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Interesting read. I think there is some parallel to "secondary school languages." If you compare secondary school (or k-12) language programs, you will find a

by netcan 5y ago

Interesting read. I think there is some parallel to "secondary school languages." If you compare secondary school (or k-12) language programs, you will find a vast range of outcomes. Vast. In one context, kids acquire usable language skills. In others, basically nothing. I studied French for 4 years, as did all my classmates. Almost none achieved any level of proficiency. I've challenged several language teachers over the years with a "why bother?" If year after year kids matriculate without gaining enough proficiency to take a bus or order lunch... why not shut down the program and teach something else? Usually, the answer is (understandably) defensive. Highlighting of meta/peripheral benefits of learning a language. Noting that out-of-classroom context plays a big role. Ultimately though, IMO.... classroom language learning is hard, and we accept low levels of performance. Classicists, generally, learned latin in an undergraduate classroom setting. This is, very often, a very ineffective way of learning a language. Being normal and common, this standard is deemed acceptable. We don't really know how to fix the classroom. The Latin classroom also has less competition than other languages. High school French learners don't become French language scholars, at least not without actually learning French. With Latin, you can get away with it. So that's basically my take. We don't teach languages very well. Formal education settings often achieve pretty weak results. By and large, we just accept whatever results are achieved. Language programs don't "declare bankruptcy" if results achieved are weak. They accept it.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
The longest-term knowledge I gained from my high school Spanish classes was learning all the parts of speech that I should have learned in the fourth grade but didn’t pay attention in class.
TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
The classroom is useful to help bootstrap the understanding of the language: here are some common words, here are the rules they follow. But there's no substitute for diving into real texts, and there's not enough time in the classroom to do that enough. I spent years learning various languages at school, but moving to another country and being forced to read text (etc) in this new language day in, day out, taught me far more in the space of just a year or two.
- kergonath 5y ago
  > But there's no substitute for diving into real texts, and there's not enough time in the classroom to do that enough. True, but classroom is still necessary if you want to go beyond conversations in a more or les broken language. I often hear people complaining about school and arguing that you just need immersion in the culture. But looking at the grammar and the way the language works is invaluable to make sense of what you hear, truly understand it, and make progress beyond just repeating things you've heard already.
malauxyeux 5y ago
> If year after year kids matriculate without gaining enough proficiency [...] why not shut down the program and teach something else? It seems like you could generalize this for most of the curriculum. Once kids arrive at the conclusion "I'm never, ever going to use this," it's over for most of them. And, naturally, that's self-fulfilling. Most kids who didn't learn math ended up not needing math – and some proudly trumpet that back at their teachers later in life! Should we shut down math? Just anecdata, but among my friend group's children, I've seen a number of middle schoolers go from completely uninterested in a second language (English) to totally engaged once they discover YouTube or Netflix or a gaming community or whatever. And classroom learning is apparently useful for those kids. The last time one of my linguist friends enlightened me, the research pointed at classroom learning being really important for those who don't learn the L2 in the home. If those learners are left to absorb the language solely through immersion, they most often end up at a middling level with the language. That may be because with L2 immersion, a non-native speaker almost never gets feedback about language mistakes and so never has the chance to correct them. Instead, they see that what they say is understandable and keep repeating the same mistakes. (Maybe like, "Yesterday, I go to the store." Incorrect, but understandable.) That's not the end of the world, but it limits the speaker's opportunities with the language. Past a certain blurry threshold, they're unlikely to be hired to do a job that involves the language, for example.
- netcan 5y ago
  I don't think it's correct to generalize this for most of the curriculum. Most people do learn some math skills. Many kids learn more than the basics. Obviously experiences vary. Yes, there are a lot of out-of-classroom factors. I think second language learning is a more extreme case though. Many language programs seem to produce very little. Math doesn't have that kind of variance. If kids' math skills are years behind another school system's... that gets noticed and acted on. If a language program produces almost no language skills, it tends to just be accepted.
- eru 5y ago
  > Should we shut down math? Math teaching in school? Maybe. It doesn't seem to be very efficient, and mostly a waste of time. (And I say that as someone who has studied math at university.)
neutronicus 5y ago
If you're in the US, studying French was the first mistake. Over time, it's increasingly struck me as negligent (in most US localities) to teach anything besides Spanish. We've got a huge sub-population that faces all kinds of obstacles because the English-speakers can't communicate with them and we're fucking around with Latin? My extended family on my dad's side speak Spanish and I took Latin in high school? I can't talk with 3 out of 4 of the guys working on my house!
- bobochan 5y ago
  French instruction starts very early in our town in Vermont because there are over 8 million French speakers right next to us, including almost 2 million living right over the border in Montréal. The ability to communicate in French has been incredibly useful over the course of my career, not just in North America, but across Europe and Africa. There are 29 countries that speak French as an official language and about 274 million fluent speakers.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Spanish has 4x more speakers and a far easier ortography.
- FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago
  I work IT in a manufacturing industry. Over the last 10 years, the plant operations have moved to almost 100% Spanish speaking. There's also Portuguese, French (Haitians), Igbo, Xhosa, Swahili, Afrikaans, and whole host of indigenous languages spoke out there (Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, Chol, who knows what else) ...
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  Perhaps people learn French, Latin, and German because they want to. Who are you to say what they may or may not choose to learn? A diversity of education and knowledge is a good thing for a culture, and if it was not, people would still be justified in learning what they want to learn. Besides, that we have a sizable population that either has not yet learned English or has chosen not to does not create an obligation in others to learn their language. Are you certain it's more important to enable a sub-community that has not embraced the dominant language of the country, rather than be able to experience the thoughts of the ancients in their own Latin? To extend your argument, I live in an area with a large Hmong population that has not fully embraced English; should the schools here abandon education in all languages but English and Hmong?
lr4444lr 5y ago
Agreed, and with Latin, it's entirely defensible, because there is no country or province other than the vatican where you can even select it as a language on the ATM machine. Latin's positioning as a purely academic pursuit, both as a cultural treasure trove and an excellent gateway to linguistics is the only thing that even makes sense. Modern day spoken Latin revival is cute, and I certainly support it insofar as it can aid reading fluency, but it's about as useless and artificial as Esperanto.
rjsw 5y ago
French is the only thing I was taught at school that I still use. We were not taught it well but it provided enough of a base for me to build on and teach myself to a what I would like to think is a fairly high standard. I also learned Latin. The Head Teacher was a Latin graduate and he ran a class after school, it was informal and fun and I feel that I picked it up quite quickly.
someguydave 5y ago
almost nothing government does “declares bankruptcy” even in the face of obvious failure.
singron 5y ago
At least at my public schools, languages weren't tracked, unlike the other subjects (i.e. one level for everyone, not A/B/C or Honors/Advanced/Standard). Tracking is controversial, but those classes were circuses. The teacher has to cater to the lowest common denominator (or the lowest 25%-ile at most) and can make excruciatingly slow progress. The high performers get bored and also start causing distractions. It's a rough job and it seemed like it had high turnover.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
> We don't teach languages very well. Formal education settings often achieve pretty weak results. We need to stop teaching languages and start using them. Practically every child in Norway can speak English by the end of primary school but this is not because Norwegian teachers have some magic inaccessible to the rest of the world; it is because they are surrounded by English on the web, on television, film, computer games and they find it useful. My three children were fluent in their second language (Norwegian) by the time they were four years old with no formal language instruction of any kind, we just sent them to the local kindergarten three days a week from the age of three once they were fluent in English. if memory serves Montaigne said that he learned Latin much the same way, his father hired a tutor who was instructed to speak only Latin.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  The best way I found to learn a language (as an adult) is to read dual-language books.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > we just sent them to the local kindergarten That is how I came to learn French; I went to a Paris kindergarten aged 3. Apparently I hated it for 6 months, but after that I was pretty fluent. When we returned to England, and I went to an English school, I was marked down by the French teacher for using the subjunctive before I had been taught it.
da39a3ee 5y ago
Yes, that's my worry also (knowing nothing about the world of contemporary classicists): in Anglophone countries such as the USA and UK it's become normal even among educated people to think that speaking a foreign language is just utterly beyond them. It's pretty embarrassing.

