<p>Apparently, our university makes us take a “placement interview” where anyone with Chinese Chinese parents must take “heritage” Chinese courses which are harder than “non-heritage” ones. This is ridiculous. Their rationale is that they don’t want you to take courses in which “you are overqualified”. Well, what about the AP Calculus BC students taking Calculus I? </p>
<p>I think this is just unfair. I used all my AP credits while my friends just took AP courses during university. Now I just want an easy course as a break for next term… but they’re making it difficult.</p>
<p>Pretty sure nobody grows up in a household speaking in Integral.</p>
<p>I think you should contact the ACLU and possibly take some legal action, especially if the same requirement is not done for French, Spanish, etc.</p>
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<p>So? Some people could have been taught from a young age.
Growing up in a Chinese-speaking household doesn’t make it easier (though it makes more effective) – you just did all the work when you were young.</p>
<p>Remember what it was first like to read? Reading comes so easy to you now that you don’t really remember the LABOUR of learning all those words by context. But you put in that mental effort.</p>
<p>Yes, it is easier because you have more exposure to the language on a constant basis, you are not graded for it, you start learning from a much younger age, and you have substantially longer to learn the material. I cannot imagine a more ideal condition to learn a different language. There is massive difference between learning a language in school and learning it in your household while growing up. I know some Mexicans who grew up in Spanish-speaking households who will be talking to family members and switch between English and Spanish while they’re talking and not even be aware they did so, because they’re that familiar with both languages. By contrast, everyone I know who learned Spanish in school is nowhere near that comfortable with the language.</p>
<p>Dude, I study linguistics. Child language development was my pet passion in high school. I know the EFFECTIVENESS difference.</p>
<p>But really in childhood, it’s not easier. You just work harder.</p>
<p>Remember, in childhood, you didn’t have that many subjects to study. Your brain was working hard to digest each word and store it somewhere. Learning a language from scratch was hard work, right from the babbling stage (also an experimenting stage). Your brain was <em>dedicated</em> to learning that language. That didn’t make it any easier. Now I bet when you learn a language in college you spend only 5% of your brain capacity on it. You work less hard.</p>
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<p>Huh? You can do the same thing with a second language. I play shooters in French with VoIP, and I constantly immerse myself in French when I can.</p>
<p>The real obstacle is really reactivating that Sylvian Fissure area such that you’re willing to do more work.</p>
<p>So what you’re saying is that it’s not easier to learn a language when you have nothing else going on in your life compared to when you’re taking many classes, are under pressure to get good grades, and maybe have a job? Maybe in your theoretical “dude I’m the expert I read something about in high school and took a college class on it” world, but the rest of us live in reality. In reality, it’s a lot easier to learn a language when you are raised in a household speaking it. Nobody cares about some stupid “well your brain is processing at X% as an infant, but only Y% as an adult” garbage, those are the kind of useless, crappy ideas they put in college textbooks to fill the pages so publishing companies and authors can fill their wallets.</p>
<p>I cannot imagine a more useless place to learn a foreign language than online games. The amount of slang and jargon is so heavy that there’s no way you’re going to get an actual sense of how people really talk. “Bomb is coming long A” or “sheep the warrior” is most likely not going to be very useful in actual conversation.</p>
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<p>No it was my obsession in high school for two years. Linguistics is also how I got into neuroscience (my current major).</p>
<p>I’m a third culture kid. Singlish is a marginalised creole in Singapore and I spent my life trying to fight the discrimination against it, and in doing so I learnt the process in which creolisation occurred and the true nature of language acquisition, because I had been fed myths about language acquisition in my childhood.</p>
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<p>It was a metaphor. Percentages are an easy way to present it to a layman. I can actually go into anatomical detail if you want and present it from a neurobiological POV, but I’m not sure if you’re into neuro.</p>
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<p>Well no because you end up talking about regular things 50% of the time. If you’ve ever been in a clan on TS or vent, then you know that well you often log on and talk about stuff besides the games.</p>
<p>Also the key is prepositions … sense of space. You need to know how to quickly say what is going on where ==> the most useful thing for fluency.</p>
<p>Most of the game slang was in English, and that was Frenchified into interesting grammatical structures, and it occurred rarely. On the other hand, you had a lot of French chatspeak, which is really useful for acquisition because by departing from regular spelling you lose the ability to recognise what words are in common with English and you actually have to sound out the words ==> spoken fluency (the true fluency). </p>
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<p>Okay that was bare assertion.</p>
<p>I’m saying you do the same amount of net work learning it as a child as you do learning it later. It’s not easy for children! </p>
<p>Just because every pregnant mother usually manages to succeed in childbirth (with some exceptions/disorders) doesn’t mean that the pregnant mother had it easy. Just because fluency is assured when learning a language in childhood doesn’t mean it was easy for the child.</p>
<p>Also, if it were feasible to take a PET scan (or some sort of way of monitoring glucose activity) of a child in the process of language acquisition (or even in the process of babbling) versus a student in a college language class, you’d definitely see the appropriate language centres along the Sylvian Fissure (including Wernicke’s and Broca’s) lit up more intensively in the child. Conclusion: child is working harder.</p>
<p>Once again, that’s lovely but is ultimately meaningless psychobabble. You are basically comparing apples to oranges and there’s this thing called reality that you seem to be ignoring. It’s like people who ramble on and on about some statistics they read about without applying any context to it, it’s meaningless.</p>
<p>Even if you need more brain cells firing it is substantially easier to learn something when your only other concerns are things like eating cheerios and watching cartoons. Children don’t have to take time out of their day to go “study” the language, they acquire it by listening to people talk and it comes naturally. Even if it is less “work” as an adult based upon some pointless brain scan, it is harder to find quality time to devote to that work and still deal with the realities of adult life. Add four or five other classes into the mix, a job, pressure to get good grades, searching for a job in a faltering economy, dealing with a girlfriend or boyfriend whose sole purpose in life at the time seems to be getting under your skin, daily fun chores, and many more fun things and all of a sudden it becomes much harder.</p>
