The country broadly has what’s called a monolingual language ideology. English is prioritized above others. Multilingualism just isn’t viewed as a skill. And thus there’s no large pool of L2 speakers with which to interact regularly enough to learn and maintain an L2. I mean, they certainly exist, but the landscape is quite different from somewhere like Belgium or South Africa or, idk, most countries. Really anywhere where there’s like a home/cultural language, a market language (maybe a pidgin), and an official state language.

The wall was meant to keep you in.

How common is it for students in non-English speaking countries to learn a second language that isn’t English? I would imagine not very. Learning a second language isn’t very useful if you’re not going to use it, and learning it won’t be easy if you aren’t immersed in it.

To be fair it’s tough to be proficient in a language you don’t get to use. In some places in the US, there’s plenty of Spanish speaking people. Other than that not so much.

Hah!

We can barely teach kids English.

Why?

The answer is Republicans want to fund Christian schools instead, with various variations of extra steps.

to be done right it has to be done early. This means parents or schools have to choose the languages learned. It needs to be immersive to. Schools will have to have teachers for every language. That can be expensive. Its a bit easier with non english speaking countries as they generally teach english and like catholic schools at one time taught latin. Now personally I would love the whole world to standardize on one sign language and teach that so that in a generation or two everyone would be able to communicate.

Because education in the USA is a sad joke? Republicans have been hollowing out education for the past 5 decades or so and they worked hard trying to shove fundamentalist christianity in schools and science classes specifically

The US is tucked and can get fucked

Although it’s been shown learning another language as a child changes the way your mind works, there’s only so much money in the teaching budget and so many hours in the day. Conservatives want to take both from our kids, for their own ends, so justifying the value of the resources to the student is a perennial challenge.

Given the low proficiency of current grads with their first language, and basic skills like punctuation and spelling, I say we’re a LONG way before we can open a second language in the curriculum.

I think this is a matter of the microeconomics concept of “scarce resources”? It’d be lovely if everyone in the US learns at least Spanish. But school can only teach a limited number of subjects, so in the US where most people don’t need to use anything other than American English, it might be argued that it is more beneficial to spend more time on, say, STEM and history, rather than getting kids to learn Spanish/German/Chinese… I guess there are foreign language electives for that reason? They are still highly valuable after all

Besides, learning and teaching a foreign language is hard lol. China used to (I’ve heard rumors that some places changed, not 100% sure) require mandatory English education from 1st grade elementary… social issues with the English teacher expats aside, the English literacy rate in China still looks like that. There are even multilingual countries in Europe where a good number of people struggle to learn/speak the other national languages so… Even if the US wants to do it, it’s not that straightforward

Learning a second language might open perspectives and expose children to ideas. The GOP can’t afford such smart kids.

I’ve almost never been in a situation where speaking Spanish was gamechanging…

So yea they’ve been teaching Spanish for like 2 years in middle school, never retained much except basics like uno dos tres cuatro cingco seis… and me llama pizza, and me no hablo espanol…

since I never got to use it outside of class

But yes I agree, its cool to have another language, but then it again you just lose it anyways since you never have the opportunity to use it, most people will never use it.

Also its about a person’s will

I remember school used to make me read boring shakespeare shit or the oddyssey, yeah I just can’t… soooo boring

Same logic with language learning…

Honestly I have more chances of using Chinese (I’m ethnic Chinese living near a lot of Asians) than using Spanish… so yea there’s that

And an average non-Asian that never goes to Chinese restaurants probably don’t need to learn any extra languages at all.

Also a lot of countries teach English because its a lingua franca so I think English speakers just expects others to be able to communicate anyways and so theres a less of an incentive to learn anyways.

Oh btw my high school does requires two credits (aka: two years) of learning a foreign language…

So guess what:

I chose the easy way out and just picked Chinese since I already knew it from two years of school in China 😎 (you can boo me all you want but who wouldn’t just do this for an easy A?)

They actually put me in Spanish at first but all the kids (I know its “high school” but people still act like “kids” so I’m gonna use that word) were misbehaving that I was just like why not just switch to Chinese, a language I already knew LOL

I’m glad I did make the switch, so comfy there lol, literally everyone behaved better (cuz no mishaving kid is gonna choose the hardest language, they’d probably be trying to change out of that class)

Edit: Went to school in Brooklyn, NYC for elementary, never got spanish class, then for middle school and high school it was Philadelphia, PA, and it was Philly that I had Spanish classes for two years in middle school.

Edit 2: Also I’d like to add: Learning a language later on as you get older plus the lack of immersion… for like a one hour class 5 days a week for two school years… yea that’s nearly impossible.

I’m lucky to come to the US as an 8 year old so I had that advantage of learning English. My dad never really learned English, still a non-citizen… 👀

My mom did, but still struggles to express things

So I sort of have a weird language barrier with parents…

If you don’t live in a border state the chances of using a second language enough to really learn it well and become proficient are really small unless you have close family members that speak it.

I took a couple of years of Spanish in high school but live about 12 hours from the Mexican border so I didn’t use it enough to retain much.

Japan tries to teach everyone English and it does not work well. Most people don’t want to learn it and the way they teach it is also to a test not to communication. I have no faith that the same wouldn’t happen in the US.

The college I graduated from required a year of foreign language for graduation – actually take it and pass, not just test out of it.

OK, that’s not quite true. For some reason, the mathematics department was grouped with the languages for purposes of this requirement, so you could take a year of calculus in lieu of a foreign language if you preferred.

Unless you were a math major. Classes in your major didn’t count, so all math majors absolutely had to take a foreign language.

Unless you were a dual major like math-physics. Dual majors could apply classes from both majors towards distribution requirements. I knew several “math” majors who took just enough physics classes to qualify as a dual major for the express purpose of not having to study a language.

When I was a kid in public school, everybody had to take a foreign language, the elective part was that we had a choice as to which language we took. Some chose French. Some chose Spanish. If you came from money, you also had the option to take foreign language courses at participating colleges, which opened up a lot of other options like German, Japanese, and Latin, amongst others.

Has that changed? Or perhaps it’s different in different jurisdictions?

For me personally, I wish Latin had been an option for me, as it’s used extensively in biology and it would have been incredibly helpful. In terms of foreign language courses I’ve taken, I’ve had Spanish, French, and German. I don’t use any of them, except on rare occasion I’ll hear/see something in Spanish that I can vaguely understand the highlights of given enough time. French is pretty much 100% useless in my day to day life. German has been helpful once or twice when watching a movie or listening to music, but otherwise, useless as well.

Keep in mind, however smart you are, most people are not that smart. They’ll never be curious enough or smart enough to learn another language. They don’t have enough exposure to another language to really remember it. It’s basically of waste of their time and educational money. I’m all for teaching these things in schools as electives, but forcing kids to learn multiple different languages? I think we should have universal/single payer healthcare, better medicare/medicaid, free school lunches (and breakfasts), true livable minimum wages, and a myriad other things first.