026: Balancing Life with Sleep, Sickness, and Learning a New Language

Learning other languages is SO important!!!
America is the melting pot, which means that there are people here who don’t speak English (many more people than you think, Ryan). Your chance of running into someone who doesn’t speak English is high!

I did 2 years of Spanish on rosetta stone. I don’t remember much of it, but I can get food, water, and to and fro.

I did a year of teaching myself french. I know much more than I do in spanish, I just can’t speak it or write it. I can carry on a conversation in french if I practice some more, but I am much better at hearing it and knowing what is said. Each summer we host a teen from France at our house for a month. I can’t learn via duolingo, but I learn from submersion! Therefore, what I know in french is typically just what I learn when a student is here. And yes the students are here to practice English, I use it as an opportunity to practice french.

Learning a language is so crucial!!! Yes, ASL is important, but so is Spanish and french!!! (Plus, if you know ASL or Spanish and you put it on your resumé it looks really good for you) (people who do ASL jobs make a ton of money as well).

I disagree with Ryan a lot on this, and he needs to stop grouping homeschoolers together when he says stuff like that. I had to take 2 years of foreign language to graduate (my mom’s standards). Not all homeschoolers learn just what seems necessary. Plus, when children know more than one language, they grow up to be more quick on their feet with decision making!

Is the pig-latin that I’m fluent in practical? No. It’s not a real language and it’s kinda stupid. But the French and Spanish I know is enough to get by. There are so many people in the USA that don’t know English, and it’s not necessarily their job to learn it, as we welcome people with open arms!!!

Being bilingual is such a huge advantage in the workforce. If I knew Spanish or ASL, then I could be making double what I am now!

Rant over. Concensus is I agree with Matthew

“I know technically it’s spring, but here it isn’t really.”
Amen.

Can I straddle the fence and suggest that Ryan AND Matthew both have valid points in the whole foreign language debate?

Matthew: You are 100% correct that growing up bi-lingual hard-wires the brain uniquely and not only makes one mor creative, but also makes learning more languages easier, no matter when you begin. However, in the US at least, foreign language (as a school subject) is rarely taught early in life, and in nearly every state, only mandated in high school (2-4 years depending on the school system). The brain has already been hard-wired by the time foreign language is introduced to the vast majority of US students, and of those taking a full four years, very few retain any functional knowledge or ability to speak/read/write beyond the absolute basics. From my generation on (about 30 years) the ONLY people I know who learned a second language AFTER the age of five who still are able to speak conversantly in it are the people who both lived abroad and learned the language by immersing themselves in it, AND still use it regularly. [Curiously, people from my parents’ (Ryan’s grandparents’) generation and older, who were taught Latin instead of a “current” language are able to decipher more speech from foreign languages than any of my generation can (almost all US schools dropped Latin as a “dead” language in the 80’s). So taking Latin as a foreign language option can be more useful than an actual language.]
The best time to teach/learn a 2nd language is before the child is fully verbal, ideally beginning in the first 18 months of life. Not only will the brain have more elasticity for learning new languages when the child is older, but the child can also develop the throat/tongue/cheek/lip muscles necessary to correctly form words in both languages flawlessly (the examples, though possibly stereotyping, that comes to mind would be Asian-born speakers being unable to pronounce the hard “r” as in rice, radio, read, while most English-born speakers are unable to roll their “r”s as is necessary for Spanish).

Ryan: You are 97.5% correct that there is NO justification to take a foreign language in high school “just because”… I dock 1% for my caveat that even if there is no “life’s work” skill gained, you still can achieve better character by forcing yourself to do something well, even if for no reason than “because you are told to”. The next 1% I am docking because I do want to account for my own bias toward not using your formative school years to sit and do things you’ll promptly forget because 150 years ago some industrial tycoons figured out the best way to create a population full of docile doers and buyers was to make everyone learn the same thing, at the same pace for 12 years. And the final .5% was docked because I know that when/if you do discover you need to learn another language, I know you will find a way to do so, just as you have always figured out how to learn the things you want to know, and how to do the things you want to do, but don’t deny that had I forced you to learn 2-4 years of that particular language (even though I had no ability to predict what it was), you would have some small head start on it.

tldr: Learn a 2nd language when you’re little or it will be nearly impossible to be fluent; use your primary (k-12) education to learn things you’re actually interested in and I’ll retain, not what “everyone says” you should. And Ryan’s mom can’t entirely step outside her own bias to objectively support her son’s arguments.