Posted on 01/29/2006 4:43:03 PM PST by Dick Bachert
Just caught a network news segment on how the Chicago government schools – at the alleged urging of parents – are teaching kids there CHINESE, a language having 3 gazillion unique GRAPHIC – as opposed to our 26 alphabetical – characters and 4 or so basic SOUNDS!
They claim they’re doing this so our kids can COMPETE with the Chinese – most of whom are busy learning a much easier language: ENGLISH!!
I think teaching American kids Chinese is wonderful. These kids will then be able to explain why they are ignorant of biology, physics, math, basic science, etc. – IN CHINESE because their local educrats stole time from THOSE vital skills necessary for us to compete with the Europeans and the Chinese – to teach them CHINESE!
Well, wish her Happy New Year for me! :-)
"In twenty years the Chinese will have the biggest economy in the world"
No, they won't.
Yes, it is about job marketability. Job marketability for people who speak only Spanish. Because if that is all they speak, they are most likely going to be mopping floors and washing dishes for the rest of their lives.
There is no benefit for somebody already speaking English to learn Spanish. Unless they plan to work in a company where they will need to speak with a lot of low-income, low-skill people who can't speak English. But there is a LOT of benefit for somebody speaking only Spanish to learn English.
The point is that even though it was pretty phonetic, the system wasn't perfect.
In later times, some letters became silent and were still written (like an iota after a long vowel), and others came to be pronounced identically, so that the writer would have to remember what was the right spelling...sort of like in Latin American Spanish where the double L and the Y can be pronounced the same...is the name of that animal spelled llama or yama?
Some of the Eastern European languages are pretty phonetic because they use diacritical marks over some of the letters, and because the spelling has been reformed in the last 100 or 200 years. The problem with English is that most spellings were fixed centuries ago so sounds are spelled in different ways...and the number of sounds is more than 26.
It's usefull for slaves to know the language of their masters...
Owway.
That's right.... what a time-waster, when the Chicago Public School system is having such problems, they're shutting down 18 schools next year.
I didn't have to document it's usefullness, there's no real job demand for chinese speaking Americans. Check your local newspapers and job market internet searches if you doubt that. I did document that it's extremely time consuming to learn Chinese, which means that the regular, more usefull courses must take a back seat to this 'multi-culturalism' idiocy.
The other reason why I documented that Chinese is very hard to learn is that I believe most of the public school students in Chicago will NOT learn it well enough to practice it even if it were necessary, (which it is absolutely not). Becoming proficient in Chinese is a difficult task, requiring time, effort, desire and language ability. Because of islamic terrorism the government could probably use some good translators proficient in Farsi, Arabic, etc. At least that would make some sense and has more ability to lead a person to a job.
Well, those children are simply going to learn the most common language in the world.
I think it is great. I also think that they can learn it without skimping on basics like history, math, etc.
I love the Chinese language and just wish I had started it as a kid instead of my 50s. Learning the pinyin (the abc written word) makes sense if you are also learning the characters along with it, as the character itself gives you a picture, if not the idea of the meaning of the word. It also makes the brain work - at any age.
When these kids get to college. they will have a head start if they wish to pursue it further.
Gong Xi Fa Cai!
Dubya is a youngster.
By worrying about the pronunciation of a written word, a person has it kind of backwards. The language is spoken, is ordered sounds. Best to learn Chinese by listening. When I taught English to Chinese students, once in a while the student had no idea what word was meant by the printed word, although the spoken word was well-known.
Yes, but it has regional pronunciations and vocabulary. Besides that, when the leap to reading newspapers is made, the vowels disappear.
Most of that is because of how foreign languages are taught. For most languages we don't get out of the present tense until second year and don't get into the complex tenses until 3rd or 4th. So by the end of 2nd year Spanish most kids haven't dealt with command form or future perfect, hard to truly speak a language on half the tenses.
English spelling is difficult partly because it is a built up language. It seems like every local language that got steamrollered by Latin and then French managed to keep much of the native language while incorporating Latin and Romance. Spelling is weird partly because many of the words came from different languages with their own standards of spelling. The French also complain about this: why is ll pronounced y? Whether to use -able or -ible depends on what language the root came from.
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