“Pretty much anything you learned in school other than math would be better replaced by another foreign language.”
Since you are a good thinker, I’d like to learn how you come to that conclusion. Is it being able to communicate with speakers of other languages that makes a person better off or does the study of the other language cause beneficial changes to the student’s brain other than being able to communicate in those languages?
For the sake of my question, let us suppose the student’s first language is English.
Also, I am told by a professional teacher of English that it takes about 7 years of study for a student to get good enough at English that language skill is not a large impediment to a native speaker’s wanting to have a conversation with the student. That’s a lot of study! The student could get a Ph.D. in a science instead. I’ve always thought that the other languages required a similar level of investment.
But then again if the benefits of the study of other languages are something other than being able to have a conversation with a native speaker, then maybe those benefits can be had for a smaller investment.
I guess I have to answer, since you called me a good thinker!
I wouldn’t call it a “conclusion” so much as a “guess” or an “idea”. And I’m mostly thinking of being able to communicate in other languages. There would also be a large tangential benefits to the nation, of having citizens likely to travel to and be more aware of other countries.
The “7 years of study” figure means, I believe, 7 years of taking 1 course per semester. You couldn’t get a PhD with 14 courses. An MS, maybe. I had to take 7 semesters of theology, philosophy, and political theory. I think I’d rather have had 7 semesters of Spanish. And I’d love to replace every single Social Studies course I took in grades 1-12 with Japanese.
Thank you for explaining your opinion of the value of becoming bilingual.
The 7-year figure comes from the chairperson of the English Department of community college near me (College of Marin). She teaches mainly recent immigrants from the third world and also people from Eastern Europe who come to this country to study English for a year.
There was a group of eight or so students, mostly women in their early twenties, from the Czech Republic here a year to study English at College of Marin. I got to know them because they would gather for coffee and cake every Wednesday at the same Borders where I played chess every Wednesday. They always spoke Czech when they came to socialize with their friends over coffee and cake: I literally never heard a word of English from their table and did not guess that they were here to learn English till they told me.
Also near me is Dominican University, which runs a residential English-as-a-second-language program. The Czechs I met did not attend this program because it is cheaper to find your own lodgings and take classes at College of Marin. Most of the students in the residential program are (or rather used to be) Japanese and Korean, and about ten years ago, I used to socialize with them, eating dinner at Dominican University’s dining hall, playing table tennis with them, hanging out in the library, where they would all go after dinner. I did ask one or two of them if they studied anything besides the English language and they said no.
The Japanese and Korean students actually used English more than half of the time when talking to each other, and they got a few subtle points across to me, but that is more because they tended to be very bright and skilled at interpersonal communications generally than from any mastery in English.
Now I never asked any of these English learners how much English they studied before they came to the U.S. to study English, but one would expect them to have studied it quite a bit because that maximizes the benefit derived from what is clearly a costly stay in the U.S.
Anyway, there is some of the evidence I am using to conclude that to learn how to communicate in another language well enough materially to help you in your career (or to materially aid a social goal like marrying a native speaker of that language) would be more work than getting a master’s degree in a science—at least for most of the people reading these words. But then of course it is quite valuable just to be able to read stuff written in, e.g., Spanish or Chinese, and that is probably an easier skill to acquire.
The foreigners resident in the US have the massive advantage of having the opportunity (and need!) to use English out of class; but they have the massive disadvantage of being adults. A middle school student who moves to another country will become fluent. But a move at the end of middle school will probably result in an accent.
Added, years later: Fluency has nothing to do with accent. It’s true that adults get accents. But it is also true that adults learn languages faster than children.
Yes, a child will pick up a second language quicker than an adult will, but the child will also tend to lose his or her first language unless he or she continues to use it. I base that belief on the experience of my father, who moved several times between two language communities in his childhood, and every time he moved he had to re-acquire the language of the community he was moving to. Once he became an adult, he retained both languages (but his English had some peculiarities even though it was the language he started out speaking), but it still cost him a great deal of learning time to become bilingual even though he started the process at a very early age.
My father never developed a taste for fiction. Or team sports. Or the pleasure that a human being can get from helping someone, e.g., visiting a sick friend in the hospital to keep the friend’s spirits up or buying a box of cookies from the pair of Girl Scouts who have knocked on your door. If you do not cultivate the ability to take pleasure in something that humans have a natural potential to take pleasure in as a child, it is almost impossible to cultivate it as an adult. It seems to me that there a lots of things for a child to learn more important than a second language if the child already knows English. (It’s different if the child’s first language is Swedish or some other language without a huge literature and huge community of speakers.) E.g., learning to draw or to play a musical instrument.
Also, if an immigrant to the U.S. is earning $40,000 a year instead of $60,000 a year because his lack of fluency in English makes him a less valuable employee then it is almost as if he is paying $20,000 a year for the opportunity to practice English in his workplace. And if a boy who has just moved to the U.S. or moved back to the U.S. does not speak English well enough to befriend someone who will help him learn to play whatever team sport the neighborhood kids are playing, then missing out on the experience of playing that sport is one of the costs of having the opportunity of practicing his English with the neighborhood kids.
My point is that I assign little expected utility to teaching children who already know English (or Spanish or Mandarin, which also have huge literatures and huge communities of speakers in countries with plenty of economic opportunity) second and third languages as if they were gateway skills like algebra, probability theory or introductory physics, and I was surprised to hear someone as well-informed and free of false beliefs as Phil Goetz recommend it.
Of course, if we know the child will move to a place where the second language is the main language, that is different.
