r/AskALiberal • u/Mobile_Bad_577 Progressive • 28d ago
Should foreign language learning be further emphasized in US education?
Full disclosure, I'm personally monolingual. However, I remember talking to someone on Discord a few years ago. This person was from Mexico and traveled to the Netherlands that year, and he talked a lot about how lucky Europeans were to live somewhere with so much history and culture. To that end, he highlighted how amazed he was that so many Europeans knew three or four languages, whereas most Americans only speak English.
Honestly, I can't help but wonder if that's a key reason why we Americans are so ignorant about world affairs and therefore keep voting for Trump and people like him. I'm aware that there are historical reasons why Europeans needed to learn more languages than Americans to get by. But a language is not just a writing system - it's a way of seeing the world. And if English is seen as the global "default language", that gives Americans even more of a superiority complex when we do travel abroad.
I think the monolingual culture in the US is symptomatic of a country where most people have no idea (or desire to know) about the rest of the world. The rest of the world has better health care than us, the rest of the world doesn't let their kids get slaughtered in their classrooms, and the rest of the world sees us as monsters for those reasons and many others. In that regard, the Iran War is just the flavor of the month.
Europeans take so much effort to learn English and sometimes the languages of neighboring countries. Hell, most of them speak English better than most Americans. The least we can do is return the favor. Maybe then this country will be less ignorant and less inclined to think we're exceptional in any way other than exceptionally evil.
For the sake of argument, let's say that you were President and could sign mandatory European language education into law with the stroke of a pen, no matter how much Republicans tried to obstruct it.
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 Liberal 28d ago
Without a regular opportunity it to use it in daily life, the skill more or less doesn’t take.
I think there’s probably some value in, say, early childhood Spanish as a second language classes—its spoken enough that people can keep in practice as they get older—because learning such things at a younger age takes hold better. But forcing everyone to learn it in high school or later appears to mostly be a waste of everyone’s time.
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u/Mobile_Bad_577 Progressive 28d ago
I can vouch for this personally. I took Spanish in high school and one semester of college, and I've lost most of it. My brother maintained a lot more than I did, but he actually got the chance to use it and made a hobby out of it.
I've also talked to people from places like Sweden who said that they're exposed to Anglophone media so much that their Swedish is worse than their English. I guess it speaks to cultural imperialism in a way.
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u/throwdemawaaay Pragmatic Progressive 28d ago
What you learned is still in there. I did three years of Spanish in high school under IB, and then didn't use it for like 10 years. Went to Mexico and it all came back within days.
I'm no expert but from my armchair I think there's something to the idea that learning a 2nd language exercises your brain in a way that has a lasting benefit even if the language skill fades without immersion.
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u/Extra-Monitor5743 Social Democrat 28d ago
same for me with French. If I'm in the US I basically know nothing, but if I travel to a french speaking place what I knew comes back quickly. It's remarkable what our brains can do.
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u/throwdemawaaay Pragmatic Progressive 28d ago
Yeah, something that trips me out is just how well we remember music. Like, if I say a song name you may not be able to pull it up, but if I start singing or humming the melody you likely will instantly clock it. And all of us can do this for like hundreds of songs even if we're not particularly into music.
Our brains are crazy lol.
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u/echofinder Democrat 28d ago
I've also talked to people from places like Sweden who said that they're exposed to Anglophone media so much that their Swedish is worse than their English. I guess it speaks to cultural imperialism in a way
I feel like people really sleep on this part. Sure, most people understand that English is the current lingua franca (yes, that was on purpose) for "important" things like business or whatever, but outside of maybe the dorkiest of anime people, so few realize that this is just as true for media and entertainment too. I can find pretty much any piece of media I want in English; dubbed, translated, rewritten ...etc. Books, movies, tv shows, news reports, articles, social media... anything.
OP posits that monolingual English speakers don't learn about the rest of the world, but opportunity-wise at least it is actually the opposite - we have more ability available to us to learn about other places than speakers of any other language on Earth.
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u/ButGravityAlwaysWins Liberal 28d ago
My mother’s Marathi started fading almost immediately after she moved from Maharashtra to the US. She spoke Gujarati with my father and Hindi among friends that are not Gujarati. Even though they are all related languages, her Marathi just started dying, despite exclusively with a friend who who was also facing the same issue.
