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: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @12:29AM
im not about to pick up and go to korea to teach english
and i can order from the taco truck near the office just fine
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @12:30AM (2 children)
With translate.google.com who needs to go to the trouble of learning how to speak to foreigners?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:38AM (1 child)
Οι Αμερικανοί δεν μπορούν να μιλήσουν.
Amerikāņi nevar runāt.
ອາເມລິກາບໍ່ສາມາດເວົ້າໄດ້.
ʻAʻole hiki i nāʻAmelika ke'ōlelo.
Amerikaner kan inte prata
Les Américains ne peuvent pas parler.
Америкалыктар сүйлөй албайт.
Bandaríkjamenn geta ekki talað.
美國人不會說話。
AmaMerika akakwazi ukuthetha.
Amerykanie nie mogą mówić. (for Runaway!)
AmaMelika akakwazi ukukhuluma.
There are more, language is a human right, and Walls will not keep you from learning Spanish, or, god forbid, Québécois! England is a dying culture, since the Brexit, and so English is a dying language. In a hundred years, no one will speak English except Anime characters. Mark my English Words!
(Score: 4, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:56AM
Nope, the Animes will speak Emoji.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @12:40AM (21 children)
Learning a language is not free. There are so many more valuable things you could learn in that time. You could upgrade from algebra to calculus, you could squeeze in a statistics class and some programming, you could learn about economics and law...
It doesn't even work! Very few people become fluent in a second language via school, and very few of the fluent people got there via school. These language requirements are just make-work programs for foreign language teachers. People are being tortured without getting any results.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bob_super on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:03AM (12 children)
> Very few people become fluent in a second language via school
That's because the US system is fundamentally flawed. Not trolling, hear me out:
"Hey, I took 2 years of French in high-school. Don't remember much" every single week, for 11 and 9 years, respectively. And I barely use my Spanish, and my teachers mostly sucked, yet I still can read the newspaper in Spanish.
US system: "well you need two/three semesters, so you can graduate". So for a few months, you're gonna get an hour of Spanish per day. Then maybe a 9 months break. Then maybe another semester of 1 hour per day. Then absolutely nothing, unless you need another credit or two in college.
The result is obvious.
Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians are typically fluent in 3 to 5 languages. French and other southerners in two or three (used to be less, but now they're streaming to maintain what they learnt). School can work. Just not the stupid semester system.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:08AM (8 children)
Whoa, two lines got eaten:
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:16AM (7 children)
You could have done so many other things with that time. You'll never get that precious time back.
The value proposition may be a bit better in Europe, where you might actually want to move to a nearby place that speaks a different language. It's still pretty weak, except that English has value for technical purposes.
The really offensive thing is that this waste is not optional. Sure, study a language if you like. The mandated learning of languages is a pointless burden upon society. It's keeping people from getting college degrees.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bob_super on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:22AM (5 children)
I'm pretty sure being fluent in English has been useful.
And my Spanish still saves money on repairs.
Being able to understand other people, travel, and read their points of view without a translator is a nice perk, in a highly interconnected world.
You might want to think about this.
My mandatory philosophy and quantum physics classes were a waste. Pretty much everything else eventually turned out to be useful. Whodathunkit ?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by black6host on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:33AM (1 child)
I'd go even further. Thinking in another language, rather than translating into your native tongue, can give you a different perspective altogether. There are words, for example "Tartle (Scottish)", that express a feeling for which there is no single English word alternative. (I'll leave it up to the reader to do a quick google...)
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday February 07 2019, @05:30PM
Thanks for the word. I tartle all the time.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:17PM
And you get what you pay for, duct-tape to a soundtrack of chitty-chitty bang-bang. Or, better, ask some Mexicans to install a new towel rack in your bathroom. During your quick and needlessly noisy job by beer-breathed Mexicans, you'll save 10 bucks and find a crooked rack, bits of plaster and drywall with splatters of paint left all over the fucking place, and scrap lumber and plywood (why the hell is that even there?) magically strewn throughout with the Mexicans long-gone with your cash in-hand.
Of course anybody should be able to install a new towel rack, but that's not the point. There are many other points I did want to make, though, and one of those is that you get a reduced rate from Mexicans because cleanup is never part of the deal. Of course, they don't tell you that before they run off with your cash.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:45PM (1 child)
Even if all you can do is read the signs, travelling is WAY easier with a bit of the language.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday February 07 2019, @06:50PM
I spent enough time in Taiwan to know that not being able to read signs (roads and shops) gets downright dangerous.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:25AM
Europeans' children are exposed to other languages from day zero - TV, YouTube, chats, friends, relatives... Children can absorb another language much easier than an adult can.
