9 ms·

It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages

It's been a long time since I was in high school, but I've long thought that the American educational system should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto. If all you're going to do is make high schoolers take a year of foreign language in a classroom, they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto. Edit: The Klingon Duolingo course should be pretty awesome, though.

weinzierl 11y ago
"You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once." -- Czech proverb Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them. More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?
- panglott 11y ago
  The key premise is that one year of mandatory classroom teaching isn't actually going to get someone speaking proficiently, unless perhaps it's something like Esperanto. They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some written knowledge of Latin will be useful. The basic paradigm of classroom language education started when Latin was commonly taught... and since it focused on teaching passive, literary use of the language (rather than active, oral use), that was entirely appropriate. But superficial, passive, literary understanding of modern national languages doesn't help anyone much more than it would of Latin.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    Sure, but the point is that a superficial literary understanding of Spanish is a stepping stone towards plonking yourself in a Spanish-speaking country and realising just how much Spanish you don't know, not to mention a substantial step towards being able to read a vast and growing quantity of Spanish-only written material. A superficial literary understanding of Latin gives you middle class bragging rights and a substantial step towards being able to parse the original text of a literature which has been exhaustively translated into English, complete with notes on shades of meaning. (And an even more limited grasp of some of the fundamentals of Spanish, I suppose) And since the source material is all ancient texts, you can't even pep the teaching up with some relevant and modern material or motivate the students by the prospect they can use it to backpack in Peru or do language exchange in Madrid. I'm not persuaded that the inadequacy of languages teaching is an argument for the same time to be devoted to devoted to something which is even further removed from being useful and the teacher is even less likely to be adequately equipped to teach.
    - panglott 11y ago
      These days we have good models for how to teach bilingualism to kids: dual-language immersion schools, in which both languages are used extensively in coursework. The problem is that this labor-intensive model will be impractical outside metropolitan areas with school choice, or communities with a strong heritage language community. Latin may not be a living language, but it remains very widely used in scientific terminology, law, religion, and elsewhere. Like the prestigious national languages, it is a mark of erudition and social status; the demonstration of which is itself a purpose of education.
- jerf 11y ago
  I'll be more bold than panglott... we can't "give up" teaching modern foreign languages, because we already don't teach modern foreign languages. I took four years of high school French, and got decent grades. I recently started reviewing and learning more through flashcards in Anki. On the one hand, the fours years of "study" put enough French in my head that I'm making progress this way... on the other hand, as I continue making what is frankly a great deal more progress with the spaced-repitition than I ever made in school I still can't help but notice I still can not fluently read much of anything, let alone speak or hear it. Now, as it is common on the Internet to confuse saying something is true with advocating for that fact, let me say that A: I still think learning a language is a good idea, I just don't think what we have now can actually be called "learning a language" and B: if we were ever allowed to change The Holy Curriculum [1], there's probably more effective ways to teach a foreign language. I can't help but notice that my Anki-based studies are wildly more effective than what I tried to do in school. (They're also still inadequate on their own so far. No contradiction there... my schooling was even more inadequate, you see.) Four years of a properly-researched and developed language program, with proper software support, might have produced someone at least capable of using the language at the end. [1]: A phrase I am settling in on to indicate my contempt for the idea that we need to deeply reform education, but we must do so under the constraint that nobody is ever allowed to remove, add, reorder, or change anything we do, ever.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Language study is tough in high school. A better case can be made for teaching languages as early as possible (pre-K, K-6). My nephew's Catholic school is teaching him Spanish[1] in pre-K and will continue until 8th grade. I took Dakota (not to be confused with Lakota) in high school. I couldn't really speak it then or now[2], but it did stick with me[3], but I see the children who learned it in K-6 did much better. 1) My parents and I recently took my 5 year old nephew with us on vacation to DC. He tends to sing at that age. We were in an elevator and he started in on a song and a couple from Spain started asking me questions about it. I really could only say he was being taught Spanish at his school. 2) I just cannot do a guttural with my voice. It sounds like I'm coughing. I have such a low voice anyway that it sounds wrong all the way around. At least I learned from a male instructor, that's a bit important as the sexes speak differently in Dakota. My old boss, a female, learned to speak from her uncles and her aunts thought she "spoke like a man". 3) I still do server names in Dakota. wanca is my #1 server.
striking 11y ago
As someone who knows the Polish language: I agree with you. With the Esperanto part, at least. Latin's very mentally stimulating, but more useless than a modern language, so I wouldn't quite agree with learning it.
- panglott 11y ago
  I think we have some strange ideas about how and why studying languages are "useful". Most Americans are monolingual English speakers, and almost by definition can't study a language that's more "useful" than English. There are large cognitive benefits to bi- and multilingualism, but for these it doesn't actually matter what language you speak: a heritage or minority language is as good as anything else. But the classroom model of the United States isn't actually designed to make people multilingual; if anything, it's the opposite. The default language policy of the United States is mostly to shift people to English monolingualism, no matter their circumstances, heritage, or language rights.
psychometry 11y ago
The point is that many students continue learning that language past that one year. It's much better to give students practical skills in a living language.
- panglott 11y ago
