51–60 of 73 posts
Interesting that most of the discussion here makes bilingualism seem like the pinnacle of achievement. But I guess I belittle bilingualism because I am fluent in two languages and strive for three or four.
(working on my fourth)
My son is fully bilingual in Afrikaans(sort of a Dutch Dialect) and English. When he was a toddler he would speak fluently to his grandmother in Afrikaans and would turn in the same conversation and seamlessly talk to me or his mother in English. He kept this ability right into about the middle years in Elementary School. After that this ability somehow diminished and he would throw English words into an Afrikaans co…
Interesting! Three of my siblings are bi-lingual Russian/English. At first they mixed things up terribly, but after their Russian grandmother spent a year with them they were suddenly able to completely separate the two. Grandma doesn't speak a word of English, whereas both parents speak both languages, so we speculated that what they were doing was 'the easiest thing that works'. When I speak in Norwegian I toss in…
I think it's because those languages are so close to each other - like C++, C# and Java - which was probably the reason I could become reasonably fluent in each of them in the first place. I actually learned Italian by "prototypal inheritance", gradually substituting Spanish words and grammar as I learned their Italian equivalents while living there.
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Mono-lingual Canadian here with a question for both of you: What do adolescents in your countries think of learning english? Most anglophone Canadians start learning french in grade 4, unless their parents put them in an immersion program at a younger age. In Ontario we were required to take French until grade 9 and after that the VAST majority of us stopped because we hated it. Is it like that with English in other…
In South Africa we have 11, yes, eleven, official languages, with English being one of them. It's easy for most people who's mother tongue is not English to learn it, as it's everywhere - government, media, advertisements, entertainment, you name it. So it's a necesity, not a status symbol. It's also interesting to note that English kids generally struggle to pick up a second language, even if they live in a communit…
While I do think that everyone should learn English in SA, research has shown that mother tongue education (especially at primary and secondary levels) are extremely important.
There are a lot of parents doing their children a disservice by sending them to English schools.
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It's not much of a perceived advantage to study a 2nd language as an American, because no matter where you go there's probably someone who speaks English, and chances are that wherever you go few if any speak the 2nd language that you studied as a kid. There's small payoff for an American to study a 2nd language. There's large payoff for people from non-English speaking countries to study English; it must be true or…
I'm betting this is going to flip around in the next eighty years or so, and not towards Spanish. If China's economy doesn't crash and burn (and, if it does, if it does not fail to rise again from the ashes like ours did after the Great Depression), Chinese is likely to become an important trade language. It's a difficult language, but then again - for different reasons - so is English. I'm placing my bets that withi…
There are many things about English that are difficult, if not infuriating for those learning it (spellings, irregular declinations, phrasal verbs, etc), but it is also a language that is quite easy to gain a basic grasp of. It has much more simplified grammar than most other European languages, for example, and even if spoken badly it is quite often intelligible.
I had a friend who taught English in Greece, and she used to say that learning English was like trying to hold sand in your hand: cup it lightly and it's easy; try to hold it tightly and it's apt to slip through your fingers.
I'm sure many East Asians would disagree with me on how easy English is though, so maybe I'm being parochial.
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I'm betting this is going to flip around in the next eighty years or so, and not towards Spanish. If China's economy doesn't crash and burn (and, if it does, if it does not fail to rise again from the ashes like ours did after the Great Depression), Chinese is likely to become an important trade language. It's a difficult language, but then again - for different reasons - so is English. I'm placing my bets that withi…
Interesting. But I doubt it will be that simple. Even if the Chinese will overshadow everything else in a few years, English will stay the dominant language in the western world. Latin limped on far over thousand years after the fall of its empire.
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Interesting. But I doubt it will be that simple. Even if the Chinese will overshadow everything else in a few years, English will stay the dominant language in the western world. Latin limped on far over thousand years after the fall of its empire.
Yes, but French is arguably fading much more quickly. It's easy to overlook where the words lingua franca originally came from.
I can't say much about French. I do know that German is alive and kicking.
