The fact most Americans are monolingual is a factor of geography more than education. I live in New England the closest area to me that predominantly speaks a foreign language is Quebec, but most of the Quebecoise speak English conversationally. Next to that the Mexican border is 32 hours away by car.
I studied French for 5 years, the closest I’ve come to having a French conversation outside of class is speaking three sentences with a friend I met in college who also spoke French. It just never comes up. It’s much easier to learn a language when you have actual people to speak to in it.
I took a few years of French in high school, it was part of our requirements to get a certain amount of language credits as long as you weren’t in remedial classes in which case you got extra classes in those subjects instead, never got close to fluent at it, but I probably knew enough to get by if I ever happened to mysteriously wake up somewhere in France one day, but I never had a chance to really use it in the real world and of course since I only took it to check off that requirement I dropped it as soon as I had enough credits so that I could take other electives that I actually wanted to take instead. So now over a decade later I’ve pretty much forgotten all of the French I knew.
Probably would have had a better outcome if we started language classes earlier and made them mandatory the whole way through school. Of course then you have the issue of where do you fit language into the school day, I don’t really want to take time away from other subjects, nor do I want to extend the day any longer than it already is. And from a budget standpoint, unless your other teachers are already bilingual, that means hiring at least one language teacher and probably several, so it’s a tough nut to crack.
I think there’s also the issue of which languages to offer. My school district offered Spanish, French, and Latin. Honestly none of those languages particularly interested me, I basically chose French because I liked that teacher the best. I can definitely appreciate the utility of speaking Spanish in the US, so that seems obvious, but, at least in my area, I dont encounter many French speakers, so probably not the most useful language option, I’d probably get more use out of Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Swahili, Korean, Mandarin, or Cantonese (in no particular order, those are probably the most common languages besides Spanish that I’ve used translators for working in my local 911 center, I’ve used a French translator exactly once in the over 5 years I’ve been here, I’ve used it for Haitian Creole more than that, which is mostly French-based but not totally mutually intelligible and has its own translators)
French can certainly be useful for living, working, or traveling to some countries, but not all of them. Aside from France and parts of Canada, I don’t personally have any major French -speaking destinations on my list of places I really want to visit before I die, though I do have plenty of places that speak a plethora of other languages on that list.
It’s a shame that something like Esperanto never caught on as an international auxiliary language.
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
Spoken like a non engineer trying to justify bad life decisions.
Bruh, if anyone sounds like STEM-bro, it’s you.
Source:
language does not give perspective.
-You
https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2022/04/29/learning-language-changes-your-brain/
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.
personal attack
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.
I wider perspective to what?
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.
Which language?
Once I learn that language, how do I maintain it?
I’ve “learned” three languages aside from English over the years, and even when I’ve traveled to areas in the world that predominantly speak that language, English is so ubiquitous that it really didn’t matter if I knew it or not.
I’m essentially monolingual again, even though I can understand bits and pieces if necessary.
I grew up in a household of my parents language, but speak predominately English. I also know enough French to navigate Quebec, and with a week, can remember enough Spanish from HS to go to Mexico. I learned bits of Russian and Chinese to speak to my coworkers, not enough to be dropped in a town and survive though.
And honestly, even after all of that… I rather people speak one language. And study international studies/geography and history.
Technology will reach a point where translations are near fluid. Traveling to Japan, I winged it with studying Japanese where my wife took courses, and we both ended up navigating in English and using Google translate, with very little hiccups.
Once I learn that language, how do I maintain it?
Go online, read books.
I’m essentially monolingual again, even though I can understand bits and pieces if necessary.
There are books never translated to English, poetry. Anyway, most translations are inferior to their originals.
Most people on the planet speak English to some degree, but the cultural heritage in other languages is mostly not available for English speakers.
This just makes you disadvantaged.
Once I learn that language, how do I maintain it?
The way non-English speakers do it: watch content on the internet in that language, listen to podcasts or simply read things written on that language.
The internet it’s a great tool to learn and practice any language if you want to, in the same way that it’s a great way to learn English for the rest of us.
Edit: to be clear, I’m not saying people should learn a second language, I just want to provide tips for those wanting to do it. It saddens me to see such a negative attitude towards learning a second language…
Why? There is more great content in english than I could ever watch. and far more garbage as well af course. I could learn a language, but why?
i’m okay with spanish, it did me no good when I was in germany.
Bigger pool of culture - easier to find good things to your taste.