<p>It would serve you well to try to apply the things you learn to real life. All this theoretical stuff is great, but ultimately you cannot ignore the real life factor.</p>
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<p>Uh what? </p>
<p>Work is by definition, the amount of useful energy spent to accomplish some task. Energy wasted on other things does not count as work.</p>
<p>Children are more efficient at acquiring language, and by definition, do more work. Certainly their brains are more active in the appropriate areas – i.e. they are working harder as their appropriate neurons are metabolising more glucose.</p>
<p>I’ll spare you the “psychobabble” since you don’t want to hear the science of it but just want to repeat cultural myths. (Technically it’s neurobabble – I don’t work in soft psych, thank you very much.)</p>
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<p>What the hell? How are the things you said “real life” factors?</p>
<p>By your definition, you should get an A in a class simply because you are juggling a job and a girlfriend while taking it. Of course, you put much more work into your essay, apparently, so the professor should factor all your “real life” things you have to deal with as an adult into your grade.</p>
<p>Basically, the OP’s school wants native speakers to “work harder” to achieve the same qualifications (same level of credit). Because face it, “heritage” adds nothing to a degree. Their rationale is that “oh the native speakers had to do less intellectual work as children” … NOT. Children expend more useful intellectual work learning a language compared to adults. It is for this reason that language acquisition is the most efficient during the critical period.</p>
<p>You just don’t get it. </p>
<p>And no, I never stated any such things. That is you putting words into my mouth. If anything, my point would be that getting an A while holding down a job and taking 20 credit hours is more impressive than getting an A while taking the absolute minimum number of credit hours to be full time and spending out of class time doing whatever you please.</p>
<p>The school’s rationale is sound. Have you ever taken a foreign language course with a native speaker? I have and they breezed through it with zero effort.</p>
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<p>Yes, so because you had to juggle so many jobs they should ease some of the prereqs for you or give you free credit.</p>
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<p>That’s because they did the WORK when they were CHILDREN. And no, they didn’t spend zero effort when they were children. Native speakers have already done the intellectual work – they should get the credit. They shouldn’t be made to do extra work to get the same level of credit.</p>
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<p>On the contrary, it discriminates against language groups and demands a federal court injunction. And especially so because the basis of judgment is through race. What if you were an expatriate child that grew up in a Chinese-speaking environment? Nope, that child gets his credit. Oh and it sucks if you were a Chinese kid who lost his grasp of Chinese during American elementary school, like me.</p>
<p>Also, by your logic, physics geniuses (whose brains happen to work harder and more efficiently at physics) shouldn’t get to take the same physics courses as all the rest of the student body. No, they should be made to take a special course with the history of physics and various useless things added in to make it even harder for them, just to gain the same level of credit.</p>
<p>You just don’t get it, at all. I wish you the best of luck with real life, because you’re going to NEED it.</p>
<p>I don’t get what it is with your invocation of “real life”. My argument is a real-life one. Native speakers have ALREADY WORKED HARD. Let them slack off for a course they have already worked for!</p>
<p>Suppose you had a particular aptitude in subject X but weren’t particularly passionate about it (that is, you weren’t interested in “taking your knowledge further”). You would be allowed to take intro-level courses in subject X despite the fact that you already knew most of the material, to allow you to gain an easy A. </p>
<p>Of course, when it comes to native language speakers in intro-level courses, they wouldn’t be doing any work, oh no! (Maybe because they have already DONE IT!) </p>
<p>Also I have the feeling that augustuscaesar isn’t necessarily an ultra-fluent speaker of a Chinese language, but rather that he just has some background in it from it being spoken occasionally at home. It certainly is possible. How is that not like arriving at an intro-level course with some background knowledge? It’s not unfair for you to take it LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE.</p>
<p>Glad to know you support racial discrimination.</p>
<p>Yes, and while we’re at it we should just let everyone who has a job just sit around and browse the internet while taking a nap at work since they worked hard for it in college so they “deserve” to be lazy.</p>
<p>Also, I would know how this is “racial discrimination.” Please, do elaborate - this should be very entertaining. I have a soft spot in my heart for those who make futile attempts to try to point out “racism” in everything, mostly because I find it very funny that people could be so naive/clueless.</p>
<p>^^ Your analogy doesn’t follow. Again, you are basing this off of toil and sweat effort and not intellectual work accomplished.</p>
<p>If your new job is in accounting, and you need to audit some client, you didn’t do that auditing in college. Certainly you didn’t audit client X. All the work you did in college was just preparation.</p>
<p>On the other hand if you take a course in language X already being a fluent speaker in language X, you have already picked up language X. Your task is done. If you have only partially completed language X, you finish the task. (And continue working at it from that basis.) </p>
<p>Where your analogy applies is this:</p>
<p>Worker A is more productive than Worker B. Worker A finishes job in 2 hours. Worker B has to use most of his appointed time (4 hours). Why shouldn’t worker A get 2 hours of surfing the internet? He did his job.</p>
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<p>White native speakers of other foreign languages aren’t being screened.
White native speakers of Chinese aren’t being screened either.</p>
<p>On the other hand, people who have a background in Chinese but aren’t fluent in it would be placed in the “harder” course and be made to work harder.</p>
<p>Outright discrimination.</p>
<p>But maybe you don’t see it.</p>
<p>Did you ever go through that “heritage” crap as a child? **** heritage, what does that have to do with language, an organic system.</p>
<p>How do you know that they are not being screened for? You are making a lot of assumptions.</p>