posted
This is a first time post here, though I've read these forums for quite some time.
I was reading the thread "America & Illegal Immigrants" and there was some talk about every other country being bilingual.
Since growing up I've heard this touted as a reason why Americans are either dumb, lazy, inferior, or just some other thing. (Of course that's probably me projecting insecurities)
My econ brain boils it down to this. Learning English is worth a lot more than learning another language. You can dispute with me on that point I suppose, but I do think that learning another language does have value.
What do you think would be a good idea to make learning another language worth more value? Forcing education down student's throats? Well since when did that ever work?
Posts: 362 | Registered: Nov 2008
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I cannot learn languages. I have tried and it just doesn't work for me. I spent years in speech therapy trying to learn to speak English properly. However, I have every intention of putting my daughter in a language class as soon as she turns five. I would have done so earlier, but that was the youngest class I could find in my language of choice (Mandarin). A lot of daycares offer lessons in Spanish starting at one. In a different local, I could probably find other languages more easily. But I think forcing education as young as possible is important. Waiting until high school is too long. If you had 12 years of a language, it would be a whole lot easier as an adult to be bilingual.
Posts: 2223 | Registered: Mar 2008
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quote:Originally posted by stilesbn: What do you think would be a good idea to make learning another language worth more value? Forcing education down student's throats? Well since when did that ever work?
I think that is reversed. Forcing education down people's throats should reduce the value, not increase it.
Going back to the tourist example. If you're the one white American in a group in China that knows Chinese, you have the power. You control the itinerary, people have to buy things through you, you can rip-off your fellow travelers, you can do any number of things. If two white Americans know Chinese, you're suddenly less special.
An amazing number of Chinese people know Dashan because he's one of the few (proportionately) white guys that can speak fluent Chinese to the extent that he can cross talk.
When's the last time a Chinese American got famous just for speaking in English?
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the forum hasn't been this appealing or sane in six years. its perpetually worst and most inflammatory participants have either been banned, forcefully curtailed, or otherwise haven't shown their face in some time now.
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Well, for most people around the world, the 2nd language they learn is English. So there is obviously lesser need for Americans to learn a 2nd language.
The problem is that when kids are in elementary school, they can't yet know whether they will benefit in their life from Chinese, Spanish, Russia, German, French, or some other 2nd language.
quote:The problem is that when kids are in elementary school, they can't yet know whether they will benefit in their life from Chinese, Spanish, Russia, French, or some other 2nd language.
I think this is the crux of it. Or at least it is for me: I recognize(d) that scenarios exist in which it would be of great help for me to know another language. But what language? And how did I know these things would come about? I have never had any goals of working internationally, working significantly in a field that would require a foreign language, or even doing much international travel. Of course it's always nice to know another language, but important enough to spend that much time on it? I'm, as others here, very bad at learning a foreign language. I know this because I tried for four years to learn French and now know about 6 words and none of the grammar.
posted
Here in Finland we learn both a 2nd and 3rd language in school. The 2nd language is English, which we start studying on the 3rd grade. English is of course very useful, and students are motivated to learn it, because so much of entertainment/arts/culture is in English, and because everyone knows how good it is to know it if you ever work/travel abroad.
The 3rd language is Swedish, which we start studying on the 7th grade. If you go to high school, you study it for 6 years all in all. We learn Swedish mainly because of our cultural/historical ties to Sweden.
The problem is, there is no use for Swedish. When you travel to Sweden or work with them, they have excellent English (as do Finnish people). So we always end up speaking English with them anyway, and Swedes prefer it, because they know Finnish people speak better English than Swedish.
In school, students generally have extremely low motivation for Swedish classes, because there is seemingly no use it at all. It's common for students to be good in all the other subjects, except for Swedish. It's harmful for the overall performance of students.
There are other languages that would be much more useful for travel and commerce, such as Russia (Russians are notoriously bad in English). Or German. Or Spanish. Or Chinese. Or French. But we are stuck with Swedish, and usually we can start learning a 4th language only in High School.
A lot of people here in Finland think all that time could be much more wisely spent into learning something that is actually useful in life. We are bound to lose the perfunctory Swedish at some point, but it still remains in our school program as a historical relic.
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quote:The problem is that when kids are in elementary school, they can't yet know whether they will benefit in their life from Chinese, Spanish, Russia, German, French, or some other 2nd language.