Also cultures are different.
There are many different english speaking cultures ifithat is what you want.
Yes, well, the world isn’t quantified into “mine” and “different”, “different” can be separated into “redder”, “bluer”, “colder”, “warmer”, “more random” and “more ordered”, “more scarred” and “more solid”, “softer” and “harder” and so on.
You are simply much more limited if you only know one language. This would seem to be obvious, I don’t get all the attempts to argue.
Yes, born in a country speaking world’s default language you have had fewer incentives to learn others, so in some sense you’ve been unlucky. Too bad, that doesn’t mean you should punish yourself by not fixing that.
While I’m in theory limited, there are more things to do in life than study other cultures. I have a todo list that I honestly expect it would take me 3000 years to get to the end of. (I doubt medical science will give me anywhere near that long to live). That I can’t learn about some culture in depth because I haven’t learned the language yet - well learning their language is something I’ll get around to when I’m 1000 years old.
I’m not saying you should learn a second language, I just wanted to give tips for those wanting to do it. As the previous poster asked how he could keep that language alive, I was just answering to that. A bit surprised at the reaction to mere tips given to learn a language.
A large chunk of the population speaks Spanish yet it’s barely taught in schools
Every school I know of has four years of either French or Spanish.
I’m not sure how much of this has changed since I was a kid, but when I was in high school we had 4 years of Spanish and French, but only one year of either one was mandatory. Most kids in my school ended up just taking a year of Spanish as a freshman, and only those who actually wanted to learn another language elected for the remaining years.
I’ve never known a school that requires 4 years to graduate.
Yeah, but it’s rote memorization. It’s not immersive usage. So almost no American students retain anything from those years of study.
Language education evolved from Greek and Latin lessons designed to get you I to college which required them because in the rennesance reading classical texts was important and the ability to was essential and it persisted for hundreds of years. Because of this speaking wasn’t a part if the pedagogy and is kinda tacked on in modern language ed
What are you smoking?
Spanish classes are universally available Jr High and up.
Every school I know requires two semesters and they don’t have to be the same language if that’s even an option. I’m in a heavy Spanish speaking part of the US too.
Are they available to use the language or do they learn to count to 10 and how to order cheese?
My jr high required 1 semester of foreign language studies, and high school, 4 semesters. I think it also qualified as elective, so I was encouraged to take Spanish for all but my last year. I still understand a bit of conversation, but damn if I can carry a conversation after 30 years gap. It was rote memorization, so I can count to 15, and ask where the library is.
My high school teacher was also the math teacher. Old white male who has been to Mexico 3 times.
¿Donde esta la biblioteca?
I’m sure the quality of the curriculum varies greatly as education is largely controlled at the local level. I had excellent Spanish instruction available to me. In the last couple years of high school you had to read books in the language, and we weren’t allowed to use English in class.
Does the math class teach the kid to add 1 and 1 or does it teach them how to factor quadratics?
I really don’t get the point of this comment.
Why bother? I would have to drive 22 hours straight to get to a location where English wasn’t the primary language. This isn’t Europe where the language changes faster than the timezones.
A lot of culture is locked behind even learning the basics of whatever language that culture speaks. It’d be awesome for monolingual Americans to learn the other language that exists in their area just for understanding alone.
Language learning is easy, especially for children and they also have plenty time in school to do so. A lot of problems come directly from unwillingness/lack of understanding of cultures that are pretty similar in the first place.
“Why bother?” can be said about a lot of the school system in the US, knowing a little about a language can go a long way and doesn’t impact the rest of the learning.
I’m surrounded by a hundred cultures that all natively speak English at the moment. Once I run out of those, I’ll probably give Spanish a try.
The thing is that culture with a shared language will homogenise or just be way more homogeneous than without one. Same for culture inside a shared nationality. This further perspective shift acquired via engaging in more different culture is useful, especially I find for critically evaluating news, politics,media and the like.
The perspective told in any other language than English is less sometimes much less integrated into the hegemony associatet with English. And seeing hegemony is much easier if you can by way of language switching step out of the one you’ve previously lived under.
There are of course other ways for this kind of perspective switching than learning a language, but having it be such a natural part of your life is in the long run easier.
So from the perspective of an education system in a supposedly democratic society what the op argues for makes a lot of sense, starting early with a 2nd language would likely make the US school system better. And I mean really early, nowadays here we start the 2nd language education with first grade, and the 3rd language with 5th grade.
