Balls on Foreign Languages

Hey, the special excellence of the American educational system isn’t limited to languages, either! Take our unique math education philosophy of teaching ever less math, at an ever slower pace, and utilizing in the earlier grades teachers extensively unqualified to teach any math at all! That’s been an equally brilliant success.

I agree — the goal of language education in America is to convince Americans that learning another language is impossible.

There are actually some developmental effects which make it much easier to learn a second language at an early age. You can see this everyday as toddlers with non-English speaking parents switch language from home to school.

About the age of 12 there is some sort of “ossifying” in the brain which prevents one from learning a new language without an accent.

All that is required is for native language speakers to play and read stories to young kids. There is no need to go into grammar, vocabulary or reading. Canada has many bi-lingual schools, but it would be too much for the US to learn from some other country.

It’s a commonplace that younger children learn languages more easily than older children or adults, but it turns out it’s pretty difficult to find any evidence for it. See, for example, Language Acquisition: The Age Factor by D. M. Singleton.

I doubt that any method of language instruction will get Americans to learn languages as well as, say, the Dutch. Language acquisition is so hard that everyone, except for a motivated few, won’t learn a language unless they really need to. And most Americans don’t need to.

pace robertdfeinman, it may be that the primary reason for the persistence of foreign accent in those who learn other languages later in life has to do with massive muscular overlearning of the sounds of one’s native language; that is, you pronounce a ‘t’ a certain way long enough, and it’s hard to change how you do it, and when speaking at a normal conversational speed, you don’t have time to consciously control muscle movements with such fineness.

On the other hand, adults, who tend to have a better understanding of how to learn about structures formally, frequently learn some of the higher-level aspects of a language (some syntax, for instance) more easily than children do.

Please note that ENGLISH IS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE in the United States.

Cre, Seminole, Oglala, Cherokee, now those are American languages. English is a European one.

Whoa, now there’s a fatuous comment. I wonder what this was meant to accomplish.

I think the British come a pretty close second to the Americans in not learning a foreign language. I wonder what they have in common?

As an aside, my home town in the U.S. started teaching French from the third grade when I was a kid (now it’s Spanish). That didn’t mean we *learned* French, because it was pretty much on the level of repeating “Bonjour” and “Ca va” over and over again. Still, by the time I left high school, I could read French pretty proficiently.

I am sure lots of research describes more rigorously than I can how much more likely it is to master another language if learned early. However, just a personal note of anecdotal information:
I learned English and Arabic at about the same time, as a young child. I am fluent in both.
But as for learning “foreign languages”– which I began to do in American schools, in the normal manner described above– I was exposed to Spanish as an adolescent, took four (4) years! of it, got straight A’s, and I was never close to fluent in the language. If I had gone to a Spanish speaking country my last year of high school, when theoretically I was at my best in the language, I would have been totally lost. I could read it better than speak it, but neither well enough to survive a normal day.

hopefully this will mean that GCSE and A level modern languages will no longer be a total joke. All the post results day whining in the press about standards is quite justified when it comes to these.

My wife is Taiwanese and our 4 year old twins have grown up with her mother around much of the time. My wife and her mother speak Mandarin Chinese all the time when I am not there and most of the time when I am. The twins however attend a daycare, and when it is just me and my wife with the twins we speak English only. (She spends an hour daily with her parents on MSN speaking Chinese in front of the twins.) And the twins attend a day care where English is the exclusive spoken language. At this point the twins are exclusively English speakers. I would like them to be bi-lingual and so would my wife but it hasn’t worked out. I am curious how this fits in with some of the comments about the ease of early language acquisition.

“>>Cre, Seminole, Oglala, Cherokee, now those are >>American languages. English is a European one.

Whoa, now there’s a fatuous comment. I wonder what this was meant to accomplish.”

Well, they’re really hard to learn – in some cases, historically so even for native speakers . . .

Four years of high school French, three years of university French, and I can barely understand a news article in Le Monde. The French nightly news is completely out of the question.

slocum is right, though. I didn’t have anything interesting to read in French, and there was nothing to listen to in French. When the bell rang at the end of the 55 minute period, there was simply no other decent opportunity to put the language to work.

I learned English and Arabic at about the same time, as a young child. I am fluent in both.
But as for learning “foreign languages”—which I began to do in American schools, in the normal manner described above—I was exposed to Spanish as an adolescent, took four (4) years! of it, got straight A’s, and I was never close to fluent in the language.

I think a lot of this is that schools suck at teaching languages, even to the few students who want to learn. Children, on the other hand, have a lot of motivation both to learn a language and to emulate a certain accent: they need people to understand them in at least one language and their friends make fun of them if they talk funny. They’re also exposed to the language and get to practice all day, not just one period in high school. And yet, they still make plenty of mistakes; adults are simply more willing to overlook them.

With adults a foreign accent is seen as perfectly acceptable, even charming. It’s unsurprising that fewer adults manage to achieve a native accent.

