where i grew up in burger land, back in the 80s, the public schools were teaching us all spanish in from age 5 to 10. not like true bilingual education, but we had a spanish class once a week. it last about 2 years before the white nationalists–who panic at the idea of working class people easily communicating with each other–got it shut down. between that and some years working with seasonal agricultural workers practicing their english, i am at the comprehension level of an inebriated toddler. i wish i had more opportunities to practice. honestly, the US should have all its signs in english and spanish anyway, but you know the reactionaries would go info a full blown pogrom over even a whiff of that being proposed.
i remember some small business tyrant in florida in the 2000s called up my work one time and wanted me to pass along his complaint to my boss that our phone system had an option to “press ocho for espanol”. he said that our company even offering the option to “those people” was wrong… in FLORIDA… the state with the name that means “land of flowers” in spanish.
Are foreign languages classes in general not mandatory in US schools ?
Here in france-cool every kid will have classes for at least two languages (one for four years, one for two IIRC), sometimes three. Depending on where they go to school the kids will sometimes have a lot of choices (Chinese, Polish, regional languages, etc.) or sometimes only either English, Italian, German, or Spanish.
in secondary school (ages 14-18) it was highly encouraged to take at least 2 years of a foreign language, though american sign language counted. and kids on the “not college” pipeline didn’t have to do that. j’ai trois ans de les cours de francais, but i haven’t had much opportunity to practice or use it conversationally in like the 25 years since.
edit: secondary school offered french, spanish, german or ASL. the private $$$ schools offered mandarin and others.
damn, bro. It’s almost like America is bigger than all of Europe and shares one language, and it’s hard to become fluent in a language when there’s no one to speak it with. If you are asian or european you can hop in the car or on a train to practice your french or vietnamese, but unless you’re practicing Spanish or some specific language kept in your area(Polish in Chicago, Pennsylvania Dutch, German in some parts of Wisconsin) you have no way to practice.
There are even plenty of first language speakers of 30+ languages in the US with hundreds of thousands and millions of speakers. In addition to the people that immigrated.Spanish – 41.3 million (13.2%) Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and all other varieties) – 3.40 million (1.1%) Tagalog (including Filipino) – 1.72 million (0.5%) Vietnamese – 1.52 million (0.5%) Arabic – 1.39 million French – 1.18 million Korean – 1.07 million Russian – 1.04 million Portuguese – 937 thousand Haitian Creole – 895 thousand Hindi – 865 thousand German – 857 thousand Polish – 533 thousand Italian – 513 thousand Urdu – 508 thousand Persian (including Farsi, Dari and Tajik) – 472 thousand Telugu – 460 thousand Japanese – 455 thousand Gujarati – 437 thousand Bengali – 403 thousand Tamil – 341 thousand Punjabi – 319 thousand Tai–Kadai (including Thai and Lao) – 284 thousand Serbo-Croatian (including Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian) – 266 thousand Armenian – 256 thousand Greek – 253 thousand Hmong – 240 thousand Hebrew – 215 thousand Khmer – 193 thousand Navajo – 155 thousand other Indo-European languages – 662 thousand Yoruba, Twi, Igbo and other languages of West Africa – 640 thousand Amharic, Somali, and other Afro-Asiatic languages – 596 thousand Yiddish, Pennsylvania Dutch, and other West Germanic languages – 574 thousand Ilocano, Samoan, Hawaiian, and other Austronesian languages – 486 thousand Other languages of Asia – 460 thousand Nepali, Marathi, and other Indic languages – 448 thousand Ukrainian and other Slavic languages – 385 thousand Swahili and other languages of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa – 288 thousand Malayalam, Kannada, and other other Dravidian languages – 280 thousand Other Native languages of North America – 169 thousand other and unspecified languages – 327 thousand
yeah we’re not sorted by ethnicity/language, so unless you live in a big city with a china town or little italy, you’d have to know the local Thai family to learn their language.
Not only this, but I’ve met one German speaker irl since german class about 15yr ago. Many times “bilingual” in europe means “X and English,” do German people oft go 15 years without meeting another English speaker? Seems like there’d be one on every corner.