OP: You haven’t given any positive rationale- this sounds like idealism
My counterpoints:
I live in the UK. I can get to several other European countries in time to have lunch there and be back home for supper. I have visited several of these countries. In each case I have attempted to speak the local language (I studied French at (high) school for 5 years). In each case, as soon as I open my mouth, locals respond in English with apologies that their English isn’t perfect (it’s usually fine anyway). As a result it is almost impossible to improve in that language since there is little opportunity.
You are forgetting the ‘common language’ problem: Let’s say you have parties from 2 different countries or states that speak completely different languages. What language do you choose for communications between them? one-on-one you might take turns but what happens when you have 3? 4? or maybe 20-50 like India? What language do you suppose Poland and China communicate in? What language do you use to cover news in science and technology? The other trade languages have largely lost out to English on the world stage.
I live in the US and speak three languages. I almost never have an opportunity to speak anything other than English, and it’s not for lack of desire.
That said, I think the word pathetic is way too harsh. People just have different needs and priorities.
It’s pathetic that the government in South Africa doesn’t mandate ice fishing lessons in high school!
…This gets even funnier when you consider how near to Antarctica South Africa is. 😂
There’s really no pressure for most Americans to learn another language. English is the lingua franca across the Western world, American culture has been disseminated globally, and besides that, most Americans spend their whole lives without ever leaving the country. I’m making no comment on whether or not these things are good or right, but there’s almost no social, personal, or economic pressure for an average American to learn a separate language. Anecdotally, the only times I’ve ever felt like learning another language it was as a hobby or challenge to myself.
To be fair about most American’s never leaving the country, it’s a big country. You can spend literal days driving from one side to the other.
If you asked the average American, “What’s the furthest you’ve traveled?” That distance will most likely exceed the average distance traveled by someone from, say, Germany.
The German could have been to half a dozen countries, and never gone outside of Continental Europe.
An American leaving the US is more comparable to a European leaving Europe rather than their home country.
Hilariously enough by percentage, the number of Americans who have never left the US is similar to the number of Europeans who have never left their home country (40% vs 37%). That’s honestly insane given leaving the US is much more difficult than hopping on a train to go to an adjacent country in Europe. I’ve never left the US, but there’s so fucking much here that with the exception of a few culturally significant places in the world (mainly Thailand) I have no desire to really travel abroad.
Upvoting because I actually disagree. Learning a language is a personal journey and the only way to really do well is to be surrounded by it.
What language do you propose? Take a pick: Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, or ASL. And then make your arguments as to why it’s necessary.
If you propose any other language, you’re definitely wasting our time here. There are far too many things to learn, and education organizers have to make decisions somehow.
The U.S. education system sucks in some ways, but it’s likely that your state or school district sucked in many more ways. A lot of educational regulations are state-specific, and a lot of the funding is county-specific.
One thing that always baffles me is that people focus on talking. I want to read. I want to understand what I hear and see. See where words come from. I don’t want to talk to anyone!
Sign language as a school subject is a really cool idea, though.
In my school the second language was English, and the third you could choose between French and German (I chose German, then my mom overruled me and chose French). Not every school has a third language here at all, but when they do, there are sometimes cool ones where you can choose, say, Mandarin or Korean or Spanish.
In USSR one could choose the second language between English, German and sometimes French. So there are people in ex-Soviet countries who never studied English. The equality of these choices stemmed from USSR being a fossil.
Also people in Europe who would receive good classical education 100 years ago and frankly even now would study Classical Latin, Classical Greek, possibly Ancient Hebrew and in addition to that a few contemporary languages, like, again, French and German.
I don’t think studying any one language in addition to your native one is hard, and it’s very good for your brains.
It’s not pathetic at all. The US is nearly three times the size of Europe and speaks the same language…why mandate learning another? It makes sense in Europe because of how many languages are spoken there.
If the US was like Europe with each state speaking a different language, it would probably be mandated. There is very little value for Joe Schmoe in the middle of Iowa to learn French or whatever.
You’re gonna get (rightfully, imo) downvoted not because people agree with you but because your post is condescending as fuck
Learning other languages promotis elastic thinking and makes you smarter overall, why not min-max?
Go for it, I’m not against learning a second language at all! But I’m not so sure about mandating it.
Either way, there is absolutely nothing embarrassing or pathetic about being monolingual
So would learning violin though, and I personally would prefer to play violin.
