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So, here is my response to that.
Why? Where I am from in the US, at least 2 years of language classes were required.
I took Spanish as most people did and years later I had a long term relationship with a Mexican, so over time I learned Spanish.
I’m now, not living in the US and learning a third language.
But I’m very much the exception. Most US citizen, never interact with people who don’t speak English as most Americans never leave the US.
No matter how much you study another language, you are not really going to learn it and be competent with it unless you regularly use it.
Most people in the US will not have any exposure to the language they learned or studied. So what’s the point?
It just seems like a wasted effort for most people.
This, I minored in Japanese language and ended up doing a 3 week travel abroad studies trip with a professor and classmates and was at least somewhat conversational then. Since that ten years I’ve lost most of it other than some familiar phases you hear in anime. Don’t use it? Lose it.
If I studied vocab again i might be able to pick it up again, but so far i have no need.
Most US citizen, never interact with people who don’t speak English as most Americans never leave the US.Well, except for the 68 million people inside of the US that speak another language. If you live in New York city, California, Texas, or Florida, it's damn near impossible not to be exposed to languages other than English. And statistically most of us do live in one of those places.
Are their interactions any deeper than basically English. Does it require them to learn an entire language? To interact with the minority?
You said they don't have exposure. Exposure is everywhere in the US. I'd argue that Americans are exposed to far more Spanish than the average Italian is exposed to German. I suspect you'd find few Americans who don't know what Agua means and would be confused if someone said Adios to them.
I mean, I could say the same thing about, say, calculus. Except learning a language could give someone a wider perspective. Plus, maybe people would talk more to native speakers of a language if they knew it.
I learned calculus for the same number of years that I learned Spanish in school.
So by that analogy, most Americans have studied a second language.
The problem is that you need other people to interact with who speak the language.
So, if you don’t naturally have friends or family who speak that language it’s is not really practical to learn as you can immerse yourself in it.
There is also no point in doing it, if you don’t have a way to use it.
Why not learn something else that can actually be used?
Again, this is coming from someone who is currently learning a third language.
I think the main problem is that high school is way too late to learn a new language. Also at least in my case, the way it was taught was pretty bad. A lot of focus on worksheets and memorization and almost no practical experience - we barely spoke Spanish in the class.
I guess that's more just an issue with the education system though. Kind of like you said, the other part is just the culture. We're not raised in a multilingual culture so we don't expect it or value it.
I started learning English in 5th year of school, when I was 11. Worked out just fine for me.
Or US has another meaning for 'high school'?
US has another meaning for high school, although it may vary from place to place even there. I think it's typically the...9th year of school, so when people may be around 14 or 15.
For me, it was also high school only. The first three years focused on memorizing vocabulary and that’s as far as most kids went. However there were also two more levels that were conversational
Ah yes, math, the language of the universe.
Spoken like a non engineer trying to justify bad life decisions. Calulas was far more valuable to me than the spanish I took.
language does not give perspective. It makes it a little easier to consume some content or talk to some people. However if you don't put forth the effort you won't get that, mean while if you care to put forth the effort you don't need to speak other languages to get perspectives. there are more perspectives from native english speakers than you will be able to consume
Bruh, if anyone sounds like STEM-bro, it's you.
Source:
-You
https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2022/04/29/learning-language-changes-your-brain/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3583091/
I'm a senior software engineer and my math skills is shit.
I'm here to tell any future programmers, being bad at Advanced math like Calculus should not stop you.
I'm getting a bs degree in the sciences and use trig almost every day lol. Thanks for the personal attack though, really classy.
All I wanted to point out is that school teaches a lot of things. Some may be relevant, some may not. But that's not a reason to not teach it. For instance, I took bio and rarely need that info. But that doesn't mean it wasn't valuable, or that it shouldn't be taught. Same thing with language. It doesn't need to help everyone to be part of a school curriculum.
Huh
I wider perspective to what?
You can currently get translations to English on a wide variety of sources, provided you want to reach out to get them.
And most Americans are going to be dealing with other English speakers outside of recent immigrants. If you count vacations, unless you visit Latin American or Quebec a lot, it isn't worth it.
Exactly - but for the opposite reason I think you're implying.
My French isn't amazing, it's not even good - but it's enough that I've been able to get by for most day-to-day stuff.
To keep my foot in, I tend to listen to French media - songs or podcasts - watch some French sport, but critically watch French news such as France24 or the FR output of Euronews. The "official" feel of the news outlets means that slang is often left out of reports, sentences follow the grammar and syntax structure that you've been taught as best practice, and idiom or contractions are avoided making it a bit easier to follow for the learner.
The difference I found was astounding - I learn a lot more things about Western Europe and the wider world because the FR content covers stuff that the EN stuff never even touches. Weirdly the opposite is rarely true, it's rare to see a story on the BBC or UK print media that the French haven't covered.
I've found it to be hugely informative to watch a report from a UK source in English, then a European source in French, and the detail specific to each is enough to fill in the blanks and give a better feel for the story or article.
Of course, I am quite pro-language - I don't speak it daily or even need to use it often but I do find it useful online (particularly Lemmy) where French media can land in your lap.
translations are never perfect, there's lots of nuance and even entire concepts that gets lost. Learning another language enables a new way of expressing yourself. it's why you often see people who share multiple languages communicate with each other by mixing them.
Cultural perspective. There are things in language that don't always make it through translation. Learning other languages can not just help you better understand things in those languages (moreso than a translation), but also broaden your perspective on communication.
I also want to point out that over 13% of the country speaks spanish (according to wikipedia). That's not a small amount. And while many are bilingual, it's a bit ethnocentric to expect them to learn english, but not expect people here to learn spanish. Plenty of other countries are bilingual with their native language and english, mostly because of colonialism. Instead of purely relying on them to accommodate us, maybe we should put a little effort into helping accommodate them.
For cultural perspective, you still need constant contact with the culture to provide that reinforcement. Most people who learn additional languages don't do it for cultural perspective, they mainly do it for economic reasons or to maintain their local culture.
And per your chart, the percentage of Spanish speakers is a recent number caused by immigration. The USA has had previous waves of immigration bringing other languages as well, especially German. If all children of immigrants maintained their languages instead of converting to English, it would be really hard to communicate in the USA today
Learning a language takes years and a lot of work and practice. Asking someone to learn a language is asking a lot of them.
Most Americans do not encounter a foreign language day to day.
Sure there are instances here and there, but they are not significant enough to learn an entire language.
Would you learn to speak Chinese because you couldn’t help someone with directions in China town or your food order was incorrect because of a language barrier?
If it's that much work why do we expect people from other countries to do it?
You mean people from other countries who move to America? Or people from other countries in general?
Well, if you move to America and don’t speak English, then that’s on you, but your ability to communicate and work will be limited.
If I moved to China or Japan and looked for a job, then I’d be required to learn the local language or I wouldn’t be able to do my job. (Not counting English teachers or people who are sent to Japan to do a job for an American company).
If you don’t live in the US and don’t want to learn the local language it’s fine, but you will be limited in your ability to do business outside of your country as the language of business is English.
The US government does not require you to speak English and if you don’t and are stopped by the police, they will use a translation service to speak to the person.
This issue is not a black and white speak english vs not kind of thing. There's no shortage of immigrants that speak english perfectly well sans a minor accent but are discriminated against and treated poorly anyway for not being native speakers.
Edit for those who downvoted: I am a native english speaker. I have been discriminated against based on my regional accent. Only a fucking fool would think the same things don't happen to nonnative speakers.
Part of the goal here isn't even mastery of the language itself. Exposure to new cultures is important. Being able to empathize with how hard learning a language is is also important.