3 ms·

I took two years of a foreign language in high school. I only learned a little bit of vocabulary, and conjugation in only a couple of tenses. I don't think it

by csense 13y ago

I took two years of a foreign language in high school. I only learned a little bit of vocabulary, and conjugation in only a couple of tenses. I don't think it much improved my ability to communicate with non-English speakers (and anyway, I haven't encountered any, so it's kind of irrelevant). Then I had to take more foreign language in college to satisfy a graduation requirement. I'd already had it in high school; I'd already learned that I wasn't good at it and didn't enjoy it. Me sitting through that college class was an utter waste of time and effort for both me and the professor. Not everybody is good at, or cares about, learning languages. If a student's had a few months of foreign language instruction at some point in their life, you shouldn't force them to take more.

Dewie 13y ago
Now replace "foreign language" with "math" and consider that many have spoken out about how the typical mathematics curriculum is backwards and gives the wrong impression about what math is really about. I hate learning languages in a school setting. Yet I have gained a minor interest in languages now many years after high school, and can appreciate learning it on my own premises.
- csense 13y ago
  An interesting analogy, so I upvoted you. But I would argue that foreign language and math are in some sense opposites. If I forget that the quadratic formula is the string of symbols "(-b +- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)) / (2a)", I can hack around that gap in any number of ways. Re-deriving the formula, or solving a specific quadratic equation by completing the square, factoring, or graphical/numerical methods would all be viable solutions. If I forget the word for "take", or I don't remember the sequence of characters that turns the base word for "take" into "you (plural) took", there's no way I can reconstruct that information from other knowledge. It's easy to learn things in math because the new things are a natural extension of what you learn. Foreign languages are memorizing a lot of words and conjugations which don't fit together in any meaningful way. For me, it seems like math is much easier to learn because the connectedness of everything means the entropy content of new material is very low, and any particular hole in your memory is of little consequence since you can easily fill it back in. But I can see where other people whose minds work differently might be scared by the nearly infinite rabbit hole you can get into in mathematics by starting somewhere and going related places, and might do much better with memorization of lists of words and conjugations. I've also heard that foreign language gets a little easier and more connected once you have some critical mass of vocabulary and grammar, but I've never been able to stand the pain of the early stage long enough to get to that point.

by csense 13y ago

Dewie 13y ago

Now replace "foreign language" with "math" and consider that many have spoken out about how the typical mathematics curriculum is backwards and gives the wrong impression about what math is really about. I hate learning languages in a school setting. Yet I have gained a minor interest in languages now many years after high school, and can appreciate learning it on my own premises.

csense 13y ago
An interesting analogy, so I upvoted you. But I would argue that foreign language and math are in some sense opposites. If I forget that the quadratic formula is the string of symbols "(-b +- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)) / (2a)", I can hack around that gap in any number of ways. Re-deriving the formula, or solving a specific quadratic equation by completing the square, factoring, or graphical/numerical methods would all be viable solutions. If I forget the word for "take", or I don't remember the sequence of characters that turns the base word for "take" into "you (plural) took", there's no way I can reconstruct that information from other knowledge. It's easy to learn things in math because the new things are a natural extension of what you learn. Foreign languages are memorizing a lot of words and conjugations which don't fit together in any meaningful way. For me, it seems like math is much easier to learn because the connectedness of everything means the entropy content of new material is very low, and any particular hole in your memory is of little consequence since you can easily fill it back in. But I can see where other people whose minds work differently might be scared by the nearly infinite rabbit hole you can get into in mathematics by starting somewhere and going related places, and might do much better with memorization of lists of words and conjugations. I've also heard that foreign language gets a little easier and more connected once you have some critical mass of vocabulary and grammar, but I've never been able to stand the pain of the early stage long enough to get to that point.