Posted on 12/25/2008 11:53:50 AM PST by I can has Low Taxes?
I have a cousin in 8th grade who's taking a "sampler" class in which she's taught the minimum basics of Spanish, French, and German. The point is to give her a better grasp of languages so that she can choose which class to take for her mandatory language requirements in Highschool.
I believe that the highschool she'll go to also has Russian and Latin in addition.
Do folks here feel that Spanish would be a bad idea, politically/culturally? Her parents consider it somewhat gauche, and there's also a concern that encouraging kids to learn Spanish would delay assimilation of US immigrants, since it gives them less incentive to learn English.
Would you advise she take Spanish, since it's more "useful" in terms of having native speakers in the US? Or should she take one of the other languages? I don't think Latin is a likely option, being that her family is quite anti-Catholic.
Advice?
For goodness sake it’s NOT a bad thing to learn as many languages as possible. Spanish is fine. It still doesn’t mean that Hispanic children shouldn’t learn English, and that English is still this country’s language.
IMO the purpose of language is communication. Learning a language you’ll have little chance of ever communicating in seems a bit of a waste.
I wish I’d kept up the Spanish I learned in school.
Take them all.
They can also learn to say in Spanish, “If I learned your language, you can learn mine.”
Hablo solamente el idióma de Univision...
I personally made sure the school my kids go to teaches Spanish. They actually start in kindergarten. Over 500 million speak Spanish worldwide, that is a pretty large market to ignore...
Advice?
If she likes languages and they come easy to her, she should take as many as appeal to her, in addition to Latin. If languages don’t come as easy, take Latin for the excellent preparation for SAT/ACT tests that will be coming up sooner than she thinks.
That’s my 2 cents.
Mon Dieu, yes, learning foreign languages is a bad thing!
Want to speak a language that may be geo-politically useful one day? Chinese (either type), Russian, Arabic.
Want a language that may come in handy in the US, especially west of the Mississippi? Spanish.
Many of these can be helpful bridges to other languages. I've heard that Spanish and Arabic have remarkably similar phonetics, and that Spanish speakers pick up Arabic a little more easily than others.
Either French OR Spanish will give you a preliminary boost toward Latin (and vice versa.) If you are headed for the legal or medical field, Latin is good to know.
On the other hand, Russian teaches you the Cyrillic alphabet, which can come in handy as some of the letters crop up in other languages too.
It's never a waste of time to study another language. Never. Heck, I studied Yucatec Maya for two years. All I remember is "Nice to meet you," and "I see you/I don't see you." But it still gave me a perspective on Indo-European languages I didn't have before.
I live in California, so while I've only ever studied French and Maya academically, I'm picking up some Spanish. It's never a waste.
Learing any language is not bad. Forcing kids to learn spanish because illegal aliens want to take over this country is nothing short of sedition.
“Chinese (either type), Russian, Arabic”
People never understand the value of those languages. Now, if your kid wants to get plenty of boyfriends or your son girlfriends, have them learn Polish.
Take Navajo! OOT!
:^)
I WISH I knew Spanish. My housekeeper thought I fired her a couple months ago. I had to ask one of my spanish speaking friends to explain that I still wanted her to work.
Voluntarily, no. I think it exercises the mind. If they want to learn another language, they should. But I don’t necessarily believe they MUST have to learn another one. They may want to focus their interests in science, or computers, or history, or music rather than language.
**They can also learn to say in Spanish, “If I learned your language, you can learn mine.”**
If I were to make an effort to learn Spanish, it would be more for verbal self defense than anything else.
I speak 4 Languages with varying levels of fluency, and can be polite (and find a bathroom) in 8 others.
I drive a taxi in a very “International” college town.. it’s amazing that I’ve increased tips by 250% just by being able to say thank you in several languages.
You signed up this week to post this question...?
Are you just trying to illicit some negative comments
from FReepers???
If you want to speak the language of BU$ine$$, then stick with proper English and be competitive.
Unfortunately, language education poses a dilemma: for ease of learning a foreign language, one should start as early as possible, preferably in early grade school, while to decide what language would be most useful, one wants to wait as long as possible, possibly until one is planning on where to go to grad school.
Depending on what one ends up doing, there are strong arguments for Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese as the optimal second language. If one has no utilitarian use for a second language, there are arguments for learning classical languages—Latin or Attic Greek.
(Sorry to all the Germanophiles out there, but unless one is going into a field where Germany is a major center of one’s business, or planning to be a Goethe scholar, German isn’t that useful, thanks to most Germans speaking good English.)
In most technical fields, Spanish is near useless, with French and Russian being the obvious choices for a second language for an anglophone. On the other hand, in commerce or any allied health profession in the U.S. there is a good argument to choosing Spanish as one’s second language.
BTW is there ANY Spanish speaking country that is pro$perou$? In history? ANY?
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