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What is a non-mainstream language for you | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4820 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 25 of 71 12 August 2012 at 6:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can echo part of what Mayday said, as far as school language teaching and take-up in
Britain goes. When our two children were at secondary school in the 1990s, it was compulsory to take 2 languages (typically French and German) for at least some of the years up to the age of 16. So they were both "forced" to take French and German (for at least part of that time), and didn't enjoy it, and didn't appear to have retained much. On the other hand, as adults, they have both made independent efforts to learn various languages because they saw a need and reason for doing so, and at least one of them is interested in the whole area of language learning, partly as an adjunct to travel, but also for its own sake, and is interested in some of the more "exotic" languages as well (certainly not from my influence by the way). There seems to be at least some degree of consensus that school language teaching and learning is not brilliantly successful, and this is not confined to the UK, but even (as I read in FX's story here) even in multilingual countries like Switzerland. So what's wrong? Is it the element of compulsion? Is it that people can't actually be "taught" a language, but they have to be allowed to teach it to themselves? The experience of self-learners on this forum would seem to suggest so. What I am slowly leading up to is that perhaps in school, we should scrap language teaching as it is usually done. And replace it with ... ...what? Well, for example, something to catch the kid's imaginations, and convince them that other languages can be fun and enjoyable. Let them choose what they want to learn, and then help to make available to them the necessary materials for self-learning (which they could do at least partly at home or away from school anyway). The element of compulsion is gone, and they are doing it because they want to. How to make them want to is the first hurdle. And making available to them the right materials would be the next. But it might free up resources and time for the schools so they can teach more effectively the things that need to be taught compulsorily in order to make the children employable and fit for society. There might still be language "lessons" for those who want them, but done in a rather different way to what is done now. I realise this is deviating a little from the original subject, but it was the original subject that got me thinking about this in the first place :-) Thoughts? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4614 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 26 of 71 12 August 2012 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yet Denmark maintains close links with Greenland to this day. As far as I know, Danish is the second language up there and pretty much everyone has at least a working knowledge. Which throws up an interesting question. If a Danish businessman is dispatched to Greenland, does he beaver away on his Greenlandic or simply not bother because "everyone there speaks Danish" The Scandanvians are regarded by many as being great language learners but here is an example where they can opt out because they don't need to know this language in order to get around, precisely what many British people do when they travel abroad. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Jiwon Triglot Moderator Korea, South Joined 6428 days ago 1417 posts - 1500 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Korean*, GermanC1 Studies: Hindi, Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 27 of 71 12 August 2012 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Now let's travel to a different part of the world.
In Korea the holy triad of foreign languages consists of English, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. They are distantly followed by French and German, and then Spanish and then all the other 'weird languages' English is compulsory from Grade 3 as the primary foreign language. Then students can pick a second foreign language when they enter high school, which means that before this point, a vast majority of Korean students will have very limited exposure to any language other than Korean and English. According to this article, 62% of students took Japanese and 26% took Chinese. While German, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic are available options in theory, most schools don't offer these subjects. Nationwide, 12 high schools offer Russian and nowhere do they teach Arabic. Even at univeristy, the most competitive programs to get in (among language majors) are English, Chinese and Japanese. In fact, most unis don't even offer programs or courses in more obscure languages. Apart from educational institutions, the majority of Koreans don't really care for foreign languages, so much that any foreign language ability is immediately assigned great chic values. My mediocre German abilities have been received in very interesting ways, especially when I translated the lyrics for Beethoven's Choral. Telling them why I want to learn Italian, Hebrew and Welsh at one point of my life is an even greater task, so I keep my language enthusiasm to myself. 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5439 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 28 of 71 12 August 2012 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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At the local Barnes and Noble (San Jose, CA), there are sections for French, Spanish, Italian, German, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Hebrew, Latin, Portuguese and Russian. After that are "Other languages." I think the first list is pretty good definition of main stream. What's really interesting is that while Vietnamese is probably the third most used language in San Jose, they rarely have more than a pocket dictionary and a phrase book or two. And working in a language school, I find it's exactly the same - lots of people learning Spanish and Mandarin to communicate with the local populations, virtually no one learning Vietnamese.
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| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5218 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 29 of 71 12 August 2012 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
You know I was aiming at you, don't you? ;) I see. I didn't think the transition from "The Big Four" to "marginal" would be much less abrupt in other places, so I felt like this was one of those "yet again!" (Matrix glitches?) moments here...