A good tactic is to create motivation. I learned French less from high school classes than a burning desire to read Le petit Nicolas books. A few of my Bollywood-obsessed friends have picked up Hindi along the way. I don’t think the school system (beyond maybe a few hard-core immersion schools) really has much to do with it.

Raghav: Are you a fan of Zompist, by any chance?

I think immersion in the language is important (developing an “ear” by listening to the radio in the language in question can be useful.

But the person who said “which” language must be kidding from a USA perspective. For most of you it must clearly be spanish, apart from those near quebec. Try being an Australian and ask “which” language. Then it is hard (Chinese or Indonesian perhaps?).

Early language education does no discernable harm. It’s just that it’s also unclear that it does much good. Classroom education by itself rarely produces real fluency, and in those rare cases where it does, the students are almost without exception highly motivated adults. That child immersed in more than one language acquires those languages without later remembering how hard it was is not an indicator that early language education in classrooms will produce the same effect.

If people are told that a foreign language will be a tacit or explicit requirement for any kind of serious university education or important position in business, then are offered chances to actually use the language outside the classroom, then early education might make a difference. As it stands… I studied French from kindergarten onwards, and still couldn’t do anything of use in it until I spent a year living France. I might well have had the same result if I had simply started in my late teens.

Ban dubbing, and force channels to carry a quota of foreign language TV with subtitles in prime time. Make radio stations carry a quota of foreign language pop music. Compel cinemas to give half of their theatre space to foreign language films with subtitles. If the UK really wanted to give Brits an incentive to learn foreign languages, it should press to have French and German declared the sole EU working languages, and campaign to have English forbidden in Brussels. Or, by far the most effective way to induce foreign language skills is to be invaded and colonized by a hegemonic power that believes God or evolution has given it a mandate to civilize you.

None of that will ever happen, but if it did, it would reflect the situation in those countries where foreign language skills are high.

@30, Ban dubbing, and force channels to carry a quota of foreign language TV with subtitles in prime time.

I don’t think you can actually ban dubbing, but yeah, in countries where movies are run with subtitles people understand English, and I suspect probably without making a conscientious effort to learn it.

But that’s only good for learning English.

I went to a school which did push foreign languages early; French and Latin from age 7, German from age 10, Russian from age 14.

I don’t know if Russian is intrinsically more difficult, or if my 14-year-old brain was much less plastic than an earlier one, but I’ve ended up reasonably fluent in French and German, and can just barely say ‘no! that is very expensive! I will find another taxi!’ in Russian.

I fullheartedly second what greatzamfir writes. People who have never had to survive in another language have no clue of what it means for others to do so, and often have no clue of what *they* can do to help other people who make an effort to speak in their langauge (such as speaking slower, avoiding the use of slang or difficult words, etc.).

Anyone who wants to be a worldcitizen should feel obliged to learn another language at least to intermediate level, partly for these reasons, and partly also because it will create more respect for those who learn and communicate in foreign languages — that is, those who work hard every day to make communication across language groups possible. But then, I’m Flemish and there are few tribes in the world for whom language is more of a political issue than the Flemings…

One theory to explain why French became the ‘Language of Diplomacy’ at the start of the 18th century is that French was really the only living ‘foreign language’ that the English could muster. So the golden age of French language infulence came about because of the Goddams inadequacies.

The preceeding main diplomatic rival was apparently Italian, not least because this was the traditional way of comunicating with diplomats from the Ottoman Empire.

(37.) But American shows and movies are hardly made for export either. I guess only British tv shows really have export to other countries in mind during production. I think this is a typical chicken and egg topic: you can’t watch foreign shows in the US because they would have to be subtitled, and the viewers don’t watch subtitled shows because they are not used to it.

But subtitles are, in my opinion, a red herring when it comes to learning languages. Foreign language tv is only understandable when you have already a reasonable grip on the language. It is not going to help people who have no other connection with the language.

Raghav: Are you a fan of Zompist, by any chance?

Yes! But my comments on the critical period are drawn from various places, including Singleton’s book and In Other Words by Bialystok and Hakuta.

“A much better idea is to wait until the children are 14 or so. That way you can be sure that most will never actually learn the language in question, and be pretty sure that they will have an unpleasant time while not learning it. That’s what we try to do here in America”

All furreigners can speak English. That’s why you have to shout at them to show you’re not fooled.

“The manner of teaching is very important though. Not just two hours in the week in a classroom, but really submerge in the language.”

Yup. In fact, some school districts are turning a liability (lots of non-native English speakers) into an asset (mix native English and non-native English speakers into the same class, and create an immersion program). San Francisco is using immersion programs to hang on to its upper middle class parents.

[Within a four-mile radius of my house, I have the choice of seven-odd Spanish immersion programs, one Korean immersion, one Japanese ‘enrichment’ [not quite immersion], two Cantonese immersion, and two Mandarian immersion programs in public elementary schools. There’s also some private immersion programs, though not as many.]

But from my experience, the ‘thoughtfulness’ rather dies out when an English speaker is trying to communicate in another language.

