any suggestions for foreign language?

JHS
Thu, 11 Jan 2007 11:10:17 +0000

mathmom – I wasn’t talking about preferring one national culture over another. Of course you can do that. I was talking about “not liking” Spanish before a student has even gotten access to any Hispanic culture through it. And, yes, I acknowledged that some languages are much harder than others for people like me or you to learn, and one can rationally dislike that. (But there’s no way that could apply to Spanish, which has practically no sounds not used in English, no true diphthongs, no inflections, fairly regular grammar and syntax that’s about as close to English as any other language, relatively few irregular verbs, etc., etc. Plus, it’s practical, and as close to a national second language as we have. If you “don’t like” learning Spanish, maybe you don’t like learning languages, period.)

That isn’t to say that bad teachers and bad courses couldn’t turn a kid off a language. That happens all the time; it happened to my daughter with French. (Have I said that I hate hate HATE the way languages are taught?)