“Pretty much anything you learned in school other than math would be better replaced by another foreign language.”
Since you are a good thinker, I’d like to learn how you come to that conclusion. Is it being able to communicate with speakers of other languages that makes a person better off or does the study of the other language cause beneficial changes to the student’s brain other than being able to communicate in those languages?
For the sake of my question, let us suppose the student’s first language is English.
Also, I am told by a professional teacher of English that it takes about 7 years of study for a student to get good enough at English that language skill is not a large impediment to a native speaker’s wanting to have a conversation with the student. That’s a lot of study! The student could get a Ph.D. in a science instead. I’ve always thought that the other languages required a similar level of investment.
But then again if the benefits of the study of other languages are something other than being able to have a conversation with a native speaker, then maybe those benefits can be had for a smaller investment.
For the record, I don’t find particular value in the fact that I know Russian...
I guess I have to answer, since you called me a good thinker!
I wouldn’t call it a “conclusion” so much as a “guess” or an “idea”. And I’m mostly thinking of being able to communicate in other languages. There would also be a large tangential benefits to the nation, of having citizens likely to travel to and be more aware of other countries.
The “7 years of study” figure means, I believe, 7 years of taking 1 course per semester. You couldn’t get a PhD with 14 courses. An MS, maybe. I had to take 7 semesters of theology, philosophy, and political theory. I think I’d rather have had 7 semesters of Spanish. And I’d love to replace every single Social Studies course I took in grades 1-12 with Japanese.
Thank you for explaining your opinion of the value of becoming bilingual.
The 7-year figure comes from the chairperson of the English Department of community college near me (College of Marin). She teaches mainly recent immigrants from the third world and also people from Eastern Europe who come to this country to study English for a year.
There was a group of eight or so students, mostly women in their early twenties, from the Czech Republic here a year to study English at College of Marin. I got to know them because they would gather for coffee and cake every Wednesday at the same Borders where I played chess every Wednesday. They always spoke Czech when they came to socialize with their friends over coffee and cake: I literally never heard a word of English from their table and did not guess that they were here to learn English till they told me.
Also near me is Dominican University, which runs a residential English-as-a-second-language program. The Czechs I met did not attend this program because it is cheaper to find your own lodgings and take classes at College of Marin. Most of the students in the residential program are (or rather used to be) Japanese and Korean, and about ten years ago, I used to socialize with them, eating dinner at Dominican University’s dining hall, playing table tennis with them, hanging out in the library, where they would all go after dinner. I did ask one or two of them if they studied anything besides the English language and they said no.
The Japanese and Korean students actually used English more than half of the time when talking to each other, and they got a few subtle points across to me, but that is more because they tended to be very bright and skilled at interpersonal communications generally than from any mastery in English.
Now I never asked any of these English learners how much English they studied before they came to the U.S. to study English, but one would expect them to have studied it quite a bit because that maximizes the benefit derived from what is clearly a costly stay in the U.S.
Anyway, there is some of the evidence I am using to conclude that to learn how to communicate in another language well enough materially to help you in your career (or to materially aid a social goal like marrying a native speaker of that language) would be more work than getting a master’s degree in a science—at least for most of the people reading these words. But then of course it is quite valuable just to be able to read stuff written in, e.g., Spanish or Chinese, and that is probably an easier skill to acquire.
The foreigners resident in the US have the massive advantage of having the opportunity (and need!) to use English out of class; but they have the massive disadvantage of being adults. A middle school student who moves to another country will become fluent. But a move at the end of middle school will probably result in an accent.
Added, years later: Fluency has nothing to do with accent. It’s true that adults get accents. But it is also true that adults learn languages faster than children.
Yes, a child will pick up a second language quicker than an adult will, but the child will also tend to lose his or her first language unless he or she continues to use it. I base that belief on the experience of my father, who moved several times between two language communities in his childhood, and every time he moved he had to re-acquire the language of the community he was moving to. Once he became an adult, he retained both languages (but his English had some peculiarities even though it was the language he started out speaking), but it still cost him a great deal of learning time to become bilingual even though he started the process at a very early age.
My father never developed a taste for fiction. Or team sports. Or the pleasure that a human being can get from helping someone, e.g., visiting a sick friend in the hospital to keep the friend’s spirits up or buying a box of cookies from the pair of Girl Scouts who have knocked on your door. If you do not cultivate the ability to take pleasure in something that humans have a natural potential to take pleasure in as a child, it is almost impossible to cultivate it as an adult. It seems to me that there a lots of things for a child to learn more important than a second language if the child already knows English. (It’s different if the child’s first language is Swedish or some other language without a huge literature and huge community of speakers.) E.g., learning to draw or to play a musical instrument.
Also, if an immigrant to the U.S. is earning $40,000 a year instead of $60,000 a year because his lack of fluency in English makes him a less valuable employee then it is almost as if he is paying $20,000 a year for the opportunity to practice English in his workplace. And if a boy who has just moved to the U.S. or moved back to the U.S. does not speak English well enough to befriend someone who will help him learn to play whatever team sport the neighborhood kids are playing, then missing out on the experience of playing that sport is one of the costs of having the opportunity of practicing his English with the neighborhood kids.
My point is that I assign little expected utility to teaching children who already know English (or Spanish or Mandarin, which also have huge literatures and huge communities of speakers in countries with plenty of economic opportunity) second and third languages as if they were gateway skills like algebra, probability theory or introductory physics, and I was surprised to hear someone as well-informed and free of false beliefs as Phil Goetz recommend it.
Of course, if we know the child will move to a place where the second language is the main language, that is different.