Posted on 01/15/2021 10:18:46 AM PST by karpov
In her fine opinion piece for the Martin Center, Megan Zogby bemoans the “Quixotic” requirement that North Carolina college and university students take between two and four courses in a language such as Spanish, French, or German. This requirement, Zogby asserts, “appears to have no meaningful effect on the language proficiency of college graduates.” What is more, the coursework “adds to [students’] tuition bill, but doesn’t teach them a new skill for their careers.”
Anyone who has struggled through Spanish 102, only to find it difficult to impossible to ask for directions to the restroom in a Latin American restaurant, can empathize with Zogby’s points. Why, she concludes, might colleges and universities not “admit the time has come for a change?”
I agree. Higher education institutions should roll back the requirements that students study a modern foreign language. In fact, they should roll their requirements all the way back to an original language of university instruction: Latin.
“But Latin is a dead language,” you may be thinking. “Nobody even speaks it anymore. Why should anyone have to pay to study a dead language for one or even two years?”
Again, I agree, in part. If I were the “decider,” I would require more than two years of Latin, beginning far sooner than postsecondary education. College may be too late for any but the most gifted or dedicated to acquire spoken or written fluency in a language.
Spoken fluency is hardly the point with a dead language, however, and college is definitely not too late for a student to gain the many other benefits that come from even beginning to study Latin.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Thats because two years of a language is not enough. And just a little grammar and conversation practice with other students is not enough. A good education should treat language study with as much importance as any other part of the curriculum, for as many years. I'm not sold on Latin, I would promote a living language.
Or maybe a couple of years of Latin followed by 6 years or so of a living language, followed by several more at the university level. The point is not to order dinner, but to be able to engage the language (and its people) at an adult level. You don't speak english like a preschool kid, and your goal should be to express adult ideas in either language at a similar depth.
You won't be fluent the day you get off the plane, but you will have the tools to achieve much more than just fluency when the need and opportunity arise. And you will have read widely, more than you would have otherwise.
No, but when they had to translate they were instructed how to turn it into proper English. The Latin also forced them to be more aware of proper grammatical forms in English.
I had a dual major undergraduate degree in French and Chemistry. While I confess that neither major has been of particular value for my MA in Urban and Regional studies and long career in government relations, I still read and speak French fluently. I also believe that traveling to France and being able to feel totally at home in a different culture was a life changing experience. I continue to read French books and newspapers and gain a different perspective that I could not without my French language background. I am particularly dismayed that many graduate degree programs no longer require proficiency in a foreign language.
Life is short, art is long -- Hippocrates.
For an otherwise highly educated Anglophone, it would be easier to learn Latin - because of the plethora of cognates among "high-falutin" words ("amicable," "audacious," "inveigh," "invidious," "post-prandial," "pulchritude," "vacuous," "verdant"); French would likewise be easy to assimilate, but as we have already pointed out, it is hardly an inflected language.
For a dumb American high schooler, it would be easier to learn a Germanic tongue - because of the loads of same-sounding everyday words ("apple / Apfel," "berry / Beere," "cabbage / Kappes," "man / Mann," "mother tongue / Mutterzunge," "shit weather / Scheißwetter," "the yellow of the egg / das Gelbe vom Ei"). But instruction would have to lean heavily upon etymology and evolutionary linguistics.
Frankly, I could imagine requiring 9th-graders to study Middle English for at least two semesters - they could jump right in with "Canterbury Tales." In 10th grade, they'd shift to Old English - focussing on "Beowulf," of course. 11th grade? Perhaps Mittelhochdeutsch - reading and discussing an epic like "Parzifal" and learning poems by the South Tyrolean Minnesänger Walther von der Vogelweide by heart. For 12th grade, they'd finally get to learn modernes Hochdeutsch.
Of course, parallel to this, they should all be learning French from 8th through the 12th grade.
Regards,
The point where a child can effortlessly learn a language is in his preschool days. It gets much harder as one gets older.
I took latin in high school. It was a mixture of a waste of time and difficult because the teacher was such an a$$.
I figured I might become a doctor, a lawer , or a priest and they all needed to take Latin. Turns out, I studied engineering.
The fact that latin serves as root words for a lot of english usage was worthwhile. And since it was a dead language, if we said “veni , vidi , veecheee” , no one could tell us it was wrong but my teacher said the proper pronunciation was ‘wenee , weedee, weekiee”. How the hell did HE know?
