<p>
</p>
<p>Well, I can think of at least one counterexample. My D1 took both Intermediate Portuguese and Accelerated Beginning and Accelerated Intermediate French (each of the accelerated French classes compressing a normal year’s worth of French into a single semester, for twice the credits) at the University of Minnesota, as a HS homeschooler attending the U under the state of Minnesota’s PSEO program, in which the state pays for qualified HS students to take college classes. It was a lot of work, and sometimes difficult to keep the two languages straight, but she got a lot out of it, not least a huge amount of intellectual satisfaction, and it propelled her French to the point that she was able to start with advanced-level French literature and writing classes as a freshman at her LAC this past year. Having conquered as much French as she feels she needs right now, she’s shifting gears and once again picking up Latin and Greek in the fall of her sophomore year, languages she had studied in junior high and her first two years of HS but suspended in favor of French and Portuguese for her last 2 years of HS.</p>
<p>Waste of time? I don’t think so. Her Portuguese is serviceable (and could easily be brushed up to very good with a quick conversational refresher course or, better, a few weeks’ stay in Portugal or Brazil), her French is excellent (she could easily study or work in France or some other Francophone country), and if you’re going to study literature in college there’s as much to be gained from French as from English literature. As for Latin and Greek, she really thrives on reading the classics in the original, and there’s an enormous wealth of literary and philosophical ideas in those ancient texts that many people still find profoundly meaningful today. What she’ll do with it, who knows, but I think she’s getting an outstanding education at a school that values both classical and modern languages and literatures as a perfectly respectable branch of intellectual endeavor. I think it’s unfortunate that so many Americans, even well-educated Americans, tend to brush off languages and foreign literatures as a kind of afterthought or something of secondary importance.</p>