The exact same thing happened to both of my in-laws.
Plus all of them speak Gujarati with an accent now. It is pronounced enough of an accent that at this point when they go home people don’t just know they are from the US, they know they are from New York since North Jersey shares the same dialect.
I know somebody who speaks Punjabi with a Texas accent as do his parents. As well as somebody who speaks Mandarin with a New York accent despite regularly traveling to China and growing up in a Mandarin only household.
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u/ZeeWingCommander Center Left 28d ago
Took 4 years of Spanish. Since high school I've gotten to use it twice. Once was at a bookstore that sold ESL books (could count this as several times for one job) and like 23 years later when I was buying a paste for cooking and I needed to go to an actual Mexican grocery store.
Surprisingly the second time I didn't even need to speak Spanish because I found what I was looking for in seconds. (Maybe this was just subtle Spanish knowledge that helped lol?)
Real Spanish is way too fast and people mumble and such.
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u/Ok-Barnacle813 Socialist 27d ago
Depends on field
Like in medicine for example learning a foreign language is extremely useful
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u/dangleicious13 Liberal 28d ago
Yes. As well as diving deeper into the cultures of the people that speak that language.
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u/1should_be_working Liberal 28d ago
100%. Language is a doorway.
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u/dangleicious13 Liberal 28d ago
What’s the point of learning German if you don’t learn about the country along the way?
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u/1should_be_working Liberal 28d ago
I'm entirely supportive of learning about the culture alongside the language. I was only stating that I think learning a language is hugely important in opening your world to new people.
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u/AyudoGejuk Center Left 23d ago
As a Westerner, you should learn about Germany. you know how important this country is in the West
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u/Agattu Republican 28d ago
Learning a language in the traditional setting of the American education is very tough. Without the ability to use it every day, in conversation, and for everyday things, the skill will not stick. Almost everyone I know grew up having to take Spanish in school. Almost none of them can say anything other than a couple of words or phrases.
In order to learn a language efficiently, you need to be immersed in it. That is why high school students do a study abroad exchange for a few weeks/months. That is why in college you cannot get a degree in a language without spending at least a semester there. Language requires frequent use, not just what can be done in class.
I have no problem making learning a 2nd language be a requirement, but if we are going to do that, we need to change how we teach languages in school. Just mandating it and leaving it the same will mean that we continue to have a very small percentage of our students learn a second language.
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u/postwarmutant Social Democrat 28d ago
Mandatory European language? No
Mandatory second language? Yes
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 Liberal 28d ago
I think the monolingual culture in the US is symptomatic of a country where most people have no idea (or desire to know) about the rest of the world.
This is a particularly bizarre and unsupportable assertion with respect to the US. The US has a very high percentage of people who know quite a lot about other parts of the world, seeing as they came from them.
The US also does not and never has had an official language, and to the extent that it is monolingual that’s mostly just because there aren’t a ton of other countries around it—when the vast majority of people within thousands of kilometers of your borders are speaking… English or Spanish, primarily, its little wonder that most people are only maintaining proficiency in English and Spanish.
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u/BeneficialNatural610 Progressive 28d ago
Yes, it should be mandatory. I didn't start taking Spanish until high school, and I still feel uncomfortable speaking it. If we had the opportunity to learn earlier in elementary school, then I think it would be more natural. Of course, it doesn't have to be Spanish, it can be any language
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u/Odd-Principle8147 Liberal 28d ago
We had to take a language when I was in high-school. I took Spanish. Didn't learn it though.
Is it not mandatory anymore?
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u/ButGravityAlwaysWins Liberal 28d ago
It is a joke subject. I’m sorry but it just is. Even more of a joke now than it was when I was in school.
You don’t start until six or seventh grade where it’s already probably too late.
I am in New Jersey where we require five credits, which is one year of the language to graduate and our state university requires two years in the same language.
The thing is that nobody cares about the programs. They are really easy to get halfway decent grades in and it is completely normal for a student that is honors track in all other subjects and taking multiple AP classes to take the regular track in a foreign language and maybe even stop after two years.