Using Huckleberry Finn’s example, if a person in French class were to say, “parley voo franzy?” the french teacher would be vehemently upset because it was said ‘wrong’. But that is what it looks like when you read it, not parlay voooo francai.... because French was an evolving, spoken language while Latin had died unless you were a catholic cardinal at a pope choosing ceremony.
My recommendation is to choose the language that is closest to you geographically that you do not know. For me, it was Spanish, and the geographic distance was about half a block away. That would have been far better for me.
Language is geography is demographics is proximity is.... power. When you luze one of those elements you luze power. Latin has no power. Chinese or Spanish or Russian or Sikh or Persian, they have power today.
two yrs of classic Latin taught to me by an old old nun....didn’t do very well in it...but it does give you a lot of info about the formation of language....
That is true - but the discussion here is not so much about attaining fluency in a foreign language as it is about learning foreign languages in order to strengthen one's linguistic / cognitive skills (which would then likewise enhance one's English skills).
The main article above is about attaining a mere "working knowledge" in, say, Spanish - and then actually employing it in everyday situations ("Where is the bathroom?")
The more-interesting question is: How can we sharpen our children's critical thinking and other cognitive skills and perhaps even their understanding of the world through 2nd-language acquisition?
For example: When learning Russian (as a foreign language), one is introduced relatively early to the concept of "aspect" of verbs. In Russian, almost all verbs occur in pairs, with one partner in the Imperfective Aspect and the other in the Perfective Aspect. The proper choice, in any given circumstance, for one or the other partner depends upon whether the given action is: repetitive and/or habitual, complete / incomplete, etc. (this is a gross simplifications).
To be able (to be required) to express thoughts in that way - reflecting also a different mindset - is fascinating, to me.
Who was it who opined:
One speaks to equals in French, one makes love in Italian, one philosophizes in German, and one gives orders to servants in English?
Regards,
German grammar and syntax, like Spanish, strike me as similar to English (though admittedly, the verb at the end thing does make German harder for English-speakers than Spanish). Latin grammar and syntax are stranger and harder to assimilate. There are six cases in Latin as opposed to four in German, and there are five different declensions, as well as structures and formations that don't survive in modern Western languages. Moreover, many German words are calques, that is, they are Latin words remade with German roots, while many Latin words that look familiar actually don't mean what they appear too.
Also, there's no need to distinguish between the highly educated and the dumb. To learn a language well is better than to simply half learn one. Learning Spanish or German well in high school would have served me a lot better than the French I half learned did. Apparently, French lost a lot of ways of saying things over time, so they came up with some very improvised ways of saying things (English probably did the same) that don't strike our ears as natural. You can study a lot of French and still not be able to put sentences together very well. That doesn't happen so often with Spanish, and I think even German may have an advantage over French there.
Above all, English is power and translation is excellent pedagogy. To that end, Chinese, Russian, and Persian are powerless.
I think Latin may actually have held up better in the schools in recent years than French has, but the general trend seems to be against Western European languages (except for Spanish and Portuguese, which are widely spoken outside of Europe). Of course, to learn Chinese or Arabic or Japanese or Russian at all well, it’s best to start early. That may leave room for some Latin in middle school, but I don’t think it will be making too much of a comeback, especially given how schools and students are nowadays.
My grandfather taught Latin back in the 1950s.
In High School.
L
My drawing a distinction between the highly educated and the ignorant (I wrote "dumb" only because I needed a word with a Germanic root for the purpose of my illustration) was not entirely serious. However, when advising someone on learning a second language, I would - all other things being equal - take into account their level of mastery of their native language, for the concrete reasons I already enumerated above.
A highly-educated person would probably take an instant liking to French, for example, while someone of lower educational level would probably find it easier to start on German. Of course, that presupposes that the curriculum had been tailored to correspond to my outlook.
BTW: So that you know that I'm not talking "out of my hat," I listed my qualifications to opine on this topic above. Furthermore, my wife - a university instructor - is a native speaker of Russian with fluency in three additional European languages, while our daughter is a native speaker of three European languages and has learned two additional languages in school / the university (where she is studying Linguistics). Our conversations at the breakfast table thus generally circle around such topics as calques, morphemes, phonetics, etc.
But I'm just "having fun" here, and wouldn't want to create the impression that I am advancing any "hard-and-true" statements of fact.
Regards,
Not too much in the public school. But for those watching, the present trend in school reform is through private and charter classical schools where Latin is making a huge comeback.
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