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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: 4, Interesting) by pTamok on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:24AM (2 children)
Monoglots tend not to appreciate the different perspectives using and thinking in another language gives you. Thinking in one language is a bit like seeing in monochrome - functional, but you miss a lot.
I regard fluency as being at or above the 50th percentile in language skills (spoken, read, written) of the target language's population. It is a high bar. I am fluent in one language, and have workable knowledge in three others, with one more possible, if I worked at it. You instantly get insight into another world-view if you are familiar with another language (i.e. I think the weak form of the Sapir-Worff hypothesis [wikipedia.org] is true).
The languages I know are all European, and it is interesting to see just how related they are. I recently took a holiday in Bulgaria and rather than being completely mystified by the written language two things helped me (1) I had had to learn to read some Russian technical documents a long time ago, which gave me familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet and (2) Once decoded, the Cyrillic text used a lot of word roots that were common to the languages I already knew: so it did not take much to be reasonably good at reading menus and labels on items in supermarkets. It was also fun to exercise my 'learning muscles'.
In large parts of the USA many people use a form of Spanish as their daily spoken language. It's not a bad idea to get a working knowledge for that reason alone. It is not a zero sum game: knowledge of Spanish does not reduce your knowledge of English - in fact, it can enhance your knowledge of English, as others have pointed out. Learning to read Chinese wouldn't be a bad idea either, given that so many products come with instructions that are produced by bad translations from Chinese. If you have knowledge of the source, you can determine where translations went wrong, and what the writer was trying to say.
Knowing more than one language also gives you the insight that there is more than one way of doing things. This is a fundamental insight, because it shows that there is not necessarily a single correct way to do things. That is a world-view foreign to many people.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:27AM (1 child)
Dangnabbit! That should be Sapir-Whorf, not Sapir-Worff. Sorry.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday February 07 2019, @09:16AM
I have always heard of it as the "Whorf-Sapir", but perhaps you speak a different language, where they grammatically arrange things by height rather than alphabetical order.