  What percentage of American high-school students who take their mandatory year of foreign language continue on to speak that language proficiently and competently? What "practical skills"? The supposed economic value from learning modern national languages is wildly overstated, for English monolinguals. It's better to learn languages because learning languages is valuable for its own sake, and pick the language you learn simply because you like it. There is a huge disconnect between our implicit goals for language learning in this country and the effort we expend upon it. I strongly believe in the value of language education, but given the amount of time and money we're willing to spend on it, we'd get as much or more benefit from making them study Latin. With Latin, all the people who want to learn a Romance language would get a leg up on it, and all the people who want to study biology would get a leg up on that, and people who are fine with just speaking English will get more insight into their own language.
  - psychometry 11y ago
    Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition. What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.
    - mason240 11y ago
      >Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition. Let's be honest here - nothing of value is lost. The opportunity costs of even one year of any non-English language for American HS students makes it simply not worth it.
ketralnis 11y ago
> should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto Why teach Latin, Greek, or Esperanto badly? How does that help? And if you can solve the "badly" problem, why not teach something that can be used day-to-day?
- panglott 11y ago
  That most Americans do not have occasion to speak a language other than English day to day is exactly the reason most of them will not learn another language. The "badly" problem is actually a really huge one.
jkot 11y ago
Why? I have basic french and german and it was usefull many times.
ajkjk 11y ago
I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns that in the US so it's less argued about. I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it as well as justifying its utility. I see Latin and Greek education as historical relics, akin to how we used to emphasizing testing students' ability to construct shapes with compasses and straightedges, or their ability to memorize bible verses.
- panglott 11y ago
  On a day to day basis, the average American is simply actually a lot likelier to encounter Latin biological nomenclature or legal or religious terminology than, say, a fluent conversation in German. The United States is largely monolingual in English for a thousand miles, and the language ideology here causes immigrants to want their children to shift to English monolingualism as quickly as possible. And thus bad Latin is more useful than bad German.
  - freehunter 11y ago
    The real problem I run into as someone who speaks English natively and German as a second language is, outside of the Internet and reading books, I never have a chance to speak German. Even in the actual country of Germany, I speak German just bad enough that I can tell it's painful for people to listen to me struggle, and they'll quickly switch to English if they know it (which they do). The only benefit is I know what the weather forecast will be and I know what the announcements at the Bahnhof mean, so I know what train to get on. I've visited Mexico with my Spanish-speaking wife (semi-natively) and while the locals loved to hear her speak their language, we communicated mostly in English if we wanted to be easily understood. The struggle is real for Americans, or for native English speakers as a whole. For Americans, there is no other language spoken for thousands of miles like you mentioned (Mexico and Quebec (to a limited extent)), and even then, most of the people we interact with on vacation will speak English. I put serious effort into maintain my German, and she puts serious effort into maintaining her Spanish. But we rarely have the chance to actually use it, even if we're in a country that speaks the language. English has won.
bkeroack 11y ago
Guess what determines school curricula in most cases? The opinions of the parents who care enough to go to school board meetings, serve on the board or complain to officials.
Jach 11y ago
I took 5 years of French, 3 years of Latin. I enjoyed them up until the last ~75% or so of my senior year when I was really sick of the whole high school business. I don't think the Latin had outside utility of any sort until the 2nd or 3rd year simply because I didn't have the vocabulary (and I, like the vast majority of people, was unaware of spaced repetition and hated non-spaced repetition flashcards). The study of French and Roman culture and history was more interesting (and also fun when done in the respective languages) but due to the lack of slow history (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/09/slow-history-and-mysterious-20th.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/09/slow-hi...) in modern education I'd say its utility was limited. That utility I got from Latin the language was mainly in deciphering a few words (or contemplating a deeper meaning behind them) instead of reaching for Google's "define:word" -- but my vocabulary has lapsed and I don't care to refresh it. The other form of utility was minor because I had already studied French for two years, and that utility is contemplation of different grammatical forms and how language is structured, which can improve communication skills. I had a great English grammar class in 8th grade, and that was basically it for serious study of English grammar, but learning French allowed me to reflect more on language grammar in general so when Latin came along it was just another thing to reflect on rather than starting the reflection itself, very marginal utility. But these utilities really don't justify the classes and resources on their own... If we want high school to produce the greatest amount of utilons, we should be explicit about that, but then many many things will need to change. I believe English should be the world language, there's no practical reason to teach anything else at the expense of other more practical things to teach (like programming), especially in English speaking countries. If we want high school to more approximate what Universities used to represent, such as encouraging more Intellectualism (which I don't think is all that great, at least society-wide, from a utility perspective...), we should be explicit about that too, and again things will change. You might want to have students study French, Greek, Latin, Lojban, etc. for at least 2 years each because of Intellectualism -- but you may also want to balance that with more modern things like deeper computer science or math or physics, which won't help most people in their future lives either but can at least be fun and intellectually interesting for people who want their Intellectualism a certain way. Or we can try for a mix, but I'd propose that our current system is a mix, and other mixes will inevitably resemble the current system by being one-size-fits-all and not work too well. So if we want both, separate. Bring back trade schools and let young teenagers wholly uninterested in purely intellectual pursuits get to doing more interesting things like building a house or building JavaEE applications, and let the intellectuals do their thing without constantly having to waste time and energy rationalizing some vague utility and relevance to their proof-carrying code research.
intopieces 11y ago
Languages are not just languages. They're also a component of a wider culture. Foreign language education exposes students to cultures and ways of thinking not present in their day to day culture and allows them to understand and possibly communicate with people around them who speak that language (living in central Texas, you ought to know a bit of Spanish).