That’s what I’m saying, that is pretty common over there whereas here the only other useful language is spanish (or maybe mandarin depending on location), and that is only to help people who come over and only speak spanish, it isn’t like english which can be necessary for business or culturally just normal due to british occupation. I do think spanish should be a bit bigger of a focus in school but also you’d be 100% fine not knowing it.
There’s tons of Germans who don’t go a year without being exposed to Catalan so there’s that. Given that the mandatory third language tends to be Romanic (usually French or Latin) it’s not terribly difficult to pick up, either.
What’s true though for pretty much all of Europe is that multilingualism still tends to be solely within the Indo-European family, unless your native language isn’t that is which is quite the minority.
Gives some perspective on american culture and problems compared to the rest of the world doesn’t it?
Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1). This translates into 43.0 million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills
I hate to extrapolate data as an idiotic internetter but being born in the US and being illiterate could also be because we have so many immigrants that aren’t set up for success right away and aren’t as concerned with education as they are with meeting their most basic needs.
Even if you excluded them (which seems like a very us-foreign-policy approach) these people are only illiterate because they’re from brown countries", you still have an education system where 13.9% of people are coming out illiterate.
Lol damn you don’t have to call me racist. I’m not, and just saw someone using a pretty general statistic to imply American education is terrible or something. I’m just someone who sees appropriation of incomplete information to create a half baked idea that makes people feel like they understand something complex when in reality we are all probably wrong in this thread. Such is the internet though.
And I was talking about my own opportunity to self depreciate, and wasn’t assuming anyone elses nationality.
Yes I did edit my comment lol. We do have a lot of immigrants that may come from poorer countries in search of a better life. Whats wrong with that? How do you know I’m not specifically proud of that for my country? You are the one implying Americans are less-than because of some statistic.
When you are so militant with discussions, how will you ever come to an understanding? Why be so mean?
If I thought it was failing of character to be illiterate then you could maybe say I was blaming immigrants. I think it’s a lot harder to uproot your life and risk it all to bring your family where the grass is greener than it is to learn your ABC’s.
Why do you assume immigrants are brown? Because you are probably right. That’s okay.
It’s okay to have a lower literacy rate if our country is helping people have better lives. It’s okay that discussions of immigration and nationality sometimes involve ethnicities. It just makes sense that those qualities are discussed and related.
It’s also okay if american school systems need to improve. I promise everything will be okay.
Not everything is political. All we have is each other and we can choose to be kind. There’s a lot of anger here and I can’t know where it’s coming from so I won’t try to assume anything about you. I just don’t appreciate you telling me I’m racist for saying America has a lot of immigration. Its not okay. You are assuming more about me than is fair.
It’s a nice graphic for sure. I think what I’m trying to say is that while we must practice vigilance to maintain equality and freedom, we carry out these obligations so that we can enjoy our lives.
I don’t understand what I’ve done to be a target for your activism. I’m not a bad person. It’s relevant to point out that lower literacy might not be a failing of our education system as the statistic implies.
Mate why are you talking like you’re giving a presidential campaign speech? And what equality and freedom are you bloody talking about? In america? Equality and freedom? Are you having a fucking laugh?
Genuinely taking the piss. I’m going to defer to my man Albert Einstein:
“I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my life.” December, 1947
People failing to buy into your delusional nationalism is not an “attack”. You don’t get to demand that people agree with delusional nationalism and then claim you’re under attack when they scoff at them. The very heart of every single one of your responses is the flag waving nationalist bollocks mate, and it’s deeply deeply embarrassing behaviour that completely lacks self awareness.
I’m seeing the opposite ideology as destructive though. Working with each other and the system to affect change is surely better than entrenching and dividing? You are saying it’s bad to believe we can make the world a better place? What is more effective than believing that your country can do better? Shouldn’t we be talking to each other instead of downvoting and blocking each other?
I don’t understand much about what you want because you aren’t talking about it. You just insult me.
The working class can not work with the bourgeoisie. The two have completely opposing interests. Anything that benefits the bourgeoisie comes from exploiting the working class, and anything that benefits the working class comes from reducing that exploitation by the bourgeoisie.