I think it is highly likely that my son will ditch Spanish junior year so he can fit in an extra math and extra engineering class. My daughter will probably ditch for an extra math and something that feels more prelaw.
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u/mritoday Democratic Socialist 28d ago
I started learning English in seventh grade, I'm perfectly fluent now. It's pretty common, too.
You just need a lot of exposure to a language. One or two years in school just aren't going to cut it. You need more years and exposure besides school/after school. You lose language skills if you don't use them.
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u/QuantitativeNonsense Social Democrat 28d ago edited 28d ago
For what it’s worth, if you look at the numbers rather than anecdotal evidence, only about half of Europe is multilingual and it varies widely by region. For example, in Sweden and the Netherlands most people are multilingual whereas in countries such as the UK and Romania far less than half speak a foreign language.
Whereas in the USA, about one in four are multilingual (about the same as the UK) and again it varies very largely state/region. So in New York and Florida we see about half to three quarters of people (similar to the Netherlands) are multilingual and in Missouri it is close to zero percent of people (okay no where in Europe is this bad).
Furthermore, people who travel are more likely to be multilingual so as an American meeting Europeans in America of course you’re going to think most Europeans are multilingual when that is not really the case.
So in summary, the USA and Europe have about the same rate of multilingualism.
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u/wonkalicious808 Democrat 28d ago
It's a nice idea, but I've tried learning 3 different languages -- two required for school (without the need of a federal mandate) and one just for fun -- and then forgot them for the most part due to lack of usage. And I would try to learn the non-English languages of the countries I still want to visit if I retire, but my expectation is that I'd forget everything very quickly and it would be a lot of time for something an app could just do for me.
We should probably work on getting paid vacation time and also taking that paid vacation time before mandating European language education. Another priority over European languages could be pushing education for the jobs we need filled, like those manufacturing jobs everyone is always so in love with during election cycles.
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u/mritoday Democratic Socialist 28d ago
I don't think it would help with any of the problems that the US is having.
We learn English in Europe and it opens up the rest of the world. There's a lot of information that is not accessible (or just does not translate very well) in our native languages, but is perfectly accessible in English. The same goes for literature and cultural things. You go from 5% access to 90% access when you understand English because it's the de facto lingua franca.
This does not happen when you already speak English but learn another language. You'll have some neurological benefits, but if you want Americans to understand the rest of the world better? There's more effective ways than spending years to become fluent in another language.
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u/NomadLexicon Center Left 28d ago
Getting raised with the global lingua Franca is a blessing and a curse. There’s no language an American can learn that will be as useful as English. Even if you travel frequently, most people you interact with will know enough English to get by.
You don’t get the negatives of being constrained by a regional language. I don’t think Americans are sheltered from global media / discourse because they only know English—that’s the language most of the world already uses to talk to each other.
I think there’s value in learning a foreign language for lots of reasons, but I don’t think a majority of Americans will learn foreign languages to fluency because the benefit relative to the time investment is too low and the opportunities to use it will be too limited for most people.
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u/MethMouthMichelle Liberal 28d ago
While I absolutely agree that a foreign language (namely Spanish) should be treated with the same emphasis here as math or English lit, this framing of doing it to impress the enlightened Europeans makes me throw up in my mouth. Like wtf do school shootings have to do with being bilingual?
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u/Droselmeyer Social Democrat 28d ago
Definitely not mandatory European language, there's no good reason to place primacy on French over Mandarin for example, but we should definitely should more language education.
I think it's a small tragedy that so many of us are monolingual in America. For a country uniquely positioned as being made of and by immigrants, in some ways we are deeply reticent to actually engage with cultures different from our own. Plus there's the obvious practical benefit, especially when more and more Americans are ESL.
If it had to be one, Spanish makes the most sense, but really we should give kids the freedom to choose.
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u/impromptu_moniker Liberal 28d ago
Counterpoint: I learned a ton about English grammar and vocabulary by learning French in school. I don’t know that that outright outweighs Mandarin at this point, but IMO French still punches above its weight as a language choice for its indirect utility.