weinzierl 11y ago

"You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once." -- Czech proverb Dead languages like Latin and Old Greek don't add lives. You don't even speak them. More seriously: I'm all for offering Latin, Greek, and even Esperanto but why would you give up teaching modern foreign languages? Why do you think they'd get a lot more from a year of Latin or Esperanto?

panglott 11y ago
The key premise is that one year of mandatory classroom teaching isn't actually going to get someone speaking proficiently, unless perhaps it's something like Esperanto. They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some written knowledge of Latin will be useful. The basic paradigm of classroom language education started when Latin was commonly taught... and since it focused on teaching passive, literary use of the language (rather than active, oral use), that was entirely appropriate. But superficial, passive, literary understanding of modern national languages doesn't help anyone much more than it would of Latin.
- notahacker 11y ago
  Sure, but the point is that a superficial literary understanding of Spanish is a stepping stone towards plonking yourself in a Spanish-speaking country and realising just how much Spanish you don't know, not to mention a substantial step towards being able to read a vast and growing quantity of Spanish-only written material. A superficial literary understanding of Latin gives you middle class bragging rights and a substantial step towards being able to parse the original text of a literature which has been exhaustively translated into English, complete with notes on shades of meaning. (And an even more limited grasp of some of the fundamentals of Spanish, I suppose) And since the source material is all ancient texts, you can't even pep the teaching up with some relevant and modern material or motivate the students by the prospect they can use it to backpack in Peru or do language exchange in Madrid. I'm not persuaded that the inadequacy of languages teaching is an argument for the same time to be devoted to devoted to something which is even further removed from being useful and the teacher is even less likely to be adequately equipped to teach.
  - panglott 11y ago
    These days we have good models for how to teach bilingualism to kids: dual-language immersion schools, in which both languages are used extensively in coursework. The problem is that this labor-intensive model will be impractical outside metropolitan areas with school choice, or communities with a strong heritage language community. Latin may not be a living language, but it remains very widely used in scientific terminology, law, religion, and elsewhere. Like the prestigious national languages, it is a mark of erudition and social status; the demonstration of which is itself a purpose of education.
jerf 11y ago
I'll be more bold than panglott... we can't "give up" teaching modern foreign languages, because we already don't teach modern foreign languages. I took four years of high school French, and got decent grades. I recently started reviewing and learning more through flashcards in Anki. On the one hand, the fours years of "study" put enough French in my head that I'm making progress this way... on the other hand, as I continue making what is frankly a great deal more progress with the spaced-repitition than I ever made in school I still can't help but notice I still can not fluently read much of anything, let alone speak or hear it. Now, as it is common on the Internet to confuse saying something is true with advocating for that fact, let me say that A: I still think learning a language is a good idea, I just don't think what we have now can actually be called "learning a language" and B: if we were ever allowed to change The Holy Curriculum [1], there's probably more effective ways to teach a foreign language. I can't help but notice that my Anki-based studies are wildly more effective than what I tried to do in school. (They're also still inadequate on their own so far. No contradiction there... my schooling was even more inadequate, you see.) Four years of a properly-researched and developed language program, with proper software support, might have produced someone at least capable of using the language at the end. [1]: A phrase I am settling in on to indicate my contempt for the idea that we need to deeply reform education, but we must do so under the constraint that nobody is ever allowed to remove, add, reorder, or change anything we do, ever.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Language study is tough in high school. A better case can be made for teaching languages as early as possible (pre-K, K-6). My nephew's Catholic school is teaching him Spanish[1] in pre-K and will continue until 8th grade. I took Dakota (not to be confused with Lakota) in high school. I couldn't really speak it then or now[2], but it did stick with me[3], but I see the children who learned it in K-6 did much better. 1) My parents and I recently took my 5 year old nephew with us on vacation to DC. He tends to sing at that age. We were in an elevator and he started in on a song and a couple from Spain started asking me questions about it. I really could only say he was being taught Spanish at his school. 2) I just cannot do a guttural with my voice. It sounds like I'm coughing. I have such a low voice anyway that it sounds wrong all the way around. At least I learned from a male instructor, that's a bit important as the sexes speak differently in Dakota. My old boss, a female, learned to speak from her uncles and her aunts thought she "spoke like a man". 3) I still do server names in Dakota. wanca is my #1 server.