I don’t know if learning another language is going to make you more thoughtful or helpful to speakers trying to speak your language. I suspect it does, but it was not the point I was trying to make. I’m not saying English-speakers should learn another language for the benefit of non-native speakers of English, but for their own benefit.

In my experience, English-speakers are far below average when it comes to communicating with people who speak mediocre or no English. On their home grounds, or in situations where English is the official language, this can be annoying for the others, but as you mention, this is not unique to English-speakers. But when they move to situations where English is not the standard, they run into trouble fast. In my experience, quicker than speakers of French or German, and definitely much quicker than speakers of small languages, like Czech or Dutch or Swedish.

I don’t expect people to learn a language for the benefit of others. It is in their own interest to be able to communicate better with foreigners, and I think learning a foreign language is a great help with this, even when talking to people who speak a completely different language than the one you learned

Abb, when American TV & film is made specifically for foreign consumption, it is… frankly, crap. I realized this watching Flemish TV, where the US shows shown are either cheap crap, The Simpsons, or stuff where I end up having to explain things to Flemings. Local comprehension of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, for instance, is really poor. But even Desperate Housewives translates poorly. And Lost… ok, no one understands Lost, so that shouldn’t count. And which American films make the most abroad? Those tend to be the plot-free special effects action films.

Japan, India, China, even Latin America to a significant degree have had some success in selling TV and film internationally, even in American markets, and even subtitled. On pure quality of writing and acting, I’d say that Germany and Quebec seem competitive to me, but have no apparent access to anglophone world distribution, except Quebec to some degree within Canada. France… ok, they make crap TV and French film has fallen far from its peak. But I’d still put some brain-rotting Luc Besson thriller up against Roland Emmerich any day. In terms of music, I suspect that popular French and German music is no more incomprehensible to American audiences than American rap is to European ones.

Robert Feinman: (@45) alas, despite much publicity and myth and a lot of desperate wishing it was so, Canadian French immersion education does not, in fact, on the whole, work. Immersion students outside areas with active francophone populations do not generally emerge with good enough French to pass Quebec university entrance exams. (And in my day, the UdM entrance exam was pretty easy.)

This is not terribly shocking. You take a bunch of English speaking kids and put them together with no francophones except their teachers (not all of whom are themselves native speakers), and no more motivation than average school kids, and it’s not too surprising when the results are mediocre. The anglos I knew who attended Quebec universities successfully were all either Anglo-Quebecois (and thus people living in at least partially francophone contexts outside of school) and graduates of ordinary English language schools who had either shown talent for French, or who were personally strongly motivated.

San Francisco’s plan – mixing immigrant kids and anglos – is a much better approach than the Canadian way. This kind of immigrant mixed bilingual education was pioneered in – of all places – Texas under George W. Bush. (Since it was a good idea, I presume it wasn’t *his* idea.)

I dunno, Scott, all I know is that poster ads in any DVD-rentals in Europe are exactly the same as in any Blockbuster back in the states. And that I can watch most of US-made hospital-soap, shoot-em-up-soap, supernatural-soap, and traditional soap TV stuff on local channels. Even, amazingly, a courtroom-soap like Boston Legal. I have to assume it’s not a coincidence.

I learned a lot of German watching “Die Leute von der Shihloh Ranch”
I have some friends who were totally hooked on Derrick and got tapes of it sent to them after they returned to the U.S.
Language teaching is a catastrophe in this country and always has been.

I thought the whole point of US foreign language instruction was to convince us that foreign languages are for foreign people. Since the rest of the world teaches everyone English, what’s the point in us Anglo-phones learning their languages. We’ll end up talking past each other.

This way we have more time to teach gym and study hall in US schools. These are skills you can’t get elsewhere.

one thing that has almost disappeared from secondary level foreign languages is literature, and with it, i would say, much of the motivation to study the language. students realise that they are never going to be fluent, or even half-decent, speakers of the language, but some at least would be stimulated by their lessons having more than just a functional aim. im pretty sure that it is now possible to do A level French without studying any literature whatsoever.

Number 28 – I’m 25, and Ed Balls is still a hilarious name. This bodes well for my Danish lessons.

Are you trying to put us translators out of business by suggesting that Americans actually learn other languages? This is an unfair labor practice.
Posted by Arthur Goldhammer

Ahh, Mr. Goldhammer, you would have a better case if you lobbied from K-Street and/or sued for “obstruction of business/income”.

Ignore the propaganda. Focus on what you see. LOL

My wife is Taiwanese and our 4 year old twins have grown up with her mother around much of the time. My wife and her mother speak Mandarin Chinese all the time… The twins however attend a daycare, and when it is just me and my wife with the twins we speak English only. (She spends an hour daily with her parents on MSN speaking Chinese in front of the twins.) And the twins attend a day care where English is the exclusive spoken language. At this point the twins are exclusively English speakers… I am curious how this fits in with some of the comments about the ease of early language acquisition.

Cheers