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> I'm not even convinced that foreign languages are worth teaching at school. Bryan Caplan writes about how in terms if effort/reward, English is the only forei
by bigthymer 3y ago
> I'm not even convinced that foreign languages are worth teaching at school. Bryan Caplan writes about how in terms if effort/reward, English is the only foreign language that will be worth studying. Personally I spent many years in Spanish and French classes, and I've pretty much forgotten everything. Complete waste of time. Another thing that makes me feel like this is just another checkbox instead of something done for the children.
Myself and I believe all of my cousins took Spanish classes in school. I've hardly used it since then and my Spanish is terrible. However, theirs is much better. I think it largely depends on what type of career you are involved in and whether frequent interaction with regular people is involved. Most of us in the software world only interact with others in professional environments who speak English well.
- treyd 3y agoAlso, while I essentially never had a use for the 2 years of spanish I took in high school, it really made my english writing better. Learning spanish made me learn more about the structure of sentences (how to talk about direct/indirect objects, etc.) and learn more latin roots that I never would have consciously been exposed to, which is very useful to me now in the context of figuring out what people are saying when hearing/reading other european languages. It made my grades in english classes go up since my writing was more formally correct and comprehensible. The knowledge transfer felt the same as it does when applying skills learned in the context of one programming language to another programming language.
- zeroCalories 3y agoThat's more of an argument for Latin.
- Ekaros 3y agoLatin grammar feels quite artificial I would say... Maybe it is the nature of dead language that has been locked down. There are things to understand in conventions, but for understanding English Latin is probably not right tool.
- colonCapitalDee 3y agoMan, taking Spanish in high school blew my mind. I'm a native English speaker with excellent grammar (I missed one question on the reading and writing section of the SAT), but it's all subconscious. I just go with what sounds right when I read aloud in my head, and it's almost always correct. When we started learning about conjugating verbs in Spanish class I was like, we do this in English? I had never thought about it before. I still haven't thought about it, I have no idea what tenses we have in English. But I can speak and write it just fine! Brains are pretty crazy.
- zeroCalories 3y agoYeah, usage is important. Most people don't need Spanish. It makes you fit to work in low class blue collar jobs. You should spend your time on extracurriculars, or anything else. Of course, if you're interested in a foreign language, for any reason, I wouldn't discourage you from learning it. I just would not make it a required part of a curriculum.
- kcplate 3y ago> It makes you fit to work in low class blue collar jobs. Go take a tech job in Miami and get back to us…
- deprecative 3y agoI dunno, taking a tech job in a red state seems like a giant footgun.
- kcplate 3y agoYes, you are right, it’s simply awful here—perhaps you should stay away and just visit occasionally to pay my taxes for me.
- bsder 3y ago> It makes you fit to work in low class blue collar jobs. It also allows you to interact with those important people. The people making my sandwich, cleaning my office, etc. can be more readily interacted with in their preferred language.
- zeroCalories 3y agoThey know English better than you know Spanish. Going out of your way to speak to them in Spanish is a silly performance of humility.