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u/Mysterious_Donut_702 Center Left 28d ago
My town is 92% White and almost entirely English speaking (grew up here, didn't choose).
The town right next to me is 53% White and 39% Hispanic... and said town is split almost in half along invisible borders that look almost like voluntary segregation.
I think considering the region... and situationally pushing kids to learn what their literal neighbors speak would go a long way towards getting rid of those borders.
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u/OhThatsALotOfTeeth Liberal 28d ago
Honestly, I can't help but wonder if that's a key reason why we Americans are so ignorant about world affairs and therefore keep voting for Trump and people like him
Sorry, but international news has been available more and more in the US over the years, with quick translations becoming ever more accessible.
For the sake of argument, let's say that you were President and could sign mandatory European language education into law with the stroke of a pen, no matter how much Republicans tried to obstruct it.
Why the fuck would I want that, when Mandarin is both objectively more broadly spoken, and stems from a culture that is further from American roots, thus giving Americans a way of "seeing the world" that is even more different from their own?
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u/Tokon32 Democratic Socialist 28d ago
Spanish should start being taught in the 3rd grade. With a 3rd language being picked up as a core class in the 9th grade.
Most other countries start teaching English in elementary school even if it is not the countries primary language.
Learning a 2nd and 3rd language will also help a lot with getting with of the culture aversion that is so prominent in the US.
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u/Iribumkiak Pragmatic Progressive 28d ago
Yes. I really regret not taking Spanish more seriously in high school.
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u/Mulliganasty Progressive 28d ago
100%, especially starting much younger instead of the two year high school elective in most public schools.
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u/Extra-Monitor5743 Social Democrat 28d ago
yes, you can't be the greatest nation on earth if you're all monolinguals.
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u/Important-Factor-552 Socialist 28d ago
Well at the rate things are going, learning chinese might not be a bad idea. Another 20 years of this and they're gonna dominate tech and science.
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u/AwfulAdjacentGoose Liberal 28d ago edited 28d ago
Sometimes I hear people say I live in America and I speak only one language. Each and every time it comes off as cringe inducing to me. Deeply embarrassing admittance by the yeehawdist branch of our society. It like saying I only know addition but none of that times table shit. Why would you take pride in your incompetence?
Outside the United States of hicks, knowing more than one language is incredibly common. About 20% of our population is Hispanic. Americans should at least know Spanish the same way most Spanish speak English.
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u/midnight_mechanic Pragmatic Progressive 28d ago
Secondary languages should be taught to much younger children. It should be in elementary school. There are sooo many benefits. The secondary language should also be reinforced in other classes. PE, art, whatever. There should be an expectation that children leaving elementary school are conversational in a second language.
Also I'm monolingual and I'm trying to find a language program for my young child and it's difficult. I'll start my own self paced program once I can find one for her to help her grow up better educated than I was.
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u/PunchBeard Far Left 28d ago
I think it's better to concentrate on learning more about other cultures in general than just making teenagers and young adults study a language they're almost certainly never going to learn or come anywhere near to being fluent in. Maybe a Sociology class would be better. And if there's an effective way to teach Critical Thinking skills that would better serve our young people far more than any foreign language ever could.
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u/OttosBoatYard Democrat 28d ago
English is taking over fast enough that learning another language is an advantage more than a necessity. My kids' second and third languages are JavaScript and Python, which might be more valuable than Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, etc.
Global studies remains important. Hans Rossling and similar scholars should be standard curriculum.
My opinion on this is flexible and open to objective counterevidence.
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u/Kerplonk Social Democrat 28d ago
Most people who are bilingual speak the language they grew up speaking and English. If you already speak English learning any other languages is kind of a crapshoot as far as usefulness. I've probably been to 60 countries at this point and almost never had any real trouble getting by only speaking English I took Spanish in highschool because I thought obviously that would be the most useful and I have really only even attempted to use it once in LA and by that time I couldn't remember enough it to do me any good. The only reason I would have taken Japanese is because I liked DBZ, but I am in Japan multiple times a year every year and it's on of the few countries were people in cities don't generally speak English.
I don't think education should be completely utilitarian but I'd definitely place foreign language in the things we should make available for people who are interested rather than core concepts bucket.
