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As an example, people routinely study a foreign language for 3+ years and come out with zero ability to actually use the language. While a couple of months in t

As an example, people routinely study a foreign language for 3+ years and come out with zero ability to actually use the language. While a couple of months in the same country will produce a person with real useful usable skills in the language. If you believed that school was there to teach people this is shocking. But it all makes sense on the basis that school is there to keep young people out of the way.

hrktb 12y ago
While true, this ignores the actual number of hours spent using the language. 3 years of at most 2h a week lessons, that's around 300 hours. Deal with the language 15 hours a day and in 20 days you reach the same 300 hours. Of course actual involvment in the lessons, motivation, effectiveness of being immerged also make going to a speaking country a better deal. About the social role of school, one of the badic goals is to format young people into "standard" citizens who can obey rules and bear authority. Sitting for long hours listening to some adult is part of the process.
Balgair 12y ago
Hear, hear! I use Duolingo for new languages and their system of spaced repetition is so vastly better than Ms. McGee's that I wouldn't even think to enroll a student in a class anymore. I was using Duolingo to study Italian before a trip to Milan and even then using the app was nearly pointless. All it did was get me started in the grammar and some basic words, but actually being surrounded by Italian, seeing it on every billboard, every menu, every streetcorner, having almost no-one speak to you in English (if requested), THAT got me good in Italian. If we simply wanted to take a random assortment of children, fly them to #Country# and let them live there, that would get the language and culture into you. Reading this back, actually, that is what I think I'll do with my kids then. We have family all over the world, speaking a variety of languages, we should just have the kids go there for a month each summer. In the end, it'll be less expensive, maybe....
ufmace 12y ago
I don't think of myself as being good at learning foreign languages, and I don't know enough of any of them to have any useful conversation, but I kinda disagree that just being in a country that speaks that language will get you started. I've spent weeks in Mexico, and my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant most of the time. I didn't feel like I gained anything at that point by being surrounded by Spanish speech and media. I think that the first hard part or learning a new language is just bridging that gap of memorizing thousands of new words and their meanings. If you haven't done that, any amount of exposure to the language is mostly meaningless gibberish that you don't know where to start at deciphering. I don't see how that helps you learn it. For what it's worth, I learned a lot more from using Duolingo for a while than from immersion. I figure a better way to really get started would be to work at that, and translate newspaper articles by hand for a few hours a day, not that I've tried it.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  >my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant most of the time // So you didn't eat out, how did you manage getting your shopping in, buying bus tickets and such without learning any of the local language, just hoped people spoke English?
  - ufmace 12y ago
    It was a trip for work, so I was mostly accompanied by people who did speak Spanish.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      Ah, people speaking other languages around me annoys me enough that I want to know what they're saying!
      - ufmace 12y ago
        Yeah, it could be kind of annoying in a way. I could catch maybe 5-10% of a Spanish conversation. Like I was saying in the original, I think I'd need to boost my vocabulary by at least 10x before listening to spoken Spanish would have much benefit. Trying to listen actually kinda reminds me of learning Vim, where you spend what feels like forever at first totally lost, and doing the simplest edit seems to require so much mental effort that you can't actually think about the code you're working on.
smsm42 12y ago
There are two problems here: approach and motivation. Most of the schools, as you correctly notice, are places where undersocialized youngsters are warehoused so that they don't get in trouble and don't cause trouble themselves. For the worst of them, they are just a temporary place to store them until they are grown up enough to put them in prison. OTOH, on the student level many of them lack any motivation to learn, and create an atmosphere in the class which is not conductive to learning. But schools can be different - I've witnessed it myself, within the same school even, where one teacher can take you in a year to knowledge which will still serve you decades after, and another may tread water for years and produce a negative outcome. For example, I had very good teachers in math and physics (and I am still benefitting from their work) and spectacularly bad teachers in English (not my native language) - which I remedied by outside study both in the family and commercially and consistently was way ahead of school requirement, the school was pretty much useless for me, and in literature, which had profound negative effect on my appreciation of literature that took me quite some time to overcome. I don't know if there is an approach that allows to solve it in a systemic way. I think if somebody invents it, he or she would be a benefactor of humanity on the level of Fleming, Pasteur and Borlaug.