I think that having learned any language helps you to learn another, when and if necessary. Good language instruction should probably at least give you an idea of the kinds of tools you can use to improve your skills if you continue to learn more languages later.
But being monolingual is certainly not only a US issue. It's true of nearly all English speaking countries - except those such as Ireland which have their own local languages in which people may actually reach fluency. But that's clearly not 'foreign' language teaching, but rather part of the culture.
Most people in the UK speak exactly one language, are not taught even English grammar in school, and mandatory foreign language teaching starts at 11 years old and ends at 14 - so for many that's only three years, in which they learn to say nothing more than 'my name is' and 'I live here'. Because everyone speaks English, right?
Now that it's so easy to just listen to free podcasts and music, watch TV shows and movies in every language under the sun and meet people from all over the world, it's easier than ever to pick up a bit of another language. Whether people will take advantage of that, remains to be seen.
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quote:The problem is that when kids are in elementary school, they can't yet know whether they will benefit in their life from Chinese, Spanish, Russia, German, French, or some other 2nd language.
I think that having learned any language helps you to learn another, when and if necessary. Good language instruction should probably at least give you an idea of the kinds of tools you can use to improve your skills if you continue to learn more languages later.
This might be true, but it could also be argued that learning your native language well also gives you the same tools. Here in Finland we start studying Finnish on the 1st grade. Usually when someone teaches you a new language, your own native language is used as a reference. "In English adverb works like this, in Chinese you do the same thing like this...".
Different languages are drastically different. Learning Spanish might help you to more easily learn some other language which has its roots in Latin, such as French, but it's debatable whether it's any use when you try to learn Chinese.
Maybe there are some empirical studies on this? I'm fully admit I'm not an expert on the subject.
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quote:Originally posted by Tuukka: Different languages are drastically different. Learning Spanish might help you to more easily learn some other language which has its roots in Latin, such as French, but it's debatable whether it's any use when you try to learn Chinese.
I'm not conversationally fluent in anything other than English, but I can read in five (non-English) languages fairly easily and well and a couple more leaning heavily on a dictionary. The Fab Five, as it were, are generally related, which made learning subsequent languages in the group pretty easy. I started with French in seventh grade, and plowed through Italian, (ancient) Greek, German and Latin in various bits of college and grad school. By the time I started Latin, it was super-easy. Greek and German both have cases, so that wasn't challenging, and French and Italian are dramatically similar (as expected). I also met a couple friends who taught me a bit of Romanian, which is pretty much modern Latin with some Slavic loan words - quite easy to pick up after all!
A couple years ago, I was bored with only studying things in English, so I cast around for another language to learn. I wanted something harder than Greek (where we say "It's all Greek to me", Greeks say "It's all Chinese to me"); when I told a friend, she thrust a Japanese textbook at me. Little syllabic pictures are hard! But because I had learned several languages, I had the process down - I knew which parts of grammar I needed to learn first (verb rules first, then prepositions, which is not traditional). Despite being totally unrelated languages, it wasn't impossible for me to start picking up the linguistic mechanics.*
So, yeah. tl;dr: Learning a language early teaches you how to learn other languages, I think. I base this on personal experience, not any sort of expert-ness.
* Full disclaimer: I stopped studying pretty quickly, and have instead picked up words here and there watching crappy Japanese shows. I may yet take an actual class, instead of reading a friend's old textbook while waiting for work on my car to be done.
Posts: 3932 | Registered: Sep 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Tuukka: This might be true, but it could also be argued that learning your native language well also gives you the same tools.
This would not be argued by anyone who knows much about language acquisition.
The language learning process that a child goes through is one element of the construction of the intellectual process. Children are able to absorb vastly larger amounts of linguistic information in much greater detail than adults, but the process is distinctly non-intellectual, and largely non-repeatable. In my experience working with kids, I've found that you can gauge someone's language acquisition plasticity with some accuracy by judging their overall level of intellectual skepticism. At the age of about 15, skepticism is as entrenched as it can be, and language learning is slowest. It actually picks up again and goes faster at around 19, and then slows into adulthood.
But the fact that you learned a language does not actually help you learn another one (at least, it confers no special advantage we can judge, since we all learn at least one language). However, there is some anecdotal evidence that the lack of proper language exposure *can* cause the brain to develop without employing the language acquisition device, and a person would then be incapable of acquiring language at all.
