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.
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.
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.
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?
Of course it is NOT inappropriate for kids to learn Spanish or French or Italian or German or any other language. Since our nearest neighbor countries speak Spanish, it actually makes a lot of sense for kids to learn Spanish.
Definitely Spanish — very valuable in the US because of Spanish speakers and trade with LatAm. It is also relatively inexpensive to do a year abroad in a S. American country, so she can learn to speak it in a native environment.
I would note that most Spanish-speakers in the US speak Spanish poorly, barely write and read it. This can never be considered a native-speaking environment.
It’s a xenophobic urban legend that Hispanic immigrants do not assimilate. Take my in-laws for example. The mother never learned English, despite living in this country for almost 50 years. Her children (raised though not born in the US) have only conversational Spanish skills, can’t read or write. Her grandchildren do not know Spanish at all. But they love Granny all the same.
I have always wanted to see a conservative politician be able to enunciate America’s values - in Spanish - to a Hispanic audience.
Maybe your cousin will become that person.