hrktb 12y ago

While true, this ignores the actual number of hours spent using the language. 3 years of at most 2h a week lessons, that's around 300 hours. Deal with the language 15 hours a day and in 20 days you reach the same 300 hours. Of course actual involvment in the lessons, motivation, effectiveness of being immerged also make going to a speaking country a better deal. About the social role of school, one of the badic goals is to format young people into "standard" citizens who can obey rules and bear authority. Sitting for long hours listening to some adult is part of the process.

Balgair 12y ago

Hear, hear! I use Duolingo for new languages and their system of spaced repetition is so vastly better than Ms. McGee's that I wouldn't even think to enroll a student in a class anymore. I was using Duolingo to study Italian before a trip to Milan and even then using the app was nearly pointless. All it did was get me started in the grammar and some basic words, but actually being surrounded by Italian, seeing it on every billboard, every menu, every streetcorner, having almost no-one speak to you in English (if requested), THAT got me good in Italian. If we simply wanted to take a random assortment of children, fly them to #Country# and let them live there, that would get the language and culture into you. Reading this back, actually, that is what I think I'll do with my kids then. We have family all over the world, speaking a variety of languages, we should just have the kids go there for a month each summer. In the end, it'll be less expensive, maybe....

ufmace 12y ago

I don't think of myself as being good at learning foreign languages, and I don't know enough of any of them to have any useful conversation, but I kinda disagree that just being in a country that speaks that language will get you started. I've spent weeks in Mexico, and my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant most of the time. I didn't feel like I gained anything at that point by being surrounded by Spanish speech and media. I think that the first hard part or learning a new language is just bridging that gap of memorizing thousands of new words and their meanings. If you haven't done that, any amount of exposure to the language is mostly meaningless gibberish that you don't know where to start at deciphering. I don't see how that helps you learn it. For what it's worth, I learned a lot more from using Duolingo for a while than from immersion. I figure a better way to really get started would be to work at that, and translate newspaper articles by hand for a few hours a day, not that I've tried it.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
>my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant most of the time // So you didn't eat out, how did you manage getting your shopping in, buying bus tickets and such without learning any of the local language, just hoped people spoke English?
- ufmace 12y ago
  It was a trip for work, so I was mostly accompanied by people who did speak Spanish.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    Ah, people speaking other languages around me annoys me enough that I want to know what they're saying!
    - ufmace 12y ago
      Yeah, it could be kind of annoying in a way. I could catch maybe 5-10% of a Spanish conversation. Like I was saying in the original, I think I'd need to boost my vocabulary by at least 10x before listening to spoken Spanish would have much benefit. Trying to listen actually kinda reminds me of learning Vim, where you spend what feels like forever at first totally lost, and doing the simplest edit seems to require so much mental effort that you can't actually think about the code you're working on.

smsm42 12y ago

There are two problems here: approach and motivation. Most of the schools, as you correctly notice, are places where undersocialized youngsters are warehoused so that they don't get in trouble and don't cause trouble themselves. For the worst of them, they are just a temporary place to store them until they are grown up enough to put them in prison. OTOH, on the student level many of them lack any motivation to learn, and create an atmosphere in the class which is not conductive to learning. But schools can be different - I've witnessed it myself, within the same school even, where one teacher can take you in a year to knowledge which will still serve you decades after, and another may tread water for years and produce a negative outcome. For example, I had very good teachers in math and physics (and I am still benefitting from their work) and spectacularly bad teachers in English (not my native language) - which I remedied by outside study both in the family and commercially and consistently was way ahead of school requirement, the school was pretty much useless for me, and in literature, which had profound negative effect on my appreciation of literature that took me quite some time to overcome. I don't know if there is an approach that allows to solve it in a systemic way. I think if somebody invents it, he or she would be a benefactor of humanity on the level of Fleming, Pasteur and Borlaug.