I've gone many times over this, so those who think I repeat myself please excuse me, but there's always a (or hint of a) new angle to it... if you take a look at this or other serious work, you'll see that language teaching has merely walked in circles for an *extremely* long time, heavily promoting one style, then another, but adding little *new* to the whole business. My bet is that if there's a really "one true better approach" it must encompass all that is good about the ones we've tried and doff the bad bits, so we mustn't be so far off anyway. With the possible exception of the 'new mathematics' (which I was a miraculously unharmed victim of) that were so quickly doffed in those countries that sensibly judged by results in the 60s and 70s, and against what all the office pedagogues that have never been to a classroom will tell you, nothing really new (let alone 'revolutionary') has appeared under the sun in the teaching world for a very long time. Why? Because there's [probably] no such a beast. Why do so many people insist that languages are different? Because they *look* easier so everyone is tempted to give out untried recipes... They're "easy", yes, but not *that* easy, they require a cognitive effort like everything else does, and the human mind apparently goes by an innate sense of economy which means you only make mental efforts either out of instant gratification (because you like what getting to know stuff feels like) or delayed gratification (you think it will pay off in the future even if you don't like it), and then loads of practice are required to make anything really stick in. Do we need to discuss if working under delayed gratification promises is a relatively hard-to-acquire skill? I don't think so. Just have a look at the results in other fields and tell me how many people do well beyond basic maths (say, linear equation systems, which should roughly correspond to the higher end of primary school everywhere) as adults who DO NOT use mathematics? What about history, <pick your own>? In my experience, very few people. So I believe (and in the light of surrounding evidence, ever more firmly) that it is a must to rise your children with a love for learning (I think that rubbed off on me from my parents, but I hope they'll still be around to help me out replicating their success if I'm wrong), educate them to appreciate the benefits of self discipline even if you don't succeed with the first point, and cross your fingers if that fails too because I don't think there are other basically different ways to make a human child a successful learner. As to why do it, I hope not to sound patronizing... what you learn can only expand your potential to do any good either to you or to others (but no guarantees, living up to it is, well, up to you :). The alternative is way worse, for you simply can't do anything out of what you never learnt in the first place, can you? How not to waste educational efforts on those who do not want to be educated, then? With an open education system that lets people go any time as soon as those basics (the ones that real people DO remember as adults) get deeply ingrained in them, and then lets them reincorporate equally easily when they're again up to the task of bettering themselves. Just my thoughts. Edited by mrwarper on 12 August 2012 at 10:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6221 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 30 of 71 12 August 2012 at 11:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I wrote a post related to this on my mainlymagyar blog along the lines of "why isn't Bengali more popular"
To summarize, as a US High School student, one has two choices: Spanish and French. If one is lucky, there might be classes teaching German or Italian. Japanese, Mandarin and Arabic seem to be popping up in schools in isolated communities but they are the exception, not the norm. My experience has been that any language outside of Spanish, French, German or Italian is seen as "out of the mainstream" in the US. (sadly, many Americans look at native English speakers who are fluent in ANY second language with suspicion and disbelief. "Everyone here speaks English... Why on earth would you want to learn Spanish, Boy??!" Like BartoG, I like to judge the quality of a bookstore's language section by its non-mainstream selection. Most book stores here have a sizable selection of Spanish, French, German and Italian books. Japanese, Greek, Portuguese, Mandarin and Arabic books tend to be the next most common. I know that if a can find a store that carries any Indian language other than Hindi, Finnish, Persian, Albanian, or Turkic languages, I have hit a language gold mine! Needless to say, there aren't very many of these. Powells in Portland may be the only one in my time zone. Edited by liddytime on 13 August 2012 at 11:57pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 31 of 71 13 August 2012 at 12:22am | IP Logged | |||||
I've been wondering at the relative popularity of German in Korea. Of course being German it's natural that I would meet people with some interest in German, but I also made this observation with people I met very randomly. Quite a few people told me that they learned some German in high school and also that it used to be common for guys to learn German and for girls to learn Japanese some generations ago. That gender difference in language study is also very curious... Do you know why German is in the top 5 languages in Korea? Does this have to do with economic, educational (cheap university education in Germany, as well as prestige in subjects like classical music) or maybe even historical reasons (Korean guest workers in Germany, similarities like our respective economic miracles and division)? Korean, on the other hand, is still considered very exotic in Germany. Chinese is hyped for business reasons, Japanese is associate with the Otaku cliché (although it's popular even with people who aren't interested in Manga and Anime; Japanese is the most- studied language in my circle of acquaintances). Any other Asian language is seen as very exotic and sometimes useless (but that applies to any non-mainstream language study). Edited by druckfehler on 13 August 2012 at 12:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4764 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 32 of 71 13 August 2012 at 11:27am | IP Logged | |||||
As for Italian, to me it looks like it's sorta becoming more mainstream. Italy has become a popular tourist destination for people fed up with Turkey, but unlike Turkey it's not that easy to get yourself understood there with nothing but Russian and a couple stock English phrases. Italian cultural output is also widely appreciated here and there are many people who love Italian cinema. I suppose studying Italian might acquire the status of a popular "cultural appreciation" hobby akin to studying Japanese, except with the associated image of a well-raised connoiseur of high culture, rather than a socially awkward basement-dweller who's into weird porn (people who think that Italian culture has nothing like that clearly haven't seen any Italian exploitation films). But then, my perspective might be skewed by the fact that my mother is learning Italian and I keep hearing about it from her :) Edited by vonPeterhof on 13 August 2012 at 11:32am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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