Edi wrote:Broomstick wrote:For those of us who started with English, there are still benefits to learning another language. Although English might be either the most commonly used language or damn close to it, there are still millions of people who do not speak it.
Indeed. Just try going to Italy, for example, outside of a few specific regions like the Garda area and the high class tourist resorts like Sorrento, Capri and Positano near Napoli you're completely up the creek without a paddle if you only know English.
Absolutely.
When I went to France I had a lot of people tell me "Oh, everyone speaks English". Um... no they don't. Not even in Paris. Sure, if you stick to the tourist areas and the high-rent districts
someone will be able to speak English, but personally I enjoyed being able to wander off into the quieter areas. No, my French wasn't fluent but I could communicate well - like just about everyone my comprehension of the spoken language was much higher than my ability to speak, but slightly broken works just fine in the real world.
In Paris there
were a few people who took offense at my "murdering" of their language but what the hell - you have jackasses everywhere. MOST people appreciated the effort, even when their English was better than my French. And outside of Paris there were entire days when I never encountered an English speaker and if I had had no knowledge of French I would have been up to my neck in
merde.
The only place my French didn't work was in the Paris Chinatown - their Chinese accented French and my American accented French collided horribly and lay twitching spasmodically on the floor. But we all had a good laugh over it. At that point in my life I was eating enough Chinese food that I could recongize the characters for certain ingredients like "chicken" and "pork", which oddly enough meant that I could read some Chinese, although I couldn't speak it. And I couldn't order in French because I don't know how to say gai kow or chop suey in French! (For some reason, Chinese food was never mentioned in my high school French textbooks) Everyone had a good laugh over our mutual mangled French, we tourists ordered by pointing at the Chinese side of the menu, and my first dinner in Paris was Cantonese and delicious.
I'm not sure what all that is supposed to mean, other than picking up
any bit of
any language might be potentially useful and international travel is an adventure.
And by the way - there is the additional problem that while there are many people in France who speak English, it's almost always
British English, which is not my native dialect. That, too, can be an obstacle to understanding.
But I tell you, a working knowledge of French proved invaluable when I was in a bar in Clermont-Ferrand were
no one spoke English but me, I needed the bathroom badly, and the path to the nearest one involved a trip through maze-like medieval streets. Trying to remember instructions given in a foreign language, in a dialect of that language you are not very famillar with, and trying to remember it while inebrated is a far greater test of one's language skills than anything I did with pencil and paper in a classroom.
Broomstick wrote:From a standpoint of practicality in the global economy, learning a second major tongue - which could be Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, etc. - makes a lot of sense, for the same reason that learning English makes sense - you can communicate with a lot more people and have access to more knowledge.
Yes, and it also gives these foreigners the impression that you respect them, because learning their language is not necessarily an easy undertaking. They will likely be more favorably disposed toward you, because there is a greater sense of equality.
Indeed. I found that out myself personally. No doubt my efforts to speak the language is a large part of the reason I found the French hospitable while I was over there.
Broomstick wrote:But beyond that, the exercise of learning another language - ANY other language - outside your native tongue is beneficial in children because it stimulates brain development and provides a different outlook on the world. Given the complexity of today's world, flexibility of thought and perspective is a benefit. I don't think you even need to achieve true fluency to beneift, although that is, of course, preferable to mere halting speech and elementary reading skills.
True. Didn't mean to imply that true fluency is necessary, as long as the communication is reasonably clear and you and the other person can get your points across, it's sufficient.
True - however, I have encounterd
many people over here who seem to feel that if you can't achieve native-speaker fluency you might as well not bother. Nevermind they're
surrounded by immigrants speaking less than perfect English who nonetheless mange to get by quite successfully in this country.
I
insisted on starting a foreign language as early as possible - which in my case was 12. I was willing at 8, and wish I had started then. Even so, many people asked me what was the hurry, I could study a language in college. No! Not good enough! It is
always easier to acquire language skills prior to puberty and I wanted at least one non-native language "installed" prior to then.
When I later studied Irish Gaelic (now
there's an obscure language!) the class was entirely adult and there was a definite difference between those of us who had been heavily exposed to a second language early in life vs. those who took up the study later. Those of us with earlier experience learned to recongize and pronounce unfamilar phoenyms (yes, I probably misspelled that) much quicker than the others - English has about 40 sounds, Gaelic 60. That's 20 new noises you have to learn to recognize and make. We picked up the grammer quicker - and Gaelic grammer is
quite different from either Germanic or Italic branches of Indo-European. As an example, the sentence the "the girl is walking" is literally "is the girl at walking", and it takes getting used to a word order that is a question in English being a statement in Irish (and Irish
never changes the word order to make it a question, the verb changes to indicate that). The language has two difference alphabets in use, and two different spelling systems (and you thought English had problems with spelling....!) But after the first year I could carry on simple conversations (never learned to read it much - the classes I took emphasized speaking over writing). I really think Irish would have been MUCH more difficult if I hadn't had French first - and not because the two are related. They're pretty distant.
Now I mutter about taking something like German or Spanish - and people tell me I'm too old! Bullshit. You're never too old to learn. Yes, it will be more difficult for me than if I were six, and my accent will most likely always be heavy... but there's absolutely no reason I can't acquire the same proficiency in German or Spanish that I once had in French.
If I am motivated to do acquire it - and that's a huge factor. You can not
force someone to learn a foreign language, they have to
want to learn it. You can mandate exposure, not comprehension.
My personal opinion, based on my own experiences, is that learning one foreign language well and at least the basics of another is good, but beyond that it has to be through genuine interest, not forced. It's better if both the primary and secondary foreign languages are of interest to the student, but it is not absolutely necessary, and pursuing extensive studies in the second foreign language is not necessary once you have a grasp of the basics. No sense forcing even intermediate level of skill when there is no desire to learn, because that will just cause resentment which will actively hinder the process.
Agree again - once you know how to ask for the bathroom and say "I'm hungry" or "I'm thirsty" without causing offense you've tackled the really essential real-world items...