striking 11y ago

As someone who knows the Polish language: I agree with you. With the Esperanto part, at least. Latin's very mentally stimulating, but more useless than a modern language, so I wouldn't quite agree with learning it.

panglott 11y ago
I think we have some strange ideas about how and why studying languages are "useful". Most Americans are monolingual English speakers, and almost by definition can't study a language that's more "useful" than English. There are large cognitive benefits to bi- and multilingualism, but for these it doesn't actually matter what language you speak: a heritage or minority language is as good as anything else. But the classroom model of the United States isn't actually designed to make people multilingual; if anything, it's the opposite. The default language policy of the United States is mostly to shift people to English monolingualism, no matter their circumstances, heritage, or language rights.

psychometry 11y ago

The point is that many students continue learning that language past that one year. It's much better to give students practical skills in a living language.

panglott 11y ago
What percentage of American high-school students who take their mandatory year of foreign language continue on to speak that language proficiently and competently? What "practical skills"? The supposed economic value from learning modern national languages is wildly overstated, for English monolinguals. It's better to learn languages because learning languages is valuable for its own sake, and pick the language you learn simply because you like it. There is a huge disconnect between our implicit goals for language learning in this country and the effort we expend upon it. I strongly believe in the value of language education, but given the amount of time and money we're willing to spend on it, we'd get as much or more benefit from making them study Latin. With Latin, all the people who want to learn a Romance language would get a leg up on it, and all the people who want to study biology would get a leg up on that, and people who are fine with just speaking English will get more insight into their own language.
- psychometry 11y ago
  Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition. What's wildly overstated is the benefit learning Latin has on anything other than taking the SAT. Studying French is much more beneficial to speaking French than studying Latin and I shouldn't have to explain why that is the case.
  - mason240 11y ago
    >Every year spent learning Latin in advance of a living language pushes the learning of that living language further out of the critical period of language acquisition. Let's be honest here - nothing of value is lost. The opportunity costs of even one year of any non-English language for American HS students makes it simply not worth it.

ketralnis 11y ago

> should give up on teaching modern foreign languages badly and just mostly teach Latin, Greek, and Esperanto Why teach Latin, Greek, or Esperanto badly? How does that help? And if you can solve the "badly" problem, why not teach something that can be used day-to-day?

panglott 11y ago
That most Americans do not have occasion to speak a language other than English day to day is exactly the reason most of them will not learn another language. The "badly" problem is actually a really huge one.

jkot 11y ago

Why? I have basic french and german and it was usefull many times.