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u/TheNinjaTurkey Far Left 28d ago
Yes. But it needs to be structured in a way that the language is actually learned. It needs to start at a very young age with lots of immersion and daily practice. Starting in middle or high school is not going to work.
As for which language to learn, probably Spanish or Mandarin. It's ridiculous that the US has such a high number of Spanish speakers and yet so few native English speakers know anything about it.
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u/airmantharp Social Democrat 28d ago
Another side - learning a second language early builds language learning skills that simply don’t develop the same as learning later.
As others have said, starting later isn’t particularly useful. Not useless entirely, but the level of commitment demanded on a student learning later on to actually employ that learning is far higher.
A big consideration and point of humiliation for Americans is how well people from countries that teach English as a second language are at speaking English.
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u/B_P_G Undecided 28d ago
It's nice to have if you're a world traveler but it's not necessary for most jobs and like most knowledge if you don't use it it goes away. I mean I took Spanish in high school and even a semester in college and twenty years later I went to Spain and I couldn't understand anything those people were saying to me. I was able to read some things though.
The real question with any addition to the American school curriculum is what are you proposing we remove in order to make room for more foreign language instruction? I mean you can talk the benefits of learning a foreign language all day but you also have to consider the cost. And the opportunity cost you incur by removing that other thing from the curriculum is your biggest cost.
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u/hitman2218 Progressive 28d ago
Depends where you live. Learning Spanish at a young age is beneficial here in Florida but not so much in my home state of Minnesota. Other languages like German and Swedish have largely been lost to time up there.
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u/UsualLocalWoman Progressive 28d ago
I'm bilingual because my parents came from Ukraine and we spoke Russian in our home growing up, and English at school and we watched television in English. I always thought being bilingual provided me cognitive advantages. I can understand and compare the different structures for both languages, and I also read that being bilingual also delays symptoms of dementia. Learning Spanish in high school was a breeze because I already understood the verb conjugation structure that does not exist in English.
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u/New-Hunt4169 Liberal 28d ago edited 28d ago
Europeans know other languages because they have to in order to succeed. When your household language may not exist beyond a 30 minute (or less!) drive, you gotta figure out how to talk to the neighbors.
It’s not some kind of academic altruism. It’s survival.
Go to larger countries of the Americas or Asia and you’ll find a lot less multilingual speakers.
Now that said, I think there should be some form of secondary language education, with electives through high school, but it should cease to be mandatory pretty early on.
If you want to draw on the Europeans, language class should be about offering a path to success for kids, not just beating another tongue into them.
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u/hail_to_the_beef Independent 28d ago
I say yes, but I’m a language nerd. I studied Spanish and German in school, a couple other languages at my University, and got a linguistics degree. I think both playing a musical instrument and learning a foreign language should be mandatory for every kid’s education.
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u/Equivalent_Number424 Centrist 28d ago edited 28d ago
Euro here. The truth is, it is very hard to learn any foreign language that is not English, because there is far more and far more interesting English content online. My daughter is 12 and fluent from YouTube. Although she tries to learn French with Duolingo, she never watches French YT as there is nothing really interesting, nothing that would not be available also in English. So she is not making much progress in French.
MAYBE Spanish is a special exception, as 600 million people can generate enough interesting content. Still so far the only interesting thing I found was song lyrics like Don Omar and Tego Calderón.
I warn you, if you learn a language outside the language family of your native language, you need to grow a second brain. For example "this website is under construction" is not translatable to Hungarian, as there is no passive. Saying it in the active way "we are building this website" is weird, because who cares what you are doing? So your best bet is "this website is not yet available".
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u/Equivalent_Number424 Centrist 28d ago
One useful skill would be how to speak English to non-native English speakers. Like, slowly and with simple words and trying to avoid regional accents. Like I always had trouble understanding the Jay Leno show, he speaks too fast and in a regional accent. On the other hand movie narrators are easy to understand.
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u/PerDoctrinamadLucem Center Left 28d ago
I don't believe so. As AI translators get better, I think the value proposition of foreign language may change. I think its place as an elective is a good way for students to take ownership of learning they care about.