“Let’s work together” is either the political theory of a child that understands nothing or the intentionally subversive lies by someone that does understand but wants to mislead others. You may as well be telling people in africa to work together with the colonial masters exploiting them.
Shouldn’t we be talking to each other instead of downvoting and blocking each other?
Hexbear doesn’t even have downvotes.
What is more effective than believing that your country can do better?
This isn’t what you want. You do nothing except defend against criticism from people that want to make things better. Because your brain is full of nationalism and you can’t help but leap to the defence of the state whenever it is criticised. This behaviour isn’t because you want it to be better, it’s because you view criticism as a threat.
I hate to extrapolate data as an idiotic internetter but being born in the US and being illiterate could also be because
The thing is that so often people who have no clue about things and the real living situations of people do talk down on people who are experts about those questions or affected. Effectively a lot of what you did was muddying the water and thus implicitly justifying that there might be good or acceptable reasons.
You were nationalist and you were racist with that and you were also ignorant of your own history and by being that ignorant you again actively(!) marginalized the BIPoC people in the US, as well as muddied class. In your other answers you were ableist and not kind either. You could’ve been kind, but you weren’t.
Lol damn you don’t have to call me a racist
Well then don’t act like one. Don’t try to defend faults of your country, try to help the people affected by the faults. Listen to affected people and listen to experts. This is a chance to grow for you. You can be kind and you can create a welcoming place for others. To do that you would need some collective work though and maybe read How To Become an Anti-Racist (and you could also watch the liberal lecture series by Robert Reich to get more how red lining works).
Should we always assume that the person to initiate a claim is more credible than lower a commenter? I agree armchair conjectures (by me) arent very helpful but it was more my intention to highlight the questionable lack of support for a claim like America doing a poor job educating people.
That claim is not at all questionable!
However even if the US would do a good job, liberal economic professor Robert Reich does present in this course good reasons that the inhomogenity of the results and who profits from what is a problem in its own that ought to be solved in terms of schooling etc.
We can’t trust anyone as an authority when users are anonymous. All claims are subject to the burden of providing supporting documentation.
Not questioning claims simply because they jive with the general sentiment that America is the worst is deluded.
You can assert whatever you want.
Why is it that every time I take a moment to check on the information presented i find that american literacy is consistent over time and with other countries? Figure 14-1 page 46.
I don’t have time to look at studies on this. But I’m not asserting beyond doubt that I’m right. I just haven’t gotten any supporting documentation from you or OP to support the idea that american education is terrible like he casually infers with a partially relevant statistic.
I hope you are a young person. Over time you will learn that understanding a field takes time and that you need to spend months to get the required minimum knowledge for it. I suggest to you to actually speak with people who work in the field and do research in the field, then you will have done a short cut and can judge whether you want to help fix the problem, the structures or help individuals or if you just wanted to be right online, no matter the real life consequences for people around you.
In any case you are currently lacking the knowledge to differentiate terms, how they are used and how certain numbers are generated. Instead of trying to become an expert I recommend to you again: Speak with the experts, it is a great shortcut.
Besides that you haven’t demonstrated that you are willing to discuss, learn or do your work, which means that you aren’t really a person to be argued with online.
I havent claimed to be an expert I have asked for support to claim that America’s education system is terrible as was inferred. You linked me a high view course with many different topics and have not given any indication that you know about this topic.
You speak in generalities and tell me to find out the specifics for myself. If you asked me questions about my field in computer science I would be specific and try to be helpful for someone wanting to learn more about it.
Yes I am lacking knowledge on this topic. But I have a brain and when I see someone disparage a country’s education system based off of a single percentage statistic I’m allowed to shit on it. The onus in on the person who makes a claim.
Yes, cause you don’t deserve it. Information is at your finger tips, you can’t comprehend them as you are not an expert of the domain, but you know how to contact some. While not always if one brings an extraordinary claim - like you did - or is uninformed their speech and sentiment is not on the same level to be regarded as others is. Especially since you do center your sentiment instead of that of affected.
But I have a brain and when I see someone disparage a country’s education system based off of a single percentage statistic I’m allowed to shit on it.
