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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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