Protesters at Houston's Arabic Immersion Magnet School on first day of class

[theone33]

Place your kid in a tutor to learn Polish. No one is stopping you.

[Vicman]

Originally Posted by Dopo

Let's make perfect the enemy of "good"
Would be great for kids to learn any language they want
Is it possible? I really doubt it.
You really think that schools today can teach 10 different languages?

It would only be feasible if it's a very large school district and the less popular languages are centralized at particular high schools. HISD has Bellaire High as its language magnet and AFAIK it offers that many languages.

I actually think that other school districts should merge together so this kind of thing is more likely.

[geolvl]

A full time high school program isn't the essential piece. High school could be an elective immersion class to upkeep the skill. elementary and middle school are key to speak and be literate. If the average person doesn't learn a language by the time they are 11, then it may not be feasible to make it happen. It's really only a marketable skill if you speak and write in the foreign language. Our public system is tough, and foreign language makes it harder, but it's feasible if it's done right with dedicated parents.

[bamba_boy]

I have spent 4+ years living and working in Kuwait and northern Saudi. I made mad money compared with the same job duties in Houston and that's just knowing English upon arrival and learning some pigeon Arabic from language tapes on the way to work and on the job. I WISH this school was available when I was young. I could have been probably promoted several times more and also, the wife was close to being given a couple of lucrative full-time professional jobs except she needed decent Arabic. The jobs went to less-qualified (professionally) Lebanese applicants who , of course, had both fluent English and Levantine Arabic.

Arabic, to learn the written script and formal grammar, is VERY hard compared to the Romance (Spanish) and Germanic (English, German, Dutch) languages. Some familiar Arabic words that crept into English from Spanish and its Moorish occupation but just a few dozen compared to the thousands of words from German and French (Spanish and the other Latin-based languages) that make them much easier to learn. The good thing is that most of the people don't know formal Arabic either and speak either sort of simplified pigeon Arabic between folks of different countries (mostly based on Egyptian movie Arabic!) or very localized idiosyncratic dialects to people from the same region of their country. Nobody makes fun of you if you can just make yourself understood in pigeon Arabic or even "Arabiclish"!

Those kids at that school, if they come out with decent spoken Arabic let alone written, will be "GOLD" for having a chance of steady of employment at a high salary in some very nice cities (not all of the Arab world is Iraq or Syria). In Dubai you can pretty much get along solely in English but very wealthy cities like Kuwait City, Riyadh, Muscat, Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Alexandria, etc, it really helps to have Arabic - especially if you seek a management position with lower level employees only conversant in Arabic or seeking to work with Arabic-speaking customers. Even in places like Dubai, Arabic helps so much as you can smooze with the Sheikhs at the Dinwanyas (private enclave boy's club hangouts) and get the real scoop on what's going on in your industry as well as the usually underpublicized cultural/entertainment happenings.

[PedroMartinez]

bamba_boy, thanks for that write-up, it's interesting to read such information from a person with firsthand knowledge.