There is yet another reason to learn: they have a need to know languages of their neighbors.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by stretch611 on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:46AM (1 child)
That is true for me. I did take 2 years of French in high school. The number of things I remember in French I can count on one hand.
HOWEVER,
I actually did learn in that class. No joke; I learned more about English in that class then I did in most of my English classes over the years.
Lets face it, I grew up in the US learning English from day one. However, I learned more from family and friends about English than I did in school. I doubt that I am unique in this way. If this wasn't true we would not have regional dialects where everyone uses different terms for soda, pop, or coke as well as hoagie, subs, or grinders. In fact, if we actually listened better in school, we would all be using the same "Queens English" as the brits in spite of their ridiculous terms like loo, lift, and telly. =)
The fact is we generally learn more about English, right or wrong, based on using it with others, not nearly as much from the correct way we are taught in school.
Now, when learning a foreign language you are taught all about sentence structure, irregular verbs, sentence tense, and all the other things that we did not care about learning English. We have to learn it because it is all different for the foreign language and in doing so, we have to learn how to convert back and forth to English. That is why I learned more about English in French class.
In retrospec, I probably would have retained more about French had I actually used it more. I took French thinking that I wasn't too far from Quebec (and undoubtably, many people from Quebec used to visit the NJ shore for Summer) so I figured it would be the most useful. Of course this was only until I went to college in Newark, NJ and had a Spanish bodega 2 doors down from my fraternity house.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday February 07 2019, @06:44PM
I bet French would have been helpful in understanding Spanish. If you still remembered any.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:30PM
Concur, when I traveled in Germany the bulk of the kids I met spoke English quite well, and not just the (very common) ones who did a foreign exchange year. They learned fluent English from their school programs, and there was a type of school that some opted for which did not teach English and they were just as hopeless with their English as I was with my (no school prep) German.
I ended up spending about 3 months in Germany over the course of 2 summers, with about 2 weeks of deep-end crash course in East Germany where almost no-one spoke English, which is where I found my fluency - such as it was. On the flight back, I sat next to a chatty German couple who wanted to hear all about my travels, in German, and I was able to describe most of it for about an hour. 30 years later, I still remember how to ask for a beer and the bathroom, but the fluency is pretty well shot from disuse. If there's any point to this, it is that a few months of immersion is probably as good as a few years of school, but even the kids that never get an immersion course can become quite fluent - and with Hollywood movies exported the world over, it's easier to retain at least English comprehension with little 90 minute brush-up entucation courses every so often. All I get for a refresher around here is 99 Luftbaloons.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:16AM (3 children)
That explains why the Germans struggle with engineering; they spent too much time learning languages in school. 67% "claim" to be bilingual, and 27% think they know more than two languages. Imagine what they could accomplish if they didn't spend all that time learning languages.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:57AM (1 child)
You use humour to express sarcasm, but the reverse is actually true. Learning languages, especially but not only at younger ages, increases the number of neural pathways in the brain. So it really does explain why Germans don't struggle with engineering.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:36PM
And a leading theory of autism is that it can result from an under-pruning of neural pathways during early development... the trick is in training them to do something useful. Learning to speak Mongolian may increase neural pathways, but it's not terribly useful around here - even if you do need to translate Mongolian texts, Google Translate has your back on that.
My wife recently discovered a cousin who speaks French and Spanish (wife speaks English only), and they're having tons of fun e-mailing and even WhatsApp chatting via Google Translate - they would both do well to learn a common language (not likely to happen in their mid 50s), but it's pretty impressive how much they can communicate as they are.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:19PM
In my experience Germans are fucking awesome at not only engineering but any job they do at work.
What they are not awesome at is basic social skills.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:21AM (1 child)
Perhaps. Let's see your list...
LOL. Seriously? I see multiple posts here saying it's better to study calculus? Look, I love calculus. But let's actually be real here -- in the real world, how many people actually use calculus on an everyday basis? How many people even occasionally use it in their jobs? I'd bet the number is a few percentage points of the population at best. But then ask how many actually, truly use calculus, as in, not just evaluate some expression or look up an equation in a book that has an integral or a derivative in it to plug in numbers occasionally (which can now mostly be done with computer help) -- but truly require the ability to manipulate calculus expressions in a fluid way or even create their own calculus expressions from scratch to solve a novel problem? That, I'd imagine, is a much lower number yet. Polls and anecdotal data suggest even most engineers don't use calculus in that manner regularly, let alone most of the general population.