Show me where you did do “shit on it” when a person was “disparaging” a country which gets negative media bias in the US. Btw. you have no clue if they did do that based on a single statistic, that was only what was posted. No one will read a book as comment. You assume too much here. Also: The want to defend a country (or its reputation) instead of helping the people who could be affected is a problem, this means you are more a nationalist (and you seem to be US American, that means you are even centering your own country) than you care about people who are as example functionally illiterate.
Could first/second generation immigrants born in the US be more likely to be illiterate? Is the American education system simply bad at teaching kids to read? No idea.
I just have a compulsive personal issue with people using data like they are justified to say they know what causes the statistic they quote. I realize social media is more of a way for people to get a little dopamine instead of trying to understand the world but I’m okay getting downvoted to add context lol.
Were you adding context though? Does it justify the situation if a percentage of people are migrants (who often are fluent in a language above the given literacy btw.)?
For real literacy skills in the US are a huge problem, it is a systemic problem of which the burden is heavily placed on individuals that are marginalized. Neolibs might quote:
It is estimated that these negative social and economic outcomes cost the United States $362.49 billion annually.
So first of all, thank you for the civil discussion because that is the biggest lacking quality of scored comment sections like this site. It seems like discussion always brings details that are helpful when we are condemning an entire country with little information provided. This is why I like discussion and not militant downvoting and personal attacks.
I truly have no narrative here but I just searched for immigrant literacy and the first thing I found:
“41 percent of immigrants score at or below the lowest level of English literacy — a level variously described as “below basic” or “functional illiteracy”.”
I’ve heard nothing but bad things about American schools and they’re said to revoltingly underfunded especially in poor and non-white communities. Seen from an outside perspective it seems like all American schools do is multiple choice tests, bullying, pledge of allegiance, school shootings, eat hot chip and lie.
Austerity and culture war has consequences, one of them is that students are not given then education they need.
Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1). This translates into 43.0 million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills
If you didn’t look at this list and ask “Why did they pick these countries and leave out others?” you’re not doing critical thinking. The countries with the highest literacy in the world are almost all either socialist or formerly socialist countries.
It’s an OECD report. They’re comparing to OECD countries and I’d take the Polish numbers with a grain of salt as they have quite a couple fewer refugees, modulo Ukrainians (Ukraine has an education system ballpark Greece or Italy).
Public school and universal literacy was literally invented in Germany (Luther was lobbying princes for it so people could read the bible).
Bruv the left ain’t either. Destroying the US education system was a bipartisan reach-across-the-aisle operation all the way up and down. The fascists wanted education destroyed and the polite fascists wanted education privatized and for profit, which is the same thing as destroyed.
Hmm look at a map of education by state. Then pull up a map of red vs blue states. Notice something strange there? This isn’t a BoTh SiDeS thing, this is a right thing. They want you dumb so you fall for their lies, get in line, and vote for them, it’s simple.
True, but, for most Americans, the “need” to become bilingual simply wasn’t a thing until recently. (It became a thing mainly because US Spanish-speaking communities are slowly moving northward from where they began in the southernmost states.)
In Europe, it’s much easier to run into someone who speaks a different language than you simply by driving to another town.
For the most part, the only two languages Americans have to worry about learning if they want to communicate with neighboring countries is French (because of Canada, although they also speak English) and Spanish (because of the countries to the US’s south, including Mexico and others).
Americans almost never even hear other languages, let alone need to understand them. There’s has been a culture here for over a century for immigrants to integrate and learn the language and culture of America as a replacement for their own. Three generations ago my relatives did this - they literally abandoned their last name in the process.
This. I think european and asian should be swapped in this meme. I think its rarer to see asian speak 3 languages than seeing european speak 3 languages
As an asian, this has been my experience as well. Of course there are exceptions, but most asians I know (not just in my country) usually just speak 2 languages.
But which part of Asia are you from? Here in India, schools are required (at least on paper) to teach three languages, so most people are at least trilingual.
Sanskrit is still spoken in some parts of Karnataka state. Also, only some schools run by the federal government teach Sanskrit. Usually it is (1) the official language of the state, (2) English and (3) Hindi. (If Hindi is the official language of the state, then any other Indian language, or a foreigh language, would be offered. For historical reasons most schools in Tamil Nadu state do not offer Hindi, but will have another third language such as French.)