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I learned some German as a young child and French from Grade 7 to the end of High School. I've picked up latin bases from general experience.
I speak neither fluently, but I understand clearly-spoken French well. I have found it inordinately practical and enlightening to have knowledge of other languages. There are places you go where there is, say, a machine that requires you to read very basic French or German.
I was talking with someone yesterday who, seeing "mangetout" on the menu not only pronounced it mang-e-tout, had not idea what they were or what mange tout might mean. For me, that seems like a massive gap in education. Of course, I would have the exact same issue with a Japanese word or even a German one, but I feel that at least I have some knowledge. French, of course, carries over in to Italian, Spanish and Romanian, which is helpful in deciphering words.
Learning another language helped me to understand my own. I didn't really think about English tenses until I studied French tenses. I didn't understand latin-based words until I studied Latin phonemes.
A second language, like learning any skill, improves the brains of children and therefore it is beneficial for young people to be challenged in this way. It's for the same reason as I would recommend children learn music or learn to play sports (as opposed to, say, merely running to keep fit). Learning complicated things like the rules and specific skills of sports or how to play an instrument or how to speak another language challenges our brains and ensures that we fully develop them.
As adults, it keeps our minds slightly more elastic to continue learning. It is well demonstrated, I believe, that older people who continue to challenge their minds are less likely to experience such strong effects of brain-affecting diseases such as Alzheimers.
quote:But the fact that you learned a language does not actually help you learn another one (at least, it confers no special advantage we can judge, since we all learn at least one language). However, there is some anecdotal evidence that the lack of proper language exposure *can* cause the brain to develop without employing the language acquisition device, and a person would then be incapable of acquiring language at all.
I thought this was pretty well shown among abuse victims who never learnt language: as older children and adults they can improve their skills a bit, but cannot gain the complex, nuanced grammar and vast vocabulary that most people learn by default.
Perhaps the same, as Orinoco suggests, can be applied beyond your first language. An additional language perhaps forces more connections in your brain, just like learning music does. This is purely conjectural, though. In that case, it would be beneficial to start early in order to maximize your future potential.
For the same reason, I would encourage students to focus as broadly as possible on subjects at school, to ensure they do have the currency to understand a variety of topics when inevitably forced to interact with them in the real world.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:Now my spidey sense is tingling. How many new posters have been popping up in this subject area within a few days?
Does this mean you have radioactive blood?
quote:the forum hasn't been this appealing or sane in six years. its perpetually worst and most inflammatory participants have either been banned, forcefully curtailed, or otherwise haven't shown their face in some time now.
Well I hope I don't turn out to be one of those crazy people.
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posted
I have no interest in searching for it, but I thought it had been pretty well proven that children who have learned a second language before the age of five had permanent changes in brain structure that made learning additional languages easier.
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For two languages, yes. My response was to the idea that having learned a first language helps. It does, but is a moot point. Two languages or more can be beneficial, but at or above 5, there is anecdotal evidence of diminishing returns. I know from my experience of teaching students who spoke at a C2 level in more than 3 languages, learning was not noticeably faster than those who spoke only 3. And anecdotally,blinguists and translators I've known have commented that past the 3rd language learned in a different language family (for instance, a good friend of mine is fluent in Czech, English, Spanish and Arabic), the acquisition of further languages is slower, if only due to advancing age.
Not being above B1 in my third language, I can't comment from personal experience, except to say that the third has been harder than the second was- but probably because it is less related to English.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Tuukka: This might be true, but it could also be argued that learning your native language well also gives you the same tools.
This would not be argued by anyone who knows much about language acquisition.
The language learning process that a child goes through is one element of the construction of the intellectual process. Children are able to absorb vastly larger amounts of linguistic information in much greater detail than adults, but the process is distinctly non-intellectual, and largely non-repeatable. In my experience working with kids, I've found that you can gauge someone's language acquisition plasticity with some accuracy by judging their overall level of intellectual skepticism. At the age of about 15, skepticism is as entrenched as it can be, and language learning is slowest. It actually picks up again and goes faster at around 19, and then slows into adulthood.
But the fact that you learned a language does not actually help you learn another one (at least, it confers no special advantage we can judge, since we all learn at least one language). However, there is some anecdotal evidence that the lack of proper language exposure *can* cause the brain to develop without employing the language acquisition device, and a person would then be incapable of acquiring language at all.
