No Stupid Questions

This topic comes up so often here...

I barely even remember much of anything taught in 2 years of spanish classes in middle school...

Now try 4 languages...

I never even have a situation where I need Spanish... and its the most popular language here behind English... imagine how quick French, German would atrophy... literally never met a french or german speaker irl...

I'm a native Mandarin speaker and since arriving in the US, I've only spoken it like to a total of 5 people maybe(?) (Mandarin not spoken at home, it's Cantonese instead) Like I rarely need it...

How many Americans (except for Chinese Americans visiting relatives maybe) would actually need to visit China?

Hahah travel. Funny joke.

In truth, though, a small number of school districts do do immersive bilingual K-12 education. That means the full curriculum is bilingual...around here usually English/Spanish. Not just one class. Usually in tightly integrated (read: mixed-race) communities.

Hardest part is probably finding bilingual teachers...especially in districts that are traditionally more budget-constrained.

US schools already have a hard time teaching proficiency in English.

Why would I learn another language when everyone else should just learn american.

I hope you don't mind a non-US-American comment on this one. I see this kind of statement/question quite often and I have a few things to say about it:

1. It is not common to learn 3-4 foreign languages at school

It's not rare to find people who speak more than 3 languages around the world. However in most countries schools just cover the languages you are expected to know in your country/region and the most common lingua franca(e). You guys simply need less languages in your daily business. If anything, there should be a bigger emphasis on Spanish in your education, at least in some states.

2. School education isn't enough to properly learn even one language

The truly foreign languages we learn at school do not stick with most of us. On the one hand, we had to pick a language that we may have not been interested in. On the other hand, you need to spend much more time beyond and after school to get beyond the basics for real life communication - even if the common reference level says otherwise. Even English or the respective lingua franca for the given region is mostly learned from real day-to-day communication. The school lessons serve more or less as a frame.

3. An overlooked advantage of learning a foreign language is to understand how little we understand

Sure, learning a foreign language is naturally useful for traveling, job prospects and educational value. But when you rewire/extend your brain a language beyond some basics for traveling, you have a bigger understanding how different languages can be, how much gets lost in translation and how little you understand of the world.

I'm not sure, if Spanish in the USA can be as important as e.g. English in many European countries (as an outsider I get the impression that it should be even more important :D), but I think treating it that way would be a much bigger benefit for the entire USA. Oh and 4) most bilingual Europeans who are yapping about dumb Americans on the internet have no idea how ignorant they are themselves. Greetings from an immigrant child from Germany! <3

It's more likely that most people wouldn't pass high school anymore

Why not make it mandatory for 40 or 50 languages? Why not 100? Why not all languages?

In my poor, rural school district (growing up), Spanish was taught starting in kindergarten. In high school, grades 9 - 12, two semesters of foreign language were required to graduate (or you had to demonstrate you qualified for an exception such as that you were already at least bilingual). The school offered French and Spanish. The only reason French was even an option is because of one special teacher, whom we were lucky to have, had a degree in French language arts or something like that. Other schools in the area only had Spanish.

You'll probably recognize this when you're older, but nearly everything in life is a balance of constraints and concerns. Teaching languages costs money, often in short supply, and requires qualified educators, often in short supply.

But also, what the hell do you even mean "upper hand when traveling"? I'd be shocked if most non-bilingual Americans who went through the education system in the USA spend more than 1 or 2 weeks in their entire lives some place where being bilingual would give them some kind of upper hand.

One might argue that Spanish alone would probably cover an enormous amount of those who have spent more than 1 or 2 weeks outside of English speaking parts of the world. But it all seems like an enormous waste of time and energy and resources just to make sure the most privileged amongst us have "the upper hand" when they travel. That's time and energy and resources that could probably be more wisely spent elsewhere to be honest, and for those privileged folks who have the luxury of traveling and need "the upper hand" -- they can turn in their privilege bucks and pay for their own education to learn 3 or 4 languages, I would think? Perhaps they could cut back to only 4 trips to Italy this year and use the savings for some lessons on how to speak Italian.

As someone who grew up bilingual in the US and now knows 3 languages, the US is fucking allergic to secondary languages. It's the xenophobia

Yeah, sure would be useful. But you only have so many years to teach the kids everything.

What do you prioritize down in favour of another language?

Honestly, it probably comes down to taxes. Many Americans are rabidly opposed to any proposal that will increase their taxes by any amount, regardless of the reason, and a lot of school district funding is based on local property taxes. Coincidentally, home- and business-owners who would have to pay that increased property tax are able to have an outsized influence on local politics. No politician is going to raise that proposal for funding foreign language classes.

As sad as it is, learning to speak another language just isn't seen as that important by many. They don't need to use anything other than English in their daily lives, and many citizens don't even have a passport, much less travel abroad.

In addition, aside from Spanish, many areas just lack the resources you would need to be able to develop your language skills from "I get good grades in my highschool German class" to "I can actually use the language in normal interactions with native speakers."

Think of your local bookstore and libraries. How many if them have a section of books you can just browse in a language other than English or Spanish? For anything beyond Spanish, how often do you see or hear another foreign language? Would you be confident you could find enough conversation partners to use that language even semi-frequently?

Yes, the internet opens up a lot of doors in terms of resources, but you need to be personally invested in learning the language to make them work. Unless there's a community with great reading lists at various levels for your target language, just searching and browsing bookstore websites aimed at native speakers is kind of tough for being able to just browse and find something that catches your eye and seems on your level, especially compared to just browsing the shelves in a brick and mortar shop. Also, those books are generally much more expensive than English books, for obvious reasons.

Yes, I would be hyped to learn my local school district was going to start teaching the kids 4 languages from elementary through high school, but it's just going to be wasted money if you don't have the auxiliary elements outside the classroom in place, or a plan to at least put them in place while rolling out these classes. Otherwise, you're just going to get a bunch of yokels coming out of the woodwork to say "My boy don't need to speak nothing but 'American!" And complaining because little Billy ordered 4 books off Amazon.de and it ran them 120€, only to show up and have Billy realize these books are way harder than he thought they would be and he actually needs to order more books with simpler language to get started.

Yes, little Billy could pirate the shit out of the books and stuff he needs and find a discord chat or forum to get in free practice with speaking and writing,, but not all students will be motivated enough and tech savvy enough for us to assume this will be a viable method to get results in general.

I believe you have overestimated the amount of americans who travel outside of cruises and all inclusive english speaking resorts

I think it's because they want to keep us stupid and withdrawn from the world as a whole. The US is kind of a giant prison, but with some shiny things to distract the more well off inmates from caring as much. For those who are poor, they'll be aware but have hardly a network to figure out how to escape. Language is incredibly important and also allows you to think in different ways depending on what languages you know; gives different perspective. They don't want us to think. I believe the best mandatory languages to learn if we implemented that in the states would be: Spanish, French, Portuguese (for upstairs and downstairs neighbors), Mandarin, Russian, and Egyptian Arabic. The last 3 are for general world literacy, Mandarin being widely spoken generally, boh Mandarin and Russian respectively to keep people aware of what's happening in the world in those spheres, as well as Egyptian Arabic since it's the most widely spoken Arab language, used in TV and everyday use most times.