Again, I'm not discouraging anyone from learning calculus. But if you're looking for a practical, useful skill that might be "valuable," most people are never going to attain calculus fluency. However, what percentage of people will encourage a person who doesn't speak fluent English in a job situation? What percentage of people could benefit in their jobs significantly by being able to communicate with others in another language? I'd bet that number is at least an order of magnitude larger than those who would ever use calculus.
(And yes, I picked on your first example. Stats, as you mention later, would be a potentially better choice. I'm just surprised that anyone would recommend calculus as if it's a common skill used in life regularly... like language.)
First off, as other posts note, it can be successful with better/more frequent instruction.
However, this presumes that the only goal of language instruction is to become a fluent speaker. If the only goal of calculus instruction would be to become fluent in calculus, I'd claim we have an even more miserable success rate at that. Of the number of students who take calculus, how many ultimately truly become fluent in its use? Again, I'd bet that number is a few percent, maybe less.
Yet calculus instruction could still potentially be valuable, as any math instruction that orients young minds toward procedure, logical thought, attacking problems using various tools, applying abstract tools to applications, etc.
Similarly, there are potentially a lot of ancillary effects of language instruction. Just a few that I think of off the top of my head:
-- Improved understanding of the grammar of one's own language. Many students claim they first really understand grammar when encountering another language. This can lead to better writing and ability to express oneself in one's native language.
-- Improved vocabulary. Many students study languages that share roots with more unusual words in their native language. This was one of the classic reasons for learning Latin and/or Greek, to understand root words from those languages. An English speaker can often benefit from connections in Romance languages, which share those Latin roots that are often the basis for rare vocabulary words in English.
-- Encounters with other modes of expression, thinking, and culture. Every language has its idioms, its assumptions, and often certain types of expressions (or even whole grammatical forms) that don't make as much sense to someone who isn't a native speaker. Struggling to understand something that is foreign is often an important learning experience that leads to broader problem-solving skills, new perspectives, and highlights the unusual features of one's own expressions, thought, and culture (thereby potentially helping one to explain oneself to others).
I could go on, but you get the idea. You might object that these won't happen for all students or some languages may work better than others... or, if we want to teach encounters with other culture, maybe we should teach more about cultures instead. And if we want to teach grammar and vocabulary, why not teach them directly in the native language?
Those are valid points too. Just as one might say that we can teach logical reasoning and meticulousness in other ways than forcing huge numbers of people to take calculus who will never use it, merely as a kind of gatekeeper course to certain paths or for college applications. One can argue that geometrical proofs teach logical reasoning, but why not instead teach formal logic if that's the main goal?
Well, that's all true. Maybe there are better and more efficient ways to get some of the ancillary benefits of language learning. But again, it's still a useful skill for a large number of people to have even a basic comprehension or communication ability with a second language. Tack on some other benefits, and it certainly isn't a waste of time.
The rest of your post maybe deserves the insightful mods you've gotten so far. But this last statement should clearly identify you as a troll. If you took a poll, I'm certain that you'd find much higher numbers of people who claim to be "tortured" by most courses in your preferred subjects (calculus, statistics, programming, economics, and law) than by language courses.
I really don't know whether having language requirements is that important. But I'm not naive enough to claim they're significantly less useful (or "valuable") than most of the standard high-school curriculum to the vast majority of people in their lives.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:43PM
Hey, lay off the calculus - I've been working as an electrical/mechanical/software engineer for 28 years now, and I've used calculus for at least 60 hours in those 28 years - that's 0.107% of my working life, you insensitive clod. Now, grant you, 40 of those 60 hours were centered around crazy-ass inventor BS that ended up having almost zero real-world value, but I had a sponsor who was paying me to make this stuff up and it was some serious fun - people were really impressed that I could balance irregular offset spinning masses in 3D.
BTW, the other 99.893% has been over half politics and social skills, and I pretty actively avoid those things, but they have a way of finding you no matter where you hide. Travel and cultural experience are excellent foundations for developing social skills in a diverse workplace.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aristarchus on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:49AM (1 child)
Or, your brain is already full, since you are a STEM student. (Let me think: Special Temporary and Eccentric Module?) No, the point is not some technical skill, like sucking your bosses dick or khallowing richies, the point is to understand the nature, structure, and logic of natural language systems. Fluency is a by-products, as are most STEM majors, whom we could just toss of the Pier with no great loss. I mean, it used to be jocks, now it STEM! What idiot of a PhEd came up with this? We have to teach kids Fortran so they can learn syntax? Madness, sheer and utter madness. Must be America.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @09:02AM
+++
It is.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @12:41AM (4 children)
Because by the time the student is in college, for most of them it's too late. While there are those who can fairly easily pick up a new language, for most people the time to teach them a different language is in elementary school. Our brains are designed to learn languages when we're young, not when we're in our late teens to early twenties.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:23AM
If you have no use for a language, or calculus, or whatever - time spent learning it will be wasted time. Your brain will forget the silly stuff at the first opportunity.