Just to clarify, I wasn't talking about merely learning to speak/read/write your native language, which almost all people learn to adequate degree.
At least here in Finland we study Finnish in great detail. It's an intellectual process, in which we deconstruct Finnish language and learn how it operates in a very detailed manner. It goes way beyond what a child learns in his non-school life.
In my experience the process was later certainly helpful. when studying new languages. Anyone who would have not first gone through the Finnish classes would have struggled to fully understand the English or Swedish classes.
I'm not arguing your point otherwise. Personally I do think that training languages trains the brain in general, and the more trained the brain is, the easier it should be for it to adapt to new, but similar challenges. The concept of fully replacing your vocabulary and grammar might be very difficult for an adult, whose brain has never faced such challenge.
It would be interesting to read some empiric data on this along with anecdotal evidence.
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Teshi: in your anonymous friend's defense, it would never have normally occurred to me that a "mangetout" would be a kind of pea, and I do speak French. I mean, we don't call oranges "eat only the middle, but not the very middle."
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Although mang-e-tout sound like someone rather unhygienic who sells over priced tickets to not-very-good concerts.
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There are studies that show that learning one foreign language (L2) helps you learn others (L3, etc) but they believe this is due mostly to the metalinguistic awareness that you develop.
There might also be benefits because of the way the mind of bilingual people map concepts, but this is still theoretical. Interestingly enough, people who map words in different languages to different concepts (for example, when they hear "church" they picture the Baptist church down the road but when they hear "iglesia" they picture a Catholic cathedral) tend to be better language learners than people who map words in new languages to the same concept in their native language (people who hear "iglesia" and picture the same Baptist church down the road they picture for "church"). It has to do with processing time - the way our brains store language doesn't seem to be efficient, like a computer, but rather redundant. The more redundant, the faster and smoother it seems to work.
That said, there are definite benefits to bilingualism that go beyond merely being able to speak the other language. Bilingual children outperform their peers on memory, focus, and other tasks. So, frankly, it doesn't really matter what second language you learn. It doesn't matter how "useful" it is. Teach your child anything, but make sure they really get an opportunity to learn it on a deep level and have plenty of chances to use it in authentic situations (even if this just means watching foreign language TV, reading books, etc.) It will help them in other academic pursuits, and it will help them have a leg up when they go for an L3 or L4 later in life.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Also, I have to throw another viewpoint in here: there's a lot of talk about other countries being bilingual, but "teaching English" does not equal "being bilingual." There are students in other countries (My area of expertise is Asia; I think things are probably different in Europe) who study English for upwards of 10 years and yet never develop communicative competence. There are students who can get high scores on the verbal section of the GRE and yet not carry on a conversation with a native speaker.
So don't be too quick to hop on the bandwagon of "everyone does it better than us." True, English is taught as a second language all over the world, and the US lags far behind in terms of numbers of students who study a foreign language, but actually language pedagogy in the US is leading the world. Our research and teaching methods are top notch and if you *do* study a language here, you can get an excellent education.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Annie: There are studies that show that learning one foreign language (L2) helps you learn others (L3, etc) but they believe this is due mostly to the metalinguistic awareness that you develop.
There might also be benefits because of the way the mind of bilingual people map concepts, but this is still theoretical. Interestingly enough, people who map words in different languages to different concepts (for example, when they hear "church" they picture the Baptist church down the road but when they hear "iglesia" they picture a Catholic cathedral) tend to be better language learners than people who map words in new languages to the same concept in their native language (people who hear "iglesia" and picture the same Baptist church down the road they picture for "church"). It has to do with processing time - the way our brains store language doesn't seem to be efficient, like a computer, but rather redundant. The more redundant, the faster and smoother it seems to work.
Hah, that *is* interesting. For the three languages that I know the word "church" in, I have three different images. I never realized that.
It does get weird with the verbs though. Like when I'm in a store at home, I don't think "shopping" I think "nakoupovani," which is actually different from how I would do things in America. They're actually two different activities to me.
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You're in the minority, then, Orincoro, but one of the best at language learning.
We did an activity like this in a psycholinguistics course and almost all of us were multiple-mappers. But it was a room full of people studying linguistics or second-language acquisition, so it was a very skewed sample.
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