The Intrusion of White Families Into Bilingual Schools - Sensationalist Headlines

[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;53019835]Back in ye olde days (16th-19th centuries) it was common for anyone willing to do anything scientific, or something that required any significant amount of reading, they would know a multitude of languages. Since they couldn’t wait for that new medical text to get translated into, say, Dutch, it was just easier to learn Arabic/Greek/Latin etc I do think the prevalence of translated works made learning new languages less interesting for people just about anywhere. Why speak a different language when you have your own already?[/QUOTE] Languages often express the same ideas in subtly different ways. In literature we often find text to be best enjoyed in spoken word (Read Shakespeare aloud after reading it I'm your head and you'll get a sense of this). I think this discrepancy is better explained by considering that access to education is greater than it has been in the past. Science/reading was largely a practice limited to the wealthy and priestly. Most physicians I have met are at least bilingual.

[QUOTE=NotMeh;53020405]Quadrilingual here Learning new languages is never harmful and can only benefit you, don't see why anybody would ever be against it[/QUOTE] As someone who's received the "This is X country, we speak English here!" line in real life when I was speaking to someone in my native language, there seems to be a strong sense of xenophobia and the threat of otherness that intimidates people who only know how to speak one language. I think in some of their warped minds, they think that learning to speak another language is also simultaneously acquiescing and bending over for the culture of the land that language comes from, at a risk to your own identity and culture. It's also being intimidated when confronted by your own ignorance when you meet someone who is freely (and happily) communicating with another person in a language you cannot understand and participate in, because you lack sufficient knowledge of the language that also alienates you from the discussion. It doesn't even matter if you were [I]meant[/I] to be a part of the discussion (you could be actually overhearing it), it still brings you face to face with your linguistic limitation, a hard evidence that you're not clever enough. When I was a younger, more foolish snookypookums, there was an incident which forever transformed how I viewed people who spoke multiple languages. I was with my mother (an English teacher for over 35 years who won numerous national teaching awards for her efforts to get children to read). She saw me making fun of a grown woman who was a Francophone and was struggling to explain to a passerby that she was looking for the restroom. My mother saw me laughing and making silly jokes about how comical and inept the woman looked with her terrible English and gesticulations to replace the words she didn't know. She was very angry, and she turned to me and asked : "Tell me: would you consider that a person who knew more languages to be smarter and intelligent than one who didn't?". I nodded, said of course. She responded: "Well, that woman currently knows one more language than you do right now because she can speak French [I]and[/I] English, which is more than can be said for you. Do you feel proud of being provably less intelligent than she is right now?" Needless to say, I STFU and I always recount that story whenever I see someone else make fun of someone's English. It takes more guts than people with a single language know to be able to communicate in a language they had to learn [I]in addition[/I] to a language they needed to converse with their family.

[QUOTE=Pascall;53020472]Tbh I’ve been desperate to learn Spanish because a lot of my family speaks it but my parents never found it prudent to teach myself or my sister how to speak it growing up. I’ve taken like 2 college level Spanish classes, regularly talk to family members who have tried to teach it to me and have even made an attempt at learning it via Duolingo but to no real avail. I’m not sure if it’s just something that’s really hard or if I’m so accustomed to English that deviating from it is too much of a challenge. Really sucks! I’m gonna keep trying as I get older but I do really wish I could speak more than just English.[/QUOTE] depending on how into it you are, i recommend changing your phone/pc's language to spanish. and when you have the time, explore some songs in spanish and add the ones you like to your playlist right away, then try to follow along with the lyrics

[QUOTE=NotMeh;53020405]English is likely one of the "easiest" languages out there, from my experience at least[/QUOTE] English's "easyness" comes from the gargantuan amount of media and cultural influence the anglosphere has, as well as absence of things that are generally considered "difficult". English is very low on inflection, which is one of the things many people consider difficult about learning new languages (particularly because it has to mastered very early on), but no one seems to notice English's complicated and rather nuanced tense/aspect system. [QUOTE=Riller;53020422]The ease of English goes both ways. English is easy because it's a bastardisation of all the surrounding European languages; which means in reverse, you can relatively easily learn any of the surrounding European languages, aided by your knowledge of English. Learning non-indoeuropean languages is another case, though.[/QUOTE] This isn't particularly true. English is no more of a "bastardisation" of the surrounding European languages any more than Castillian Spanish, High German, or any given Slavic language is. Not only that, English has plenty of things that even languages in its immediate family don't (eg; do-support, progressive aspect, dental fricatives, verb-phrase ellipsis). Additionally, knowledge of English won't necessarily help outside the Romance or Germanic languages, even if the target language is within the Indo-European family. For example, Russian and English have very little in common aside from some common vocabulary, as Russian makes use of plenty of things that English doesn't have, and vice versa.

I'd love to learn another language but I've never really had the opportunity. My high school only offered French and I wasn't interested. Sure it's the second official language of Canada but I live in a province that has no French speakers and I have no desire to connect with French Canadian culture so I found it pointless. Then my university only offered French, Spanish and Japanese and I just plain wasn't interested in any of those. I've been trying to use Duolingo for Russian and Turkish but I feel like it's not really helpful, especially when it comes to Russian. And I can't really get formal instruction in those languages in the most Americanised, redneck part of Canada.