If you need a language to read things and write and talk to others, or calculus to solve actual equations - you'll be amazed with how quickly you can learn.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday February 07 2019, @05:58AM (1 child)
Maybe that's why most people can't learn to code. Programming languages are, well, languages.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:56PM
More than languages, programming languages are precise procedural instructions - a lot like a well written law, the say specifically and unambiguously what will happen. Well written code handles corner cases, etc.
Thankfully, not everybody is cut out to be a lawyer.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:54PM
Absolutely true - now: take a peek inside the US elementary school system, where they're cancelling Art and Music courses to reduce costs / focus on the core curriculum (standardized tests), and tell me where they're going to find the funding/time (aka political will) to hire foreign language teachers? Further: the only "foreign" language in any kind of ready supply in most of the U.S. is Spanish, and what did the last Presidential election teach us about grassroots political posturing toward Spanish speakers?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @12:51AM (8 children)
Repeating what so many other people have said thus far, learning another language in the US is hard. It's a large country with only two neighboring countries, one of which mainly speaks English. Unlike living in Germany or Poland, where 3 other languages are a 2-hour car ride away, you can go literally days before you go to a non-English-speaking region. (Moreover, how often do you really go into Mexico?)
There isn't even very much of a Hollywood effect, where people want to learn another language to engage in foreign culture (with Japanese Anime and video games being the only token exception... only viewed by a subset of population and those also being mostly translate as well).
Cross that with the amount of work it needs takes to learn a foreign language, plus the fact that that English is currently the lingua franca in the world means there is very little reason to learn a foreign language at present time. To be clear, reading something like Tale of the Genji in the original language is superior than a translation, but is it really worth "years of study and hard work?" Likewise there is a small subset of highly paid jobs for people who are multi-lingual, but there are far more jobs which are far higher paid in fields like investment banking or software development.
(Score: 2) by petecox on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:17AM (4 children)
French is pretty useful for a Quebec vacation.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:34AM (3 children)
Pretty useful for a trip to France as well! :)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:32AM (1 child)
Americans generally do not travel to other countries. Less than half of us have a passport. Back in 1990, before we needed a passport to visit Canada, only 4% had a passport. We sure aren't flying off to Europe and Asia.
The same mostly applies in China, where only 5% have a passport today.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:56AM
Apocalypse Now. Tigers, you know.
Firken Scaredy-cat Imperialist Americans! What Maroons!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:51AM
Or, Louisiana, where the Cajuns dwell.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @09:19AM
For Ethanol_fueled, every other day? For "culture", don't ya know!
(Score: 1) by bmimatt on Thursday February 07 2019, @09:39AM (1 child)
"...Unlike living in Germany or Poland, where 3 other languages are a 2-hour car ride away..."
No, you seriously underestimate the size of Poland.
An E->W or W-E, border to border trip would take you much longer than the implied 4 hours, pretty much regardless of the starting latitude within that country.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @09:49AM
And besides, where I grew up in Montana, 15 minutes drive would put me amongst native speakers of Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Alt-Deutsch, Some kind of Serbo-Croat, Russian, Assiniboine, Dakota-Lakota-Nakota , and possibly some Chippy-Cree. Only Newbies spoke English. Or federal officers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @12:59AM
Health, it can help prevent Alzheimer’s
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180206140713.htm [sciencedaily.com]
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:01AM (3 children)
Took a field trip to Tijuana (think mid 70's). Nobody understood us, they actually laughed at us when we tried to talk to them.
I learned more spanish dealing with my illegal landscaper for 3 months than I did a year of high school spanish. YMMV.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:51AM (2 children)
The only Korean I remember from a year there can't be used in polite society. ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:59AM (1 child)
Imperial Storm-trooper, eh? Or Mormon missionary? Hard to tell the difference. 어리석은 foriegner.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Hartree on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:38PM
"Imperial Storm-trooper, eh?"
