Foreign Language Education

Time for my slightly off topic story.
I was standing behind 3 or 4 Mexicans in an Indian convenience store. The Indian store clerk was arguing with the Mexicans saying I no understand. Finally the Mexicans gave up and left without what they wanted. The Indian clerk told me "I speak 7 languages fluently and one of them is Spanish", "when I moved my family here I made them learn and speak English." "I ain't speaking Spanish to those guys, this is America they can speak English".

 

Unfortunately Spanish will become the dominant language in the next 50 yrs.

In Tampa, there are very few places you can go without it being spoken and in places further south in the state they don't even bother to use English.

At my wife's surgery center, so many techs have been hired that speak very little English it is becoming difficult for the doctors to work. They need someone in the room to translate what the Dr is asking them for into Spanish.

 

Uh huh, that definitely happened

 

Unless they stop teaching English in schools that isnt going to happen at all.

 

As @latergatercg stated, Japanese is incredibly difficult to learn. Tonality and accent are difficult, reading and writing it is next-level difficult. I took 2 or 3 semesters of it figuring that if I was going into electrical engineering it would be useful (an incorrect assumption as it turns out). It has 3 distinct "alphabets"; one for Japanese words (hiragana), one more used for "english" Japanese words (katakana) and a third symbolic "kanji" alphabet that behaves more similarly to the Chinese pictographic lettering.

 

"Dominant" where? In small immigrant enclaves? 100% of Americans either speak English, or will have kids who speak English. And birth rates in Latin America are on the decline (we'll he hurting for labor someday). More Hispanics will speak English in the future.

That said, I think learning Spanish is a great idea. If I had kids I would insist that they learn.

 

I would love to learn German, but from what I understand, written German is miserable. The Germans didn't really have a literature until fairly recently, and the language hasn't caught up.

French was hard, mainly because I struggle with phonetics.

I would love to read both someday. Maybe it I manage to retire early.

 

Goethe is the king of German lit, and The Sorrows of Young Werther was written in the late 18th century, so I dont know what you mean by recently? The German language has been around for a long time, but the idea of a "German" people with a shared history and literature is probably a more recent phenomenon, as is a German state itself. But the Romantic period is definitely formative in German nationalism.

 

There's a joke in there somewhere. Just can't put my finger on it yet.

 

Maybe I want to tell Polish jokes in the original Polish

 

My co-worker's husband is from PR, and he has relatives up in Chicago. The kids (third generation american born nephews and nieces) can't write in spanish and only speak broken spanish. She was appalled that they have "lost their heritage". I said that is how this country has been working since it was founded. Look at all the immigration around the 1880's. Why do you think people aren't still speaking italian, german, welsh, irish etc. in any meaninful way?

 

Then let me submit Gaelic as a possible target for you.

 

My wife tells me I'm fluent in Smart Ass.

 

Ok, I do want to know how to say "Taoiseach" correctly

 

Recently as in 18th century. The language of the learned class, prior to that it was French and Latin. Leibniz did nearly all his writing in those languages. It's part of the reason why Kant's treatise is so miserably written. Nietsche and Schopenhauer were both proficient in multiple languages and looked outside german to develope their style.

 

To be honest I don't know but if I had to guess I would say he was probably the owner. It was an older store and not one of the big named stores.

 

I studied French at school and German at school and also had a tutor.
French level is 0, and in German, I'd say A2, and to be honest, I'm so angry that I didn't put in enough effort. I got a chance to move to France ( which I'd love to because part of my fam and friends live here), but I'll have no job, and without language, I won't be able to do something.
So I think that learning languages is a must because you never know which possibilities you'll have, and losing them is sad.