anything other than American English, it might be argued that it is more beneficial to spend more time on, say, STEM and history, rather than getting kids to learn Spanish/German/Chinese… I guess there are foreign language electives for that reason? They are still highly valuable after all
Besides, learning and teaching a foreign language is hard lol. China used to (I’ve heard rumors that some places changed, not 100% sure) require mandatory English education from 1st grade elementary… social issues with the English teacher expats aside, the English literacy rate in China still looks like that. There are even multilingual countries in Europe where a good number of people struggle to learn/speak the other national languages so… Even if the US wants to do it, it’s not that straightforward
the idea that learning languages is particularly difficult seems like an anglophone invention to me, english is a completely standard mandatory subject in most of the world and in many countries a lot of kids learn 2 more languages on top of that.
Here in sweden it’s 100% expected that you speak fluent swedish, english, and can make yourself somewhat understood in at least one other language (usually spanish or german, it’s no different than being expected to know maths and science.
I don’t think it’s an impossible task to get students quality language instruction that gets them on track to proficiency in a given foreign language. It’s doable, and people manage to do so all the time. The issue is more that people often don’t see the benefits of it in their daily lives where English suffices for everything, and they most certainly don’t see enough of a benefit that they wouldn’t collectively lose their shit over a proposed property tax hike intended to adequately fund foreign language instruction in the local school district. They’ll gladly fork over a few million dollars in tax money to trick out the football field, but to hire enough new teachers to have kids start learning French in 3rd grade and continue until graduation? Not a chance in hell. Ditto for French-language media purchases for the school library, or any other auxiliary purchases that would facilitate a genuine attempt at teaching and learning a foreign language.
Although it’s been shown learning another language as a child changes the way your mind works, there’s only so much money in the teaching budget and so many hours in the day. Conservatives want to take both from our kids, for their own ends, so justifying the value of the resources to the student is a perennial challenge.
Given the low proficiency of current grads with their first language, and basic skills like punctuation and spelling, I say we’re a LONG way before we can open a second language in the curriculum.
Because education in the USA is a sad joke? Republicans have been hollowing out education for the past 5 decades or so and they worked hard trying to shove fundamentalist christianity in schools and science classes specifically
The US is tucked and can get fucked
Because money. More classes more money. Less common skill set, more money.
to be done right it has to be done early. This means parents or schools have to choose the languages learned. It needs to be immersive to. Schools will have to have teachers for every language. That can be expensive. Its a bit easier with non english speaking countries as they generally teach english and like catholic schools at one time taught latin. Now personally I would love the whole world to standardize on one sign language and teach that so that in a generation or two everyone would be able to communicate.
That would be good, and in line with Plains Sign Language’s legacy. It was created as a trade language and adopted by the deaf. That said, sign languages are living languages and without much mass communication in them they drift pretty hard and fast. All said Plains would be a really cool choice, but French Sign Language (LSF) would probably be the most practical choice.
So yeah, if everyone could agree on a sign language to learn, my deaf ass is in.
well us adults would likely never really see the benefit but as I said in a generation or two it would be huge.
Hah!
We can barely teach kids English.
Why?
The answer is Republicans want to fund Christian schools instead, with various variations of extra steps.
To be fair it’s tough to be proficient in a language you don’t get to use. In some places in the US, there’s plenty of Spanish speaking people. Other than that not so much.
How common is it for students in non-English speaking countries to learn a second language that isn’t English? I would imagine not very. Learning a second language isn’t very useful if you’re not going to use it, and learning it won’t be easy if you aren’t immersed in it.
The wall was meant to keep you in.
Stay inside and consume.
West coast Canadian who is proud of Canada’s French history but can’t speak French.
Language needs to be used in daily life for a lot of people.
I’ve met countless immigrants who can’t speak very good English after being here for years because they just don’t speak it at home, only when they need to put in public.
Which is no different than me learning French from grade 6 to 8 and not being able to learn it, though I do understand it more than I expected that one time I was in Quebec City for 2 weeks (absolutely lovely city, and the Thai soup I had from Don Vegan, the cities first vegan only restaurant, was the best Thai soup I’ve ever had. DELICIOUS! But I digress) It’s just a symptom of not needing it in your life because I’m just not around it. I’m not a super outgoing person either and I’ve never been good at getting a conversation going so my own hurdles are certainly part of this, but I’ve worked with a lot of immigrants and I think in spite of my bias, it’s pretty accurate.
America isn’t much different in that regard, unless you are on a southern border there’s significantly less opportunity to have other languages be part of the fabric of the average americans personal lives. Not impossible but just a lot less likely
The country broadly has what’s called a monolingual language ideology. English is prioritized above others. Multilingualism just isn’t viewed as a skill. And thus there’s no large pool of L2 speakers with which to interact regularly enough to learn and maintain an L2. I mean, they certainly exist, but the landscape is quite different from somewhere like Belgium or South Africa or, idk, most countries. Really anywhere where there’s like a home/cultural language, a market language (maybe a pidgin), and an official state language.
For me it was a requirement for at least a few years.
Capitalism relies on dumber citizens, don’t seek anything more than consumerism, work consume and die. Otherwise they would teach financial education in school too.
Texan here. 2 years in HS was required when I was there. I took Latin.
The US is allergic to other languages. Hell, it’s even allergic to English depending on where you look. It’s all just part of the government’s plan to keep people stupid.