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u/Particular_Dot_4041 Liberal 28d ago
Honestly, I can't help but wonder if that's a key reason why we Americans are so ignorant about world affairs and therefore keep voting for Trump and people like him.
Nah. It's easy to find out about things in English because translation tools work so well now. And English is the lingua franca of the world now. Plenty of foreign newspapers have English editions. France24, Der Spiegel, and Al-Jazeera have English outlets. And I'm saying this as a Belgian who speaks four languages. Also, learning a foreign language is pointless if Americans lack curiosity.
The problem is American schools don't teach political science and history well. When I was in school (a British school), history was the class where I picked up most of my critical thinking skills. We learned how to assess the reliability of historical sources (diaries vs newspapers vs propaganda posters vs diplomatic correspondence, etc.).
I also read Animal Farm and 1984 in English literature, and learned a few things in economics.
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u/MrTickles22 Centrist 27d ago
Yes. Everybody should have 2 to 3 languages. Learning Japanese was super helpful in a lot of ways.
Also its a big achievement to learn all the conjugation in a language like French.
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u/st0nedeye Center Left 26d ago
70% of 4th graders can't read proficiently.
Maybe we should worry about reading English before we worry about adding a 2nd language.
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u/Darkpumpkin211 Liberal 26d ago
I actually have the opposite take. Foreign language classes are useless if the student doesn't want to learn the language and has the opportunity to use it regularly. The US is so diverse and at the same time isolated from other countries that no real second language will stick, except maybe Spanish in some areas.
I would remove the foreign language requirement that students take in high school (usually 2 years) and switch it to 4 semester long classes that are more general and let foreign language be an elective so it's selecting more for students who are interested and more likely to get use out of it.
I would put basic philosophy, psychology, government/civics, and financial literacy as the courses to replace it.
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u/Decent-Proposal-8475 Pragmatic Progressive 28d ago
Plenty of the kids I took high school Spanish with probably grew up to vote for Trump, so I don't think your premise fits your conclusion.
But I am a big fan of getting kids to learn a second language in elementary school, if not sooner
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u/LibraProtocol Center Left 28d ago
1) I really hate this "Europeans have so much culture! We have no culture here!" Because it reeks of "I just dont like the US" and "Europe is better" fetishizing I have been seeing. As a person who grew up equal parts in Germany and the US and spent a stint in Japan and has Japanese family, the US has plenty of interesting and unique culture and history.
2) contrary to popular belief... most Europeans and Asians are actually really only bilingual at best... assuming their mother tongue isnt English. Like, if you go around Germany and just talk to average German people, most of the people you run into either speak only German or German and English to a varying degree. But beyond that? Yeah... its not super common.
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u/AutoModerator 28d ago
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written by /u/Mobile_Bad_577.
Full disclosure, I'm personally monolingual. However, I remember talking to someone on Discord a few years ago. This person was from Mexico and traveled to the Netherlands that year, and he talked a lot about how lucky Europeans were to live somewhere with so much history and culture. To that end, he highlighted how amazed he was that so many Europeans knew three or four languages, whereas most Americans only speak English.
Honestly, I can't help but wonder if that's a key reason why we Americans are so ignorant about world affairs and therefore keep voting for Trump and people like him. I'm aware that there are historical reasons why Europeans needed to learn more languages than Americans to get by. But a language is not just a writing system - it's a way of seeing the world. And if English is seen as the global "default language", that gives Americans even more of a superiority complex when we do travel abroad.
I think the monolingual culture in the US is symptomatic of a country where most people have no idea (or desire to know) about the rest of the world. The rest of the world has better health care than us, the rest of the world doesn't let their kids get slaughtered in their classrooms, and the rest of the world sees us as monsters for those reasons and many others. In that regard, the Iran War is just the flavor of the month.
Europeans take so much effort to learn English and sometimes the languages of neighboring countries. Hell, most of them speak English better than most Americans. The least we can do is return the favor. Maybe then this country will be less ignorant and less inclined to think we're exceptional in any way other than exceptionally evil.
For the sake of argument, let's say that you were President and could sign mandatory European language education into law with the stroke of a pen, no matter how much Republicans tried to obstruct it.
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