by netcan 5y ago

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

The longest-term knowledge I gained from my high school Spanish classes was learning all the parts of speech that I should have learned in the fourth grade but didn’t pay attention in class.

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago

The classroom is useful to help bootstrap the understanding of the language: here are some common words, here are the rules they follow. But there's no substitute for diving into real texts, and there's not enough time in the classroom to do that enough. I spent years learning various languages at school, but moving to another country and being forced to read text (etc) in this new language day in, day out, taught me far more in the space of just a year or two.

kergonath 5y ago
> But there's no substitute for diving into real texts, and there's not enough time in the classroom to do that enough. True, but classroom is still necessary if you want to go beyond conversations in a more or les broken language. I often hear people complaining about school and arguing that you just need immersion in the culture. But looking at the grammar and the way the language works is invaluable to make sense of what you hear, truly understand it, and make progress beyond just repeating things you've heard already.

malauxyeux 5y ago

> If year after year kids matriculate without gaining enough proficiency [...] why not shut down the program and teach something else? It seems like you could generalize this for most of the curriculum. Once kids arrive at the conclusion "I'm never, ever going to use this," it's over for most of them. And, naturally, that's self-fulfilling. Most kids who didn't learn math ended up not needing math – and some proudly trumpet that back at their teachers later in life! Should we shut down math? Just anecdata, but among my friend group's children, I've seen a number of middle schoolers go from completely uninterested in a second language (English) to totally engaged once they discover YouTube or Netflix or a gaming community or whatever. And classroom learning is apparently useful for those kids. The last time one of my linguist friends enlightened me, the research pointed at classroom learning being really important for those who don't learn the L2 in the home. If those learners are left to absorb the language solely through immersion, they most often end up at a middling level with the language. That may be because with L2 immersion, a non-native speaker almost never gets feedback about language mistakes and so never has the chance to correct them. Instead, they see that what they say is understandable and keep repeating the same mistakes. (Maybe like, "Yesterday, I go to the store." Incorrect, but understandable.) That's not the end of the world, but it limits the speaker's opportunities with the language. Past a certain blurry threshold, they're unlikely to be hired to do a job that involves the language, for example.