My son is fully bilingual in Afrikaans(sort of a Dutch Dialect) and English. When he was a toddler he would speak fluently to his grandmother in Afrikaans and would turn in the same conversation and seamlessly talk to me or his mother in English. He kept this ability right into about the middle years in Elementary School. After that this ability somehow diminished and he would throw English words into an Afrikaans co…
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> learning a second language in school has enough ancillary benefits to make it mandatory Would you include in this those who can't use a first language to any reasonable degree. Or those who already have the main language of the country (English say) as their second language? I'm generally against mandatory subjects in education as it tends not to reflect the vast differences in experience and background, motivation…
I'm generally against mandatory subjects in education as it tends not to reflect the vast differences in experience and background, motivation and ability of the students. At a higher education level (say College on up) I would be strongly inclined to agree with you. Give the students freedom and they will make the right choices for themselves, and they will be the only ones to live with it if they don't. At the basi…
> At a higher education level (say College on up) I would be strongly inclined to agree with you. Give the students freedom and they will make the right choices for themselves, and they will be the only ones to live with it if they don't. > At the basic education level (high school and below), this is precisely when society is teaching its children what it needs to continue its culture.
Background: I am in high school.
Anyway, I've come up against this barrier so much and it drives me crazy. Here, like in most American high schools, society isn't teaching us anything. It's teaching us to hate the 'mandatory' subjects, because everyone has to take them, and thus the teachers can't teach it well because 3/4 of their classes are utterly uninterested. To be honest, I despise my world history class. And it's not because it's history - I'm fine with history, in face, I enjoy learning about it. It's because it's mandatory, which means everyone takes it, so in the end, everyone suffers.
With the AP level course system that exists in the USA, you're taking college-level courses in high school. Why should high school students have to suffer any more than college students?
> Most students at this age do not have the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about what they should learn, and moreover society has a vested interest in ensuring that its young people meet certain minimums.
This is even harder to argue with, because of the "most". I guess it's that old argument: would you rather allow the more gifted to excel, or everyone be held at the same level (with that level being slightly higher than had you went with the other option)? And, honestly, it isn't 'society' - society isn't doing anything. It's the school system, a bureaucratized administration incapable of seeing the system from the students perspective and incapable of creating a true institution of learning in which the students who want to learn at a decent rate can.
Ugh, sorry for this rant. It's just been bothering me for the past two years, because high school is so goddamn constrained and mandatory it's angering. Instead of learning, I have to sit through things I already know and listen to incompetent teachers talk about irrelevant topics.
I guess I should add something related to the original topic. I speak two languages fluently, and learned Spanish in high school for four years, then promptly dropped it. Why? Because even though I live in an area with easily 30% Spanish-speakers, I don't ever need to use it. Ever! And if I try to practice it, the Spanish-speakers would just rather speak English, because a lot of them are more comfortable talking to me in English. My point: in almost all places in the USA, other languages are useless. Now, in my own time, outside of school, I've learned some Portuguese, because I play capoeira and my instructor and students learning it along with me speak it all the time. My second point: when you need to, you will learn a language.
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It's not much of a perceived advantage to study a 2nd language as an American, because no matter where you go there's probably someone who speaks English, and chances are that wherever you go few if any speak the 2nd language that you studied as a kid. There's small payoff for an American to study a 2nd language. There's large payoff for people from non-English speaking countries to study English; it must be true or…
I'm betting this is going to flip around in the next eighty years or so, and not towards Spanish. If China's economy doesn't crash and burn (and, if it does, if it does not fail to rise again from the ashes like ours did after the Great Depression), Chinese is likely to become an important trade language. It's a difficult language, but then again - for different reasons - so is English. I'm placing my bets that withi…
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
So Chinese still has to gain a lot of use at home before it can gain major use abroad.
Several of the other comments about the importance of network effects in favoring one language rather than another show what a tremendous head start English has as the interlanguage for varied ethnic groups all over the world.
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The best (possibly only) way to learn a language on a functional level, is to use it. In my second-year Spanish class in high school, our teacher let us chat during class, so long as we chatted in Spanish and not English. In practice, we talked Spanglish, but nonetheless, that experience made me far better at Spanish than all my other studying before and after. She also taught all of her lessons entirely in Spanish,…
I've heard great things about language immersion. There is an American actress - can't remember her name - she speaks fluent French. I saw her in a French movie and spent half the movie trying to place her face. It turns out that she went to a bilingual school French/English.