Why do so many people in the United States take a foreign language?
This is something I've never fully understood. I take a foreign language (Spanish) for pure enjoyment; I like learning languages. However, it seems like everyone around the world knows English. In foreign nations, most people involved in the industries of business and tourism speak English. And why would an American visit a foreign country, besides for vacation or business purposes? Clearly, it is more important that people in other countries learn English than we learn other languages. Maybe so many people here take a foreign language in high school because they think it'll help them get into a good college. Or, maybe they just think it's important to know another language. But at the same time, if it's so important, then why isn't it a requirement to take a foreign language at New Trier?
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I have to disagree with some of your post, starting with the opening assumption. A little research on olce.org, a Chicago Public Schools website, shows that less that 25% of CPS students take a foreign language. That number paints a different picture than what we see at New Trier. In most European countries, students are required to learn English as well as another foreign language. The U.S. values foreign languages less than most other countries.
ReplyDeleteWhen you go on to say that people use English for business and tourism, you are correct to a degree. For example, at Skokie Country Club in Glencoe, the caddie master is Mexican and can only speak a little English. It is still the case that a lot of occupations require a language other than English. You may ask how likely it is that a future job will require the language you learned, but it is much easier to learn a new language if you already learned one. I will give the example of my cousin; she grew up in Evanston and learned Spanish in high school. She got a job working as at a large agricultural company in Brazil and was able to learn Portuguese very quickly. She recently got married to a Brazilian man and they speak Portuguese in the home because her Portuguese is better than his English. Knowing only English really limits ones opportunities in such an interconnected world.
I’m in agreement with a lot of what Kevin said.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think the assumption that it’s obviously more important to learn English that Americans learn other languages is a tad too ethnocentric. While America is very important in business around the world, China is up and coming and may surpass the US. Whether or not the US is the most important in business, businesspeople in countries all around the world as you said are often bilingual—doesn’t that put us at a disadvantage, especially seeing as the need to learn foreign languages may increase as time goes on? A friend of mine who speaks French almost fluently helped her dad get some business clients by being his translator on a trip.
And what about Spanish in America? Fact is, so many speak Spanish here, even if you have some really terrible basic Spanish it can really help you out. My mom’s knowledge of Spanish is fairly abysmal, and she studied only a bit of French in college. However, she works as a fairly well-known ear doctor in Chicago and not only do many people come from Chicago to see her, but places outside IL, as well. And when she’s had clients that barely know English, just her tiny fragments of Spanish here and there really helped out in communicating with the family.
In my opinion, I think it’s sort of a bad thing America is kind of this massive, almost totally English speaking country—and when others don’t speak our language, sometimes we freak out because we’re so used to not being exposed to other languages. I went to France a couple years ago and most of the people I met were at least bilingual, which allowed them to go to fairly close-by countries like Germany, Spain, Italy, etc, as more than just English speaking tourists. Language is a hard thing to teach in a classroom, although it is helpful. You need to make a rather large jump from America to a foreign language-speaking country in comparison to some other parts of the world, but I think the benefits from it are enormously worthwhile.
At New Trier, I think the obvious reason people take a language is because most colleges look for at least three years of a foreign language. I exclude myself from that stereotype because I genuinely like learning French and about French culture.
ReplyDeleteI think it is absolutely terrible that Americans go to Europe expecting everyone to automatically speak English, and it's equally as terrible that we expect visiting Europeans to know English. It's completely unfair. When I was in Italy, we would go to restaurants and the menu would be in at least three languages. That was the fewest I ever saw it. At one restaurant, the menu was in Italian, English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Janpanese. That's six languages. And Kevin was right when he said that most European students are required to take English and one other language. My cousin from Sweden, when she lived there, took Swedish, English, and Spanish.
However, I can come up with some reasoning for this. In the United States, everyone in every state speaks English. So the way I look at Europe is this: it would be like if each state in the US spoke a different language. There are so many states in Europe, and each one speaks virtually a different language. Instead, of learning 15 different languages, English acts as a universal language.