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What's surprising is the opposite question from that of the original posting: why is Spanish so popular as a second language in the US, and French (and especially German) very much of secondary status?
You might be onto something. I never quite understood why French is so popular as a second language in Canada yet Spanish is nowhere to be heard. Huh, surprising.
Last edited by SunsetMission; 01-11-2014 at 10:55 PM..
In the US there is no particular need to learn any language other than English. Spanish certainly can be very useful, but the language of the land is English. So taking another language is just a matter of choice. I'm part German, so I took that in college. It didn't work but I didn't really try.
If you live in the US and do not speak English, it would be a good idea to learn it or you will not be able to communicate in many important situations.
Given that English is the common language in the aviation world and many business communities, as well as other reasons, it would be the obvious choice for a second language outside the English-speaking world.
It's common for people in Europe and other parts of the world to chastise Americans for not knowing any other languages, but realistically what need do we have? Europe is a comparable landmass and population to the US and they have at least a dozen separate major languages. We have one.
Yes we have a lot of Spanish-speaking immigrants, but just as previous waves of immigrants had to assimilate, so do they. It's not on me to learn their language.
Last edited by mbradleyc; 01-12-2014 at 03:10 AM..
In grade school, they made me take French. In high school, they made me take Latin for a year. The other three years in high school, I took French. In college, I took a couple of years of French, some German, and some Chinese. I guess when I was taking these courses, I wasn't really thinking so much about actually using languages. Either I had to take the courses or there was not much choice about it, as I had to take some language and that's what would fit my schedule.
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I wish more high schools offered ASL. When i worked in customer service, I encountered more people who are deaf that use ASL than people that only spoke Spanish or another language. I know a little ASL (all self-taught) but to me, it is a fascinating language.
ok I get Chinese is hard, but so is german. In the business world, both the latter will be more important than german or French in terms of business. Sure in the ideal world, you know every language out there.
Chinese is MUCH harder for a native English speaker to learn than any European language. You can often understand what someone is saying in French, German or Spanish because it's similar enough to English. That's not the case with Chinese. Every single word can be messed up because you put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. My daughter lived in an area of China with very few English speakers, had Chinese language lessons for a year and at the end, had only mastered what she called "survival Chinese". She could give directions, order food and have a short conversation, but that was about it. And if she left her area, where Mandarin Chinese was the norm and went to Hong Kong, where Cantonese was spoken, she had an even more difficult time.
That said, our schools only teach Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. The Spanish classes are always over subscribed. German was dropped about 6 years ago, over much community protest and French was phased out a few years ago.
You might be onto something. I never quite understood why French is so popular as a second language in Canada yet Spanish is nowhere to be heard. Huh, surprising.
It's not surprising. It's because the French settled Quebec and decided to keep their language and culture. As a result, French is the official language in Quebec and about 23% of the total Canadian population speaks French as their first language.
Spanish is useful in America because large areas of the US were settled by the Spanish, and those people spoke Spanish only for a long time. Even after the US conquered those areas in the mid-1800s, the residents continued to speak Spanish only for decades as there was not a significant English-speaking population in those areas for a long time. Afterwards, many of those Spanish speakers became bilingual.
In any event, Spanish and French are more globally versatile than Chinese. While there are more Chinese speakers in the world, they are concentrated in a single country. Learning Chinese is a fad. It will help you only in China, Taiwan, and Singapore. The push to learn Chinese in the 2000s is like the push to learn Japanese in the 1980s. When the Chinese economy stagnates, the language will lose its shine and people will be telling you that you need to learn Hindi or Bengali.
Spanish and French are spoken by people across the world. Spanish lets you travel freely through Central and South America as well as parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia, and you can communicate with the millions of people who have moved to the US to work as well.
French is spoken in parts of the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and parts of Asia.
In elementary school, we had Spanish lessons once or twice each week. Once you started middle school, the instruction became more rigorous with class lasting 55 minutes each day. I chose French as a 12-year old because I suspected that the prettiest girls would be in French class (I was correct).
At my middle school and high school, we offered Spanish, French, German, Latin and (I think) Mandarin. The vast majority of students took Spanish with French in second place. Because taking a foreign language was mandatory for graduation, a lot of average to below-average students populated the Spanish classes. As such, the level of instruction they received was much less intense than in French class. By high school (I made it up to AP French 4), we were fully immersed and rarely used English in class unless there was a difficult concept that required serious explanation. In fact, our professor would take points off of our overall grade if we used English in class without permission.
Most of the kids took Spanish just to fulfill the language requirement. The teachers understood this, and so I don't think those students learned much. If you compared language mastery of the students in the different classes, those taking Spanish were definitely at the bottom. We could have intense discussions (such as when 9/11 occurred) in French while my Spanish-taking peers could barely communicate in their language of choice.
Spanish certainly has it's merits in the United States, particularly in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and parts of Florida. However, it's not seen as a language of business. English, Mandarin, Arabic, German and French would probably take you much further on a global scale than Spanish. In the United States, Spanish is more important for food service, construction, tellers at banks etc. It hasn't quite penetrated to the upper echelons of the white collar world.
However, plenty of jobs where I live advertise "bilingual preferred." Oddly enough, I know plenty of bilingual people (speaking Ibo, Vietnamese, Hindi and Farsi) yet that's usually not what is meant when a company asks for bilingual. I feel sympathy for African and Asian immigrants because they're typically expected to know English with no safety net.
It was kind of unfair, but totally understood when the second generation Latino's took Spanish for their foreign language requirement. Most of them were fluent in both English and Spanish, giving them a huge leg up.
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