What's the way you study foreign languages in your country?

[Vetty]

Hi,to everybody. I am very much interested how you people study f.l. in the countries you live in or well informed about. I am from Russia and I can't tell I am completely satisfied with it. Though, now it's getting much better. You could start learning the language from the very early age, say 3 years old. Kids sing songs, learn rhymes, repeat a lot, etc. Then at the age of 6-7 they go to school and start the grammar and all that linguistic items and here starts the problems. They are forced to learn, not much encouraged by the teachers, not much interested in the language. Teachers at municipal schools usually don't love the language and, consequently, don't know it well enough and have little to share. The prosess of education at the secondary and high school is focused at passing the exams, again no love, no pleasure, no stimulus. Then there are much more choices. After school, but for Universities, where the situation is much the same, people could visit language school and, if they are lucky to come across a charismatic teacher, they could probably learn some basic language for, let's say, some 3 years.

[Skrej]

In the U.S., languages typically aren't a mandatory part of the curriculum, and if they are, generally not until the last 4 years of high school. In those cases, the requirement is pretty minimal, usually only requiring one or two credits (classes).

Some schools and colleges have a token foreign language requirement, but this is left to the individual college, or in case of high school education, left to individual state boards of education to mandate if they see fit.

For the most part, language learning in the US involves adults paying for private lessons or taking classes on their own initiative.
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[Vetty]

Thank you very much, Skrej, the system sounds reasonable, but it's obvious easier in your country, as all the world speaks your mother tongue. And couldn't you aswer, please, how much time (approximately, sure) it takes to learn a foreingn language for an adult?

[Skrej]

I can't answer that, as it's different for each person. Some people pick up other languages very easily, others don't. Also, it depends on what you mean by 'learning' a foreign language. Do you mean native level fluency, or basic survival level phrases? Do you want to be able to book a motel room, or discuss politics and art? The first is learned fairly quickly, the 2nd takes a good deal more time.

You will find many books and courses that advertise learning a language in a month, but these are introductory level courses, concentrated around memorizing some basic routine phrases. You may learn to say some phrases, but if the other person doesn't respond exactly the way you've memorized the expected answer, you're out of luck.

The only well established fact is that it's easier for young children to acquire a second language then it is an adult.

Yes, I agree that we Americans are somewhat spoiled in that we're not forced to learn a 2nd language, due to the increasing importance of English across the world. I also think that being monolingual is a handicap, and that you're better served learning at least one other language. The US just isn't in the situation that we're necessitated to do so, so it's largely a voluntary effort.
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[Jamie (K)]

Vetty, how an American learns a foreign language depends on who he is and where he lives.

American schools are administered locally, and the courses offered depend on the priorities of the local community. Some towns spend big money on sports facilities and not enough on academics, while others really stress a high academic level. As far as languages are concerned, some local schools offer only one language -- nowadays usually Spanish -- and maybe only in high school. In other towns, the schools offer several languages and start them early.

At my school in Michigan, I had to take French starting at the age of 9. (At that time, Americans typically believed that any educated person should know some French.) At the age of 12, we went on to the next level of school, and there we had a choice of Latin, French or Spanish, but we didn't have to take any language at all, if we didn't want to. In my high school, the choice was between Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German or Russian. I took German and French. Few US schools offer Portuguese, even though that language is in great demand by large international companies here.

When my niece was 13 years old, her school gave them one year of language "sampling" courses, so that they could see which language they liked best, or disliked the least. One semester was French and Spanish, and the other was Latin and German. From their experience with those, they had to decide which language to continue with when they got to high school.

Some children also go to weekend language schools, so for example in my area kids can go to Saturday school for German, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Arabic and some other languages. Many of these schools are run for the children of immigrants, but I think they'll allow anyone in. In my area there is also a Catholic school that educates children in both English and Ukrainian from kindergarten through high school.

Another issue is how Americans choose which language to learn, if their schools give them a choice. You see, for native English speakers there is no logical first choice of a foreign language to learn, so they have to come up with some criteria for deciding. Among the deciding factors are usually these:

-- Which language is the easiest to get a good grade in?
Americans usually think this is Spanish, and those who are obsessed with high grades think that anyone taking Latin, Russian, Chinese or Japanese is taking a suicidal risk with his academic future.

-- Which language did my ancestors speak?

-- Which language will be most useful professionally?
A lot of students think this is Spanish and get a big surprise when their future employer wants them to know a different language.

-- Where might I go on vacation someday?
I have often seen high school kids use this as a criterion for their choice of foreign language, and they use some rather odd logic.

You also can't discount the factor that some parents force their child to choose one language over another. I know a lady who was the daughter of a pilot and a stewardess, and they made her take seven years of Japanese instead of Spanish. The girl didn't understand it at the time, but it was a very smart, benevolent move by her parents and opened up a lot of opportunities for her.

One of the problems of the American educational system is that since the 1960s it has tended to reduce instruction in subjects that kids don't like, or that adults think are "frills". The result is that the expense of educating people is offloaded onto employers. Many employers have to pay to get their workers educated in math and English writing skills that the high schools didn't teach well.

Foreign languages are another of the skills that American schools have taught less and less, often just teaching them as a general "cultural enrichment" without any idea that languages can be learned to a useful level. And often they don't provide courses in the languages that employers need people to know. The result is that many employers have to spend huge money getting tutors to teach their engineers, managers and other employees languages like German, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and even a useful level of Spanish that their schools never gave them. There is a very large industry built around this need for corporate language tutoring.

As for how long it takes for someone to learn a language, the US government and some other organizations have created research-based scales showing how long it takes a typical American to become proficient in various foreign languages. They are usually broken into language groups, because some languages are harder for us than others. If I remember the scales correctly, it takes a typical American adult three times longer to learn Russian or Hindi than to learn French or Spanish.

[Vetty]

Skrej and Jamie (K),
thank you very much for your detailed survey. I envy a bit the variety of the languages possible to learn in your country. I wish my kids and I had the same choice. It's not so easy to find even French as a foreign language studied at schools and universities if they are not special language institutions. We normaly have English and German. The level of education, I believe, is the same as in your country, I am not satisfied with it and I teach my kids of 5 and 11 these languages myself, though they have them at school and kindergarten.
If you could tell me what's the weekend language schools. How much time do kids stay and learn there, what and how do they study the language, and what are the results.

[Prezbucky]

My father's father was one of the top civil engineers for Kimberly-Clark (Kleenex, Huggies, etc.), so my dad lived in multiple locations during his childhood. One of the places in which he was stationed was Mexico. My dad picked up a good deal of Spanish there.

My mom studied French.

So my sister and I, growing up in Wisconsin, heard Spanish and French from time to time.

In high school I took Spanish classes for four years or four semesters (I forget).

At UW-Madison I took a semester or two of Spanish.

We kept an exchange student from Valencia, Spain, while I was in high school. That was obviously also beneficial. I learned that the Spanish word for "shit" is "mierda" and not "caca" as I had thought it was.

During the winter of my sophomore year at UW the whole family (gramps paid for it) spent a week in cancun. I was able to communicate with the cancunians well enough. Two years later my sister and I went back to cancun and tore it up, speaking Spanish with the locals.

In 2003 my sister married an Argentinian, so she began pronouncing the "ll" and "y" letters as "sh" instead of the "y" phoneme spoken by spaniards and mexicans.

Yo puedo hablar en espanol. (tilde over the n)

Oh, FYI: "bruschetta" is properly pronounced "broo-SKEH-ta" ... NOT "broo-SHEH-ta" (highlight from Italia).
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