netcan 5y ago
I don't think it's correct to generalize this for most of the curriculum. Most people do learn some math skills. Many kids learn more than the basics. Obviously experiences vary. Yes, there are a lot of out-of-classroom factors. I think second language learning is a more extreme case though. Many language programs seem to produce very little. Math doesn't have that kind of variance. If kids' math skills are years behind another school system's... that gets noticed and acted on. If a language program produces almost no language skills, it tends to just be accepted.
eru 5y ago
> Should we shut down math? Math teaching in school? Maybe. It doesn't seem to be very efficient, and mostly a waste of time. (And I say that as someone who has studied math at university.)

neutronicus 5y ago

If you're in the US, studying French was the first mistake. Over time, it's increasingly struck me as negligent (in most US localities) to teach anything besides Spanish. We've got a huge sub-population that faces all kinds of obstacles because the English-speakers can't communicate with them and we're fucking around with Latin? My extended family on my dad's side speak Spanish and I took Latin in high school? I can't talk with 3 out of 4 of the guys working on my house!

bobochan 5y ago
French instruction starts very early in our town in Vermont because there are over 8 million French speakers right next to us, including almost 2 million living right over the border in Montréal. The ability to communicate in French has been incredibly useful over the course of my career, not just in North America, but across Europe and Africa. There are 29 countries that speak French as an official language and about 274 million fluent speakers.
- anthk 5y ago
  Spanish has 4x more speakers and a far easier ortography.
FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago
I work IT in a manufacturing industry. Over the last 10 years, the plant operations have moved to almost 100% Spanish speaking. There's also Portuguese, French (Haitians), Igbo, Xhosa, Swahili, Afrikaans, and whole host of indigenous languages spoke out there (Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, Chol, who knows what else) ...
JasonFruit 5y ago
Perhaps people learn French, Latin, and German because they want to. Who are you to say what they may or may not choose to learn? A diversity of education and knowledge is a good thing for a culture, and if it was not, people would still be justified in learning what they want to learn. Besides, that we have a sizable population that either has not yet learned English or has chosen not to does not create an obligation in others to learn their language. Are you certain it's more important to enable a sub-community that has not embraced the dominant language of the country, rather than be able to experience the thoughts of the ancients in their own Latin? To extend your argument, I live in an area with a large Hmong population that has not fully embraced English; should the schools here abandon education in all languages but English and Hmong?

lr4444lr 5y ago

Agreed, and with Latin, it's entirely defensible, because there is no country or province other than the vatican where you can even select it as a language on the ATM machine. Latin's positioning as a purely academic pursuit, both as a cultural treasure trove and an excellent gateway to linguistics is the only thing that even makes sense. Modern day spoken Latin revival is cute, and I certainly support it insofar as it can aid reading fluency, but it's about as useless and artificial as Esperanto.

rjsw 5y ago

French is the only thing I was taught at school that I still use. We were not taught it well but it provided enough of a base for me to build on and teach myself to a what I would like to think is a fairly high standard. I also learned Latin. The Head Teacher was a Latin graduate and he ran a class after school, it was informal and fun and I feel that I picked it up quite quickly.

someguydave 5y ago

almost nothing government does “declares bankruptcy” even in the face of obvious failure.

singron 5y ago

At least at my public schools, languages weren't tracked, unlike the other subjects (i.e. one level for everyone, not A/B/C or Honors/Advanced/Standard). Tracking is controversial, but those classes were circuses. The teacher has to cater to the lowest common denominator (or the lowest 25%-ile at most) and can make excruciatingly slow progress. The high performers get bored and also start causing distractions. It's a rough job and it seemed like it had high turnover.

kwhitefoot 5y ago

> We don't teach languages very well. Formal education settings often achieve pretty weak results. We need to stop teaching languages and start using them. Practically every child in Norway can speak English by the end of primary school but this is not because Norwegian teachers have some magic inaccessible to the rest of the world; it is because they are surrounded by English on the web, on television, film, computer games and they find it useful. My three children were fluent in their second language (Norwegian) by the time they were four years old with no formal language instruction of any kind, we just sent them to the local kindergarten three days a week from the age of three once they were fluent in English. if memory serves Montaigne said that he learned Latin much the same way, his father hired a tutor who was instructed to speak only Latin.

Koshkin 5y ago
The best way I found to learn a language (as an adult) is to read dual-language books.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> we just sent them to the local kindergarten That is how I came to learn French; I went to a Paris kindergarten aged 3. Apparently I hated it for 6 months, but after that I was pretty fluent. When we returned to England, and I went to an English school, I was marked down by the French teacher for using the subjunctive before I had been taught it.

da39a3ee 5y ago

Yes, that's my worry also (knowing nothing about the world of contemporary classicists): in Anglophone countries such as the USA and UK it's become normal even among educated people to think that speaking a foreign language is just utterly beyond them. It's pretty embarrassing.