Duolingo is good in some areas and horrible in others. They don't really help too much with inflection and they haven't done any progress on Vietnamese iirc

[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;53020506]Duolingo is good in some areas and horrible in others. They don't really help too much with inflection and they haven't done any progress on Vietnamese iirc[/QUOTE] Duolingo's been great for me so far as testing and building up a vocabulary bank. But as far as hammering the grammar rules, knowing how feminine/masculine objects and things is concerned, it's definitely lacking. So it's gotten to a point where I can now read a sentence in French and somewhat piece together what the words mean with my fragmented knowledge, but couldn't even think of putting that sentence together by myself. Also, without traditional learning methods (conversation with an actual language speaker involved and supervising) I can never be sure if my pronunciations are absolutely correct. I don't think Duolingo can [I]ever[/I] be a one-stop-shop for learning a language, but it can definitely get you atleast 60% of the way there if you were really determined.

[QUOTE=snookypookums;53020521]Duolingo's been great for me so far as testing and building up a vocabulary bank. But as far as hammering the grammar rules, knowing how feminine/masculine objects and things is concerned, it's definitely lacking. So it's gotten to a point where I can now read a sentence in French and somewhat piece together what the words mean with my fragmented knowledge, but couldn't even think of putting that sentence together by myself. Also, without traditional learning methods (conversation with an actual language speaker involved and supervising) I can never be sure if my pronunciations are absolutely correct. I don't think Duolingo can [I]ever[/I] be a one-stop-shop for learning a language, but it can definitely get you atleast 60% of the way there if you were really determined.[/QUOTE] Adding to this, Lingodeer might be a better choice if you're learning East Asian languages.

The hardest part about learning a new language, to me at least, is not being immersed in it. I took Russian in college for two years, getting consistent A grades in the courses, from an excellent native Russian speaker as a professor. We even went to Brighton Beach in NY which has a large Russian language community and were forced to do a scavenger hunt by talking with the locals in Russian to ask them where certain landmarks were. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the language. That was 4 years ago. Since then I've had no opportunity to speak Russian since literally no one in my life speaks or understands it. None of the media I watch is in Russian, and due to my full time job I have very limited time to relax so trying to refresh my understanding of the language is low priority. I'm slowly forgetting everything I've learned since I speak English 24/7 and hear Russian only once or twice when some asshole in a video game calls me a whore. If you don't speak the language you learn frequently you start to get rusty and forget things, so it's difficult to retain what you've learned. Bilingual schools are a great thing because students are immersed in the languages they're learning and will be much more likely to retain it since they're actually using it.

[QUOTE=Riller;53020175]Ved du hvad, du har sku ret. At være tosproget er ubrugeligt i det 21. århundrede, fordi oversættelser og oversættelsesprogrammer er så tilgængelige for alle at der bogstaveligt talt ikke er noget formål i at tale andre sprog end det første man lærte som barn. Fra nu af vil jeg kun kommunikere på dansk, og hvis I har problemer med det, kan I jo bare se om min tekst findes oversat et eller andet sted. Jeg er dog nødt til at spørge - Det med at tosprogethed er unødvændigt; gælder det kun jer hvide amerikanere som er velsignet med Guds eget sprog, engelsk, som modersmål, eller har jeres spansktalende befolkning heller ingen fordel i at lære et andet sprog? [sp]No I won't because that's fucking stupid, and thinking knowing more than one language is somehow bad or useless is literally one of the dumbest, most regressive points I've seen on here for quite some while[/sp][/QUOTE] I'm about 95% sure that his point is that a lot of people don't learn a second language because they don't need to, and the advent of mass translation of various texts gave people less reason to learn multiple languages. In the modern age this would be the same as someone using Google Translate instead of just learning German to talk to their internet buddies.

[QUOTE=mugofdoom;53021452]I'm about 95% sure that his point is that a lot of people don't learn a second language because they don't need to, and the advent of mass translation of various texts gave people less reason to learn multiple languages. In the modern age this would be the same as someone using Google Translate instead of just learning German to talk to their internet buddies.[/QUOTE] Yeah, I don't think anyone would argue that knowing multiple languages is disadvantageous, and culturally we'd all benefit from a universally multilingual populace. But learning languages is hard and time-consuming, so most people only go to that level of effort if there's a tangible benefit to doing so. For most Americans, accustomed as we are to the rest of the world translating for our benefit, learning a second language is little more than an academic exercise. I've studied French, Swahili, Russian, and Georgian at various points as a practical necessity for living in countries where those languages were spoken, but in the US I have basically no practical application for any of those languages and I know I'm slowly losing any fluency I once had. I had good reason to learn those languages and it wasn't too hard to do when I was immersed in it. But what incentive does my next-door neighbor, who already works a full-time job and has plenty of demands on his time, have to learn a second language?

[QUOTE=snookypookums;53020380]Now that the enmities are over, I feel it'd do a better job for those with Irish/Scottish/Germanic ancestry to reconnect with their heritage by learning the language. At least it beats claiming a fraction of your ancestry as a reason to be Irish for St. Paddy's day and behave like a drunk twat. :v:[/QUOTE] I can't really speak for Ireland but the problem with Scotland is that besides English, which is already very very likely to be spoken by a Scottish descendant, is that Scottish Gaelic is only spoken by less than 2% of the population of Scotland. I mean, sure you /could/ learn Gaelic but good luck finding anyone to use it with. I am a native Gaelic speaker and received my primary education in Gaelic, starting to learn English at age 4, meaning that I effectively have 2 first languages in practical terms and honestly I dunno if I would recommend learning Gaelic to people who do not live near Gaelic communities, simply because you are never going to get a chance to use it. Unless you live in Scotland or some tiny parts of Nova Scotia where Gaelic still exists, you are much better off learning another language. I don't want to discourage people as Gaelic is a very rich and interesting language, but it's unlikely you will have any use for it. There is not a lot of Gaelic art or media either, most of it being oral tradition. [editline]2nd January 2018[/editline] Well I guess there is Scots/Doric but wether or not you count that as a separate language or a dialect of English gets political and messy.