The Associated Press has an article that doesn’t surprise me at all.
American students are falling far behind their international counterparts in learning second languages, creating economic disadvantages for U.S. businesses and raising national security concerns.
Virtually all European and Asian elementary students study a second language, but 97 percent of Ohio and Kentucky students do not because their schools don’t offer it.
Foreign languages are seen as something of a luxury. Our political culture tends to hold other countries in disdain. News reports about the rest of the world are pretty limited. Opportunities for Americans to travel in foreign countries are relatively infrequent. And English, for the time being, is the world’s lingua franca. School systems can’t see a lot of reason to emphasize foreign languages and students can’t see a lot of reason to learn them.
You’re just confirming what I have lived my whole professional career. And another reason the world sees us as arrogant.
learning either german or a romance language like spanish or french actually helps you understand english better!
Due to my misspent youth, I speak several european language fluently, and can read newspapers, etc., in a few more. So I’m more than acquainted with my fellow Americans’ inability to speak foreign languages.
But I think it’s a more complicated issue than simply arrogance…and I’m skeptical that the inability of Americans to speak a second language is really harming Americans economically. While it is certainly true that virtually all European and Asian elementary students learn a second language, it is *also* true that the language they learn is almost universally English. That the language is English is an accident of history having more to do with the British Empire than with the US. And the reason that these students learn English is not primarily to speak with Americans; it’s because, for reasons of efficiency, it is preferable to have one default second language, which is English.
So when the Dutch tourist travels to Greece on vacation, he speaks with the hotel staff in English. Likewise for the Italian tourist in Denmark on business. Students aren’t learning English (or additional languages) because they want to be more culturally sensitive; they are learning them because they have a specific, demonstrable, utilitarian purpose.
The first problem with learning a second language in the US is deciding what language to learn. Spanish is probably the most useful, but won’t help you if, say, Lilly wants to transfer you to Germany or France. Likewise, if you are transferred to Denmark, no language that you would have likely learned in Indiana will help you. (Although IU does actually teach Danish, come to think of it..). Unfortunately, the real incentives that exists for non-anglophones to learn English don’t really exist for Americans. Consequently, not only do few Americans learn foreign languages, the instruction that they receive is typically fairly superficial, since our schools aren’t set up to provide the eight years of foreign language instruction provided in elementary school/HS in other countries. Which means that a typical student who takes 3 years of HS French, doesn’t speak it for a few years, and then travels to France for two weeks…will likely end up speaking English most of the time anyway.
None of this is ideal, and I wish more Americans could competently speak foreign languages. But I do think it’s important to realize that other countries aren’t learning English because they want to be more culturally sensitive; they are learning it for hard-nosed practical reasons.
When I was in France during 9-ll,the only French-speaking American diplomats that French TV could find for the evening news to explain things in USA were Madeleine Albright and Jamie Rubin. Both were called on several times. Rubin has been on American TV again just recently giving the dipomatic thinking of Iran/Iraq/Israel after a long absence since Clinton era. I will always remember his very good,clear French explaining to a French news audience what was going on in America just after 9-11. No one was available that was directly from the then current Bush administration.
It does seem like a tired joke but I have seen American tourists yell louder in English when a non-English speaker someone doesn’t understand .So many americans have no concept of what a foreign language is.As pointed out above, it’s considered a frill subject in many schools.
Personally I would rather have someone speak in French unless their English is very good because French and English speaking patterns are incompatible in pronunciation and intonation.German is actually harder grammatically but easier to pronounce. As a college student I used to help doctorate candidates prepare for their French reading proficiency test. Reading only is relatively easy for an educated English speaker because of all the latin cognates: not so with German.
I remember living in an old cheateau out in the country in a study exchange and the son of the family ( about 20 yrs old) was trying to tell me why he wasnt feeling well and it sounded like ‘I have a duck’ and he actually was trying to say ‘he had a headache'( ay AVE a-DACH) and my favorite is.. ‘Ay deed NOT doo EET’.no translation necessary,probably from Pepe le Pue cartoon.
To really become fluent a person must go abroad and isolate himself in the language and culture..That’s part of normal European education.In USA ,that’s a college-level undertaking and can be very expensive.In Europe higher eduation is free,but the probem is getting accepted.That’s why French education is so brutal; to weed out the bottom 95% to make room at the top for the French intelligentsia.
Agree with Peter, with a quibble: I think it’s the adaptability and enormous vocabulary of English, more than the British Empire, that makes it so attractive as a lingua franca: 200,000 words in the standard English vocabulary (more than 600,000 in the OED), over 10% more than German, and twice that of French. Despite its vaunted complexity and idiosyncrasies, English is about as forgiving of word order as a language can be without adding layer upon layer of word endings or vocal inflection. Plus English pronouns are simple.
This is why, despite the uphill battle, I support the ongoing efforts to teach Americans how to speak it, with an eye towards requiring fluency in all newscasters by 2025, all reality-show contestants and chat-show hosts by 2030, and all football coaches, NASCAR crew chiefs, and Paula Deen by 2040.
In the meantime, if we’re dropping cursive, let’s fill that time teaching grade-schoolers two or more additional languages. Much easier to learn the younger you are.
I took two languages, French and Latin, and found Latin to be helpful in learning and understanding both French and English. Nevertheless, I’ve lost a lot of the French, other than cooking terms and the easy stuff, because I have very little reason to use it. I think that our geographical isolation has a lot to do with why more Americans aren’t fluent in other languages. I suspect that a lot of people learn a language (to the extent that it is possible to learn one with a few years of schooling) and then lose whatever they learned because they have little opportunity or necessity to use and maintain the additional language.
I participate on some message boards that are based in other countries, but the default language is almost always English. I don’t know how much the message boards are a reflection of real life, but the Russian and other eastern European people seem to know at least three languages, sometimes four. They know their first language, English, French, and sometimes Spanish or German. The French-speaking Swiss I’m acquainted with tend to know French, German, (not necessarily Swiss German), and English. The German-speaking Swiss, depending on what they do and perhaps how old they are, tend not to know French or English particularly well, but can converse somewhat. Their English is better than my French, however! :)
My favorite joke!
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language? American!