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Of all the skills that a person could have in today's globalized world, few serve individuals – and the larger society – as well as knowing how to speak another language.
People who speak another language score higher on tests and think more creatively, have access to a wider variety of jobs, and can more fully enjoy and participate in other cultures or converse with people from diverse backgrounds.
Knowledge of foreign languages is also vital to America's national security and diplomacy. Yet, according to the U.S Government Accountability Office, nearly one in four Foreign Service officers do not meet the language proficiency requirements that they should meet to do their jobs.
Despite all these reasons to learn a foreign language, there has been a steep decline in foreign language instruction in America's colleges and universities. Researchers at the Modern Language Association recently found that colleges lost 651 foreign language programs from 2013 to 2016
The advice to learn foreign languages has been repeated for decades, but how much does it really help native speakers of English, professionally, to learn other languages? Additionally, does the decline of language courses at traditional schools reflect cheaper, better alternatives online?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:48AM (5 children)
>they're just different ways of communicating more or less universal concepts
I'm not so sure about that. For the most part perhaps, but different cultures (and thus their languages) can have very different conceptual models of the world. For example I remember reading that there's something like a dozen different ways of saying "thank you" in... Japanese(?). All of which literally translate to varying degrees of resentment. As another example, there's an... African(? or maybe Indonesian?) tribal language that has no word for "past" or "future", only for "now" and "not-now". Those sorts of stark differences in language often reflect conceptual models of the world that are, at least in places, quite alien.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:51AM (3 children)
Uh...nowhere in the (admittedly very formal, office-lady-style) Japanese I studied did anything approaching resentment come across from any form of "thank you." Unsightly groveling, a relic of a Han-style subservience to an emperor, yes, but not resentment. It is very, very, *very* hard to get single, direct, English-like meanings out of Japanese. So very much of it is contextual, and intonation is important, while not actually carrying semantic information like the various forms of Chinese or Bengali. Rather it's the choice of words in context of the status of the speaker, listener, and the situation they find themselves in that carries the information. Someone calling you "omae," especially if that someone is not a very close friend, is being extremely over-familiar at the best.
Weirdly, Japanese is very much *like* English historically speaking; as English consists of Norman (and other Romance) insertions into a Germanic groundmass, Japanese is an entirely different family from Sino-Tibetan and had more or less *all* of Han culture including hanzi (kanji) forced into it. It's bizarre, like writing English with a mix of Egyptian hieroglyphs and IPA script. Mandarin is also SVO if i remember right, while Japanese is SOV.
Can't speak to the Indonesian or African language that has no past or future word (perhaps no past or future tense?), though. That seems...impractical. I do know some languages use present and future as the same tense, sometimes without even a determinative or particle of any sort to distinguish them, but that's it.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:50PM (2 children)
Love that! Using the IPA for things like 'ing' and 'ed' and some prepositions.
What a great visual image!
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday February 07 2019, @10:35PM (1 child)
I noticed that happens mostly when conjugating verbs or modifying adjectives; the kanji for the infinitive (verb) or abstract (adjective) is given, followed by modifiers like -imasu. -imasen deshita, -[tte kudasai, etc in hiragana. The language is still hopelessly difficult to write but once I figured this out things became easier since I now knew where semantic blocks started and ended, if that makes sense.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday February 16 2019, @04:24AM
Yes, that's pretty well the way it works. Except perhaps in young childrens' literature, where it's all hiragana to make it easy for children to read. And it makes it harder for foreigners learning the language because there are no visual clues about word boundaries.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday February 07 2019, @11:07AM
As another example, there's an... African(? or maybe Indonesian?) tribal language that has no word for "past" or "future", only for "now" and "not-now". Those sorts of stark differences in language often reflect conceptual models of the world that are, at least in places, quite alien.
Urdu uses the same word to mean 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow', and its meaning is derived from the word's context. I notice that many Indians speaking English also tend to use the continuous present tense far more than a British speaker of English. I have a suspicion that this is because at least one of the major languages used in India probably uses the continuous present tense more than English, or may not even have a simple present tense. I have not been able to confirm this.