any suggestions for foreign language?

JHS
Thu, 11 Jan 2007 09:50:48 +0000

Most of what I would say has already been said here, but that seldom stops me.


I like the idea of putting in the effort to take the last few steps to achieve some real mastery of Spanish. It will be years before he masters Arabic or Mandarin, and he probably is not far from mastering Spanish (which is about as easy a foreign language as there is). It would probably help him in learning his next language to know at least one foreign language well – you get a better sense of the final goal and how to achieve it.
It is ridiculous, ridiculous, to talk of “not liking” a language. Languages don’t have inherent moral or aesthetic qualities. They can be harder or easier for native English speakers to learn, but there’s nothing especially good or bad about any of them. As far as I can tell, your son has not gotten to the point where he has had any engagement with Spanish literature or dealing with Hispanic culture in Spanish. So how can he possibly make a judgment about “not liking” it?


(My kids say stuff like that, too. I lecture them about it, too.)


The son of a close friend, who knew Latin very well and had two years of Greek (with its non-Roman character set) before he started college, started Arabic his sophmore year of college, for much the same reasons your son has. After three years and one summer of college Arabic, two years living in Cairo, and almost a year in Jordan, he does not feel close to fluent in Arabic (although he can and does get by in it day-to-day). That is not to discourage learning Arabic, only to note that really learning Arabic is a substantial, long-term commitment. (And, yes, the regional differences are substantial – maybe not as substantial as among Chinese “dialects”, but I know that, say, Egyptians have a lot of trouble understanding Algerians if the latter aren’t speaking formally, and when I listen to Egyptian and Algerian popular music, as I do, I can tell that not only the pronunciation but the vocabulary itself is quite different, although the basic grammatical structures are the same.)