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!
My spoken Arabic tapes and CDs seem to be mainly Egyptian pronunciation. I am not making rapid progress, although some phrases sound a little clearer now.
Hungarian is one of the most difficult languages.
Fair enough, but how many of these public school Chicagoans are taking Chinese because they are 'inclined to go that route'? You know damn well, (especially in Chicago), that this is just another liberal, multi-cultural load of bilge that is wasting the taxpayers' money and the time of our kids who are already undereducated in the basics.
It would theoretically be possible to change to a completely phonetic system for English (by creating additional characters) but that would be far too much trouble for most people who already know how to read English.
Theodore Roosevelt believed in simplified spelling and had a list of revised spellings he wanted everyone to adopt...and got nowhere with it.
Latin would be the best language for a first foreign language...the kids would have to learn grammar, and would improve their English vocabulary immensely. Plus, learning Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, or Romanian later would be much easier.
Written Chinese is not simply a written form of Chinese ~ it is a different language. Written Chinese also has a different grammar.
Good thing they didn't stick you with learning the Jerusalem accent ~ neighbor kid with that accent started in at the Arabic language highschool here and really got criticized.
That's to accommodate everybody but the guys in Jamaica, eh!
English is the most widely spoken language on Earth. No single variety of Chinese is spoken as much, and you have to remember, those varieties are not mere "dialects", but full-blown languages with independent vocabularies and grammatical differences.
Grammatically, English is nothing like any of it's Germanic predecessors. In fact, it's more like Chinese~!
Many of the folks counted as speaking Mandarin actually don't ~ they've been instructed in Mandarin to some degree but they go home and speak other languages.
Oh, absolutely. But its no guarantee of accurate meaning! A good example would be-- suppose the following words were characters: "to" "get" "her". Putting them together would nett: "together" -- a word that is nothing like its components.
Still, knowing the radical and the number of strokes required to make the character, one can look it up in a Chinese dictionary with some measure of success.
I'm old fashioned. I like the old-style characters. I think the simplified are pretty ugly.
German grammar is inflected enough to be a problem for English-speakers trying to learn the language, but too many endings are the same. Latin has more variety in the endings, so you can figure out the subject, direct object, indirect object, etc., usually from the ending. Even though English doesn't do that (except with pronouns to a degree) learning Latin forces you to learn the fine points of grammar.
English has a lot of words that are similar to German, but mostly because of common inheritance (father/Vater, foot/Fuss, starve/sterben, harvest/Herbst)...one Latin word often has many derivatives in English.
I think the number of symbols needed is somewhere between 30 and 40--fewer if you use two-letter combinations like "sh" for the sound usually spelled "sh" in English.
Systems with 89 or more symbols are usually syllabaries (like the Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah, or the Linear B syllabary used by the Mycenaean Greeks).
Chinese may be the 'most spoken language on the planet', but it's spoken nearly exclusively within the borders of China & Taiwan. Unless they plan on opening up a Chinese restaurant it won't help any of these Chicago kids.
As I already said, this will only take away precious time that should be spent on useful, essential studies which are sorely lacking in U.S. public schools. Studying Chinese should be a college elective, (and I doubt even most colleges teach it), not a public school mandatory subject.
BINGO! This man knows his stuff. Once you know Latin nearly every European language becomes easier. That's why many of the Popes could speak fluently in ten, twelve or more languages. They learned Latin first.
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