Huh, people here are really hostile to learning another language, with an undercurrent of 'Murica fuck yeah!
I’m sure part of it’s the tone of OP’s title, another part is that the demographics here seem to lean STEM over humanities, another part is that regular mix of people that just abhor anything mandatory, and some of what you mention among other things.
It’s pretty depressing tbh. I don’t agree with OP being all judgmental over it, nor do I think making learning another language mandatory would do much of anything. I’m pretty sure a few years of a secondary language already is mandatory in many schools, and we see how well that goes.
Nevertheless I do think everyone should aspire to learn other languages if for no other reason than simple curiosity, and making oneself at least a little more literate in other languages so that they may be able to experience even those stories that haven’t been translated. Think of all those gems in the rough you find in your own language that may not be translated to any others, and what gems may yet be found in other languages.
Imagine only knowing the lingua franca LOL. And using it purely to delve into internet sophistry. English is a brain disease.
Two half-overlapping bilingual people can translate for each other. You can travel all over the world p easily if one knows Spanish alone.
As a bi-lingual person I disagree. It makes sense for me to learn english as it’s practically an universal language but if you already speak that natively then I don’t see a need to learn some other language just for the sake of it. Yeah it’s not a bad thing but also not necessary. I spent 6 years studying swedish aswell but I never bothered to actually learn it because Swedes can talk english better than I can talk swedish. Every single hour sitting in the swedish class could’ve been spent better doing literally anything else.
Swedish is my third language. As I became more proficient in it, I quickly realized how many nuances and how much content you actually miss by only communicating in English while you live in Sweden.
If you live in Sweden, sure.
If I occasionally travel throughout Europe for work and pleasure, should I try to learn everything or stick with English?
If you don’t have any specific interest in a language you’ll probably do fine in English.
Yeah, I had a similar experience with learning Dutch when living in The Netherlands.
That said I can understand the problem for native English speakers to learn other languages even when living abroad in a place like that: the locals usually speak English so well that when they hear somebody trying to speak their language but finding it difficult, and that person has an accent from an english-speaking country, they just switch to English, so the only way for the other person to keep on trying to use the lical language in day to day life to improve it is to forcefully keeping on speaking it even when a local has switched to English which can be interpreted as rude (I’ve actually had to do that once or twice, though not usually because my accent is from a country were most people can’t speak English decently).
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if that kind of thing also happens in Sweden.
I get it. I have only succeeded at learning languages I’ve been sort of forced to learn, even when I’ve also genuinely wanted to learn them.
I wanted to study an undergraduate degree that is only given in Swedish, so I went to school specifically to learn Swedish before that.
I work with programming so I’d get away only with English but somehow I’ve managed to reach a point where people mostly speak to me in Swedish, even though I don’t look Scandinavian. I have a coworker that keeps talking to me in English and I reply to him in Swedish and sometimes it takes him a while to notice we’re speaking different languages.
It does require a sustained effort and I slip when I’m lazy or tired. Also, having to use a language that doesn’t let me project the best of me can be challenging as an adult.
All of that is very much how it went for me, even down to the whole extra difficulty to look and sound articulate and knowledgeable when one is has the extra barrier of speaking a language when one is far from mastering.
I’m sure that applies to all languages. Ironically I often struggle to express myself in my native language because I lack the finnish vocabulary for many on the words I use in english. Some words translate only into sentences and there often is no equivalance for many words in other languages.
Yeah I agree that it applies to all languages. I mean mostly that while it’s easy to get away with just English in places like Sweden, it’s not an equivalent experience. I really appreciate being able to communicate in Swedish here.
But yes, while my native language is Spanish, there are many things I can express better in English, and even Swedish. For example I learned a lot about myself emotionally and socially at the same time I was learning English as a teenager, and I struggle communicating these things in Spanish. I also only got proper therapy in Sweden and as a result, I express many aspects of my mental struggles best in Swedish.
Us speaks de facto on international language of communication. Other countries have much better second language programs because it is needed if you go outside of your (relatively small) country and or consume information on internet the vast majority of which is in English. The same story is for any English speaking country. Do you think that UK is different?
Well, this IS an unpopular opinion, so… thanks for that?
It was mandatory in my midwestern HS?
We had 3 students enrolled in Latin, maybe 30 in Japanese, the the rest in Spanish and mandarin.
Barely anyone kept it up. I blame a few factors. I think there should have been more encouraging elements.