ajkjk 11y ago

I'm honestly surprised to learn that anyone defends learning Latin outside of academic scholarship. I guess I feel the same about Greek but no one learns that in the US so it's less argued about. I took Latin in high school and felt that I wasted four years I could have spent learning (rudimentary) Spanish, or at least something that had any cultural relevance at all. You have to find a way to make kids care about it as well as justifying its utility. I see Latin and Greek education as historical relics, akin to how we used to emphasizing testing students' ability to construct shapes with compasses and straightedges, or their ability to memorize bible verses.

panglott 11y ago
On a day to day basis, the average American is simply actually a lot likelier to encounter Latin biological nomenclature or legal or religious terminology than, say, a fluent conversation in German. The United States is largely monolingual in English for a thousand miles, and the language ideology here causes immigrants to want their children to shift to English monolingualism as quickly as possible. And thus bad Latin is more useful than bad German.
- freehunter 11y ago
  The real problem I run into as someone who speaks English natively and German as a second language is, outside of the Internet and reading books, I never have a chance to speak German. Even in the actual country of Germany, I speak German just bad enough that I can tell it's painful for people to listen to me struggle, and they'll quickly switch to English if they know it (which they do). The only benefit is I know what the weather forecast will be and I know what the announcements at the Bahnhof mean, so I know what train to get on. I've visited Mexico with my Spanish-speaking wife (semi-natively) and while the locals loved to hear her speak their language, we communicated mostly in English if we wanted to be easily understood. The struggle is real for Americans, or for native English speakers as a whole. For Americans, there is no other language spoken for thousands of miles like you mentioned (Mexico and Quebec (to a limited extent)), and even then, most of the people we interact with on vacation will speak English. I put serious effort into maintain my German, and she puts serious effort into maintaining her Spanish. But we rarely have the chance to actually use it, even if we're in a country that speaks the language. English has won.

bkeroack 11y ago

Guess what determines school curricula in most cases? The opinions of the parents who care enough to go to school board meetings, serve on the board or complain to officials.

Jach 11y ago

I took 5 years of French, 3 years of Latin. I enjoyed them up until the last ~75% or so of my senior year when I was really sick of the whole high school business. I don't think the Latin had outside utility of any sort until the 2nd or 3rd year simply because I didn't have the vocabulary (and I, like the vast majority of people, was unaware of spaced repetition and hated non-spaced repetition flashcards). The study of French and Roman culture and history was more interesting (and also fun when done in the respective languages) but due to the lack of slow history (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/09/slow-history-and-mysterious-20th.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/09/slow-hi...) in modern education I'd say its utility was limited. That utility I got from Latin the language was mainly in deciphering a few words (or contemplating a deeper meaning behind them) instead of reaching for Google's "define:word" -- but my vocabulary has lapsed and I don't care to refresh it. The other form of utility was minor because I had already studied French for two years, and that utility is contemplation of different grammatical forms and how language is structured, which can improve communication skills. I had a great English grammar class in 8th grade, and that was basically it for serious study of English grammar, but learning French allowed me to reflect more on language grammar in general so when Latin came along it was just another thing to reflect on rather than starting the reflection itself, very marginal utility. But these utilities really don't justify the classes and resources on their own... If we want high school to produce the greatest amount of utilons, we should be explicit about that, but then many many things will need to change. I believe English should be the world language, there's no practical reason to teach anything else at the expense of other more practical things to teach (like programming), especially in English speaking countries. If we want high school to more approximate what Universities used to represent, such as encouraging more Intellectualism (which I don't think is all that great, at least society-wide, from a utility perspective...), we should be explicit about that too, and again things will change. You might want to have students study French, Greek, Latin, Lojban, etc. for at least 2 years each because of Intellectualism -- but you may also want to balance that with more modern things like deeper computer science or math or physics, which won't help most people in their future lives either but can at least be fun and intellectually interesting for people who want their Intellectualism a certain way. Or we can try for a mix, but I'd propose that our current system is a mix, and other mixes will inevitably resemble the current system by being one-size-fits-all and not work too well. So if we want both, separate. Bring back trade schools and let young teenagers wholly uninterested in purely intellectual pursuits get to doing more interesting things like building a house or building JavaEE applications, and let the intellectuals do their thing without constantly having to waste time and energy rationalizing some vague utility and relevance to their proof-carrying code research.

intopieces 11y ago

Languages are not just languages. They're also a component of a wider culture. Foreign language education exposes students to cultures and ways of thinking not present in their day to day culture and allows them to understand and possibly communicate with people around them who speak that language (living in central Texas, you ought to know a bit of Spanish).