Meh I only speak English and Norwegian. I can (with extreme difficulty) make myself understood in German, but I wouldn’t say I “speak German” . Although anyone who speaks Norwegian can also understand Swedish and Danish (not easily in the case of Danish unless it’s written).
I think it also really depends where you are, which is why generalising entire continents maybe isn’t very useful. Someone from Luxemburg or somewhere in the Netherlands with more recent immigrants is going to be a lot more likely to speak multiple languages than say someone from Russia or more rural France, just as someone from China is more often going to be monolingual compared to someone from India or Singapore
Surely that depends on where in Asia you’re looking at as well? On average, the number of languages people speak is quite different between, say, India and Japan. Or Switzerland vs Romania in Europe.
Canadian here, I am fluent in English, French and Russian. Currently learning Spanish as well. If I can do it at 15y, you can too. Edit: Uyuu pointed out that its actually easier when you are young and I agree.
I had no patients or focus to do it when I was younger. I actually learned more Japanese and Chinese in the past 3 years, than I had ever done in childhood or university.
Pretty sure I can’t since I’m no longer younger than 15
In all seriousness though I’m curious how you’ve been finding Spanish, just if it kinda fits with my experience where, coming from French, it seemed overall quite easy to learn and improve (especially on the comprehension side of things.
Its not that bad. I joined a school with spanish classes this year and the others had 2y more of knowledge on me as I did not learn Spanish at my previous school, but I still managed to pull off a year average of 82% without studying. If you know french, then its a lot easier to learn Spanish as the verb and sentence structure is similar, not speaking about the amount of words that are the same in both languages. Knowing Russian helps as well as it also has some similarities. If Inhad a tip to give, it would be to not be shy trying to speak as there aure no negative and the positives are major. If you mispronounced a word, someone will just correct you and you will likely not repeat the same mistake again instead of you being shy to say something wrong.
Hello fellow Indian. This is very similar to my linguistic capabilities if you substitute Japanese for the bit of French I learnt in school / college 30 years ago. Ok, I can’t really follow someone when they speak French, but I can read it well enough even now.
Nice. I know every language is pretty difficult mostly, but as someone who’s had a hard time learning Hindi after realising it uses the same script and yet is a different language from Marathi, French just blows my fucking mind.
In my experience, it was reasonably simple to learn how to read / write French. We had it in school for 3 years and then college for a couple of years. The emphasis was on reading / writing and not so much on speaking / listening, though I remember we had to recite some French poetry once. The teacher’s ears must have fallen of hearing our impeccable accents :D
Definitely is. I forgot the actual name of the writing style, but for children’s books it is also not uncommon to have kanji with their hiragana transliteration above/beside it. Requiring someone to immediately write kanji when they learn japanese, especially as a secondary+ language is insane
I know you are joking but based on my purely anecdotal personal experience, the French (at least in Paris) can now speak and are willing to speak in English much more than a few decades back.
The first time I went to France, almost 25 years back, I had a rough time communicating at restaurants or even buying tickets at the Paris metro stations. Not sure if the latter was an ability or willingness issue because even holding up two fingers and saying “two tickets” was apparently indecipherable. Had to muster my school days French and say “deux billets” to produce instant results.
Edit: And no, the two fingers I was holding up were not the middle finger of each hand :P
well because it’s kind of a forced adoption in an ideal world we would have developed a common tongue by slowly merging the languages, or at least would have taken one that’s pretty good and then improve on it. For example Hungarian is much better in the sense that what you write is what you pronounce, not the mess that is English, so in an ideal common tongue I feel like that aspect would be adopted.
Of course Hungarian also has stupid parts, ly (<- that’s supposed to be indeed one letter) and j is the same thing. x is just ks, y is pronounced the same as i and w is just v so there is some extra fat on it, but other than that the 44 letters cover all the sounds you make while pronouncing words.
Hungarian is like Chinese to most romanic / germanic languages.
While being excellent in describing every little thing pretty efficiently and short, the problem I see with highly advanced languages is imho that they are pretty complicated to learn.
Add comment