You seriously overestimate my shooting accuracy.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:23AM (10 children)
I'm intermediate in Spanish, can swear rather well in Russian and Finnish, and know some business Japanese. It's always good to know more languages, all else being equal, because at the end of the day they're just different ways of communicating more or less universal concepts, and knowing more languages means you can communicate with more people. How is this a waste?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:16AM (3 children)
"I am "that girl" your mother warned you about..."
A bitch?
Or are you a tranny degenerate?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:54AM (2 children)
A total bitch :) I will eat you alive, manlet. Run! Run for the hills! The Nasty Woman (TM) is here! Our actual "tranny degenerate" thinks I'm a TERF, so there you are. Maybe you should try and arrange a date with her? She likes men, for some unholy reason...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @09:04AM (1 child)
Seriously, manlet, you should be seriously afraid. You will not stand a chance. Your manhood will be ground up by the deficiencies of your arguments, and feed to fishes. You will find yourself hiding behind the apron of your mother/sister/nurse/dominatrix because you are not enough of a man to stand up on your own, and so your attacks on women are in fact your refuge in women that you are dependent upon. You will not be able to form a relationship, with anyone, let alone an actual female. Your only friends with be on Gab and World of Warcraft, and they will all be of the age of a Runaway1956, with similar cognitive deficits. Run now, manlet! Let it go! Save yourself!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @09:10AM
He can't. Mummy's nowhere near, he doesn't know where to run, he's totally paralyzed and his pants are wet.
(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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mendax on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:09AM (3 children)
It might be useful if we taught foreign languages in elementary school, when kids' brains are still language sponges. As adults, it becomes much more difficult. I think much of this is due to the fact that Americans are quite arrogant and believe that being monolingual is just fine. For myself, I would have liked to have learned Russian but that was never an option for me.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @06:12AM (2 children)
The thing is, for an American, there really ISN'T much "use" in learning another language.
For speakers of global minority languages, there is an obvious benefit to learning English, the lingua franca of the modern world.
But for me to learn, say, German? The number of speakers is a rounding error! Spanish? There are a large number of speakers, but they tend to be poor. The ones you will meet will be landscapers. Nice guys, but nothing to benefit you. Careerwise and in business, it's ENGLISH.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday February 07 2019, @09:13AM
This, of course, is why you should learn Greek. Not only of a long and noble lineage, but you get to talk to some of the best people! English has the opposite effect.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:47PM
you can just say that you want to stay dumb
(Score: 3, Informative) by aim on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:58AM (1 child)
Learning a foreign language is not only about the language itself, but also about the culture that language belongs to, the different world-view. By learning about those, you get to reflect on your own culture's views. You'll understand those other cultures better, and may really get a meta-view on inter-cultural relations.
IMHO, that's precisely what's lacking in current US politics.
Maybe you'll also learn some history, if you go for something like latin or greek - which also helps understanding the roots and thus meanings of many words in modern languages. To actually get proficient in any language, you need to immerse yourself in it, school alone won't do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:49PM
Lots of people here seem oblivious to American culture.
Probably they need to go hunting. That might be more productive. Starting a business would help. Joining the Marines would help. Buying a home with a yard would help.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 07 2019, @11:48AM
We have comparatives in English; the correct word is scarcer.
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:59PM (1 child)
You can get a language learning kit over the counter for $100 and that you can use any time you want, has multimedia and software, and works great, being developed with the best scientific research. They are professional productions, and having thousands of customers, they can spend more money on research to make the delivery and quality as perfect as it can be. It works as well as any class, if not better. You can learn at your own pace and on your own schedule and come back to it any time you want because its always there.
You don't need to spend $300 on a language class that's only a few hours long. If anything is obsolete and antiquated, its spending thousands of dollars to take courses at a college. With multimedia, more information and knowledge can be distributed to more people cheaply and efficiently. This cheaper mode of education through self study and multimedia lowers the cost of education and increases upward mobility by removing more barriers to success. At many colleges, college dropout rates are over 60%, while professors enjoy posh tenured jobs students struggle to feed themselves after paying massive tuiton fees, often working second third or fourth jobs to try to make ends meet. The costs of college are enormous with trillions of dollars of student debt in the US. Its one of the most inefficient forms of educating people and the fact is, the experience with language learning and the success with scientifically developed multimedia language courses that cost a fraction of college courses, shows that an self study program, followed by an apprenticeship can be far more cost effective for many jobs.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:59PM
I've always found it helpful to have a live teacher to discuss what I'm learning with. And, even more important, to give me regular paced homework assignments to do. Without that scheduling, my mind tends to wander off and not work on learning what I set out to learn.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:40PM
Correlation is not causation. It's far more likely that those capable of learning multiple languages already were smarter and more creative.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.