I mean the whole school I went through kept nailing in our heads how much a foreign language would benefit you. I guess this went under the noses of whoever like teaching kids to balance a checkbook.
In my own experience, if you pick up another language but don’t use it on an at least a semi-regular basis, your skills in it get real rusty real fast.
That’s why it’s a fucking robbery when bilingual parents refuse to teach their kids a second language. Sadly happens a lot in the US with Spanish
Everyone coming up with conspiratorial reasons why this is not the case but it’s much simple than that. It’s not feasible and it’s expensive and the returns aren’t really worth it.
Kids in school have a bunch of other subjects they have to learn besides foreign languages. You can add one or two languages but then at some point you will need to remove other subjects to add more or you need to keep kids in school even more. Both are not really feasible. Then you need to hire teachers for all these new languages which most places won’t do.
Another issue is with the way they teach languages in schools. They expect you to pass a test and not actually learn the language so a lot of the languages will not “stick” as the students lack immersion and practice with that language. I can speak for myself, I have learned two languages besides my native language in school: French and English. I had French since 2nd grade, which is 10 years of French classes and English since 5th grade which is 7 years of English classes. Today I can speak English fluently and like 3 words of French. The difference was that I was always immersed in English, though video games, movies, songs and so on. Not so much with French. I have noticed the same pattern with most of my friends and family members.
Do Americans really not learn any other languages in school? I was under the impression that Spanish lessons were part of the public school system down there. I’m not trying to be rude I’m genuinely asking
They tried teaching Spanish in my elementary school with videos that no one paid attention to. A lot of schools don’t even go that far.
Generally not till highschool or college.
So you’re old enough that it doesn’t come easy and generally no one retains much without a lot of effort.
I see thanks for clarifying
We didn’t have any foreign language classes until highschool. We had one month in 5th grade (~11 years old) where we went over some French, Spanish, and German like once a week. By the time I got to highschool, the only options were Spanish and French and I was only able to get into French due to the way they sorted people. That was fine for me, though, since I went to Canada basically every year. These were not, however, required. Some tracks would have things like Ag Sciences and more vocational classes instead. I graduated in the late '90s.
I see. That’s a little surprising to me. I didn’t realize that there is basically no language education there
At least in my time, people going the “college prep” route generally were expected to take two years of a language in highschool. I moved for my final year to a bigger city and more affluent area and they had French, Spanish, Latin, German, and Japanese, though at least some of those were being phased out the next year (I think Japanese may have been phased out the year I moved there, but I had already had 3 years of French and was more focused on music classes as I thought I wanted to be a music teacher).
So in high school languages are just an elective, not a requirement?
In my generation, yes. I doubt that’s changed in the last
51015really?20ohno2530ish years.Edit: Rural Ohio for the first part of my schooling, but not really different from what I could tell in the big city when I moved for my final year.
Okay. I didn’t realize that’s how it worked over there. Thanks for sharing.
Even for a wealthier state like New York, often thought of as more progressive on stuff like this, the actual requirements are a joke. You can just take a year of a language in 8th grade, pass the local test that meets the curriculum’s criteria, and never touch it again all the way to graduation from high school. At least when I was in school, they would at least try to dissuade you from not continuing it at least one more year to get on track for some sort of special diploma, but you could just opt out if your parents gave the okay to your guidance counselor.
Wow thats honestly pretty crazy to me. To me this is like learning Americans don’t learn geometry in school or something. Language learning should be an essential part of any public education system
Guys should we tell them?
You guys don’t learn geometry either?
Because the system is designed to make it so you never leave and you never have the upper hand.
English has 1.5B fluent speakers spread across the entire globe. Hardly an insular language.
This is far more about discrimination - freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services, segregating English speakers from minority speakers, abolishing First Nations language and culture.
Also very important to keep Americans from reading foreign language press.
Sorry, but I really am failing to make the connection between how learning a second language as an optional class leads to “freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services”. You don’t even need to speak English to access those most of the time. In my city, nearly all public services are available in English and Spanish at the minimum, and frequently Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian as well.
I really am failing to make the connection between how learning a second language as an optional class leads to “freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services”.
American public school kids don’t normally get access to electives until at 6th grade (sometimes not until 8th or 9th grade depending on the state and district). So “optional” in theory is a deliberate effort to delay bilingual learning in practice.
Mono-lingual populations are more easily primed towards hostility against minority speakers. So your senior staff is biased towards English as a primary language when hiring the next generation of public workers. And these workers are increasingly both unable and unwilling to provide services in secondary languages. This creates a natural barrier for any minority speaker from even interacting with public bureaucracies.
In my city, nearly all public services are available in English and Spanish at the minimum, and frequently Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian as well.
Bigger and more egalitarian cities, with large minority-language populations can staff their departments with fluent minority-language speakers. And under more liberal and egalitarian governments, they do. But as the population grows more reactionary, these kinds of skills get drummed out of the bureaucracy.
This isn’t even a new problem in government.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 2,500 troops Tuesday about the foreign-language skills he championed as a congressman, an active-duty Army officer was complaining about the paucity of military personnel who can speak anything other than English.
But it has become an increasingly domestic issue, as fascists take command of the bureaucratic core.
On March 1, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 13166, which designated English as the United States’ official language. This Executive Order is no longer theoretically in effect, and existing federal civil rights laws and regulations require language access for individuals with limited English proficiency in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.
Nonetheless, numerous federal entities are pursuing policies prioritizing English as the only language, effectively reducing or eliminating Spanish.
It hasn’t really been an economic necessity or cultural priority like other countries.
Most countries who have a population who speak more than one language usually either have a variety of languages spoken within/near the country or rely on ESL speakers to participate in the international workforce.
With English being the current lingua franca, Americans already know the current dominant language. There is really only one major language which is relevant to neighbors, but Americans are usually in the more dominant economic position and there is a cultural aversion to adopting Spanish more.
This is the correct answer.
If you live in SE Asia for example you speak your local language at home but you need to learn English for work.
If you already speak English at home then you already know how to speak English at work.
There is really only one major language which is relevant to neighbors
Spanish
French Canadians would like to have a word with you
They could, if they were economically relevant on the continent. Spanish and Portuguese are far more relevant when interfacing with international trade in the Western Hemisphere.
I pointed out cultural reasons for maintaining a language as well. The USA, as a country, has no current cultural reason to have portions of the country maintain a different language.
Is Canada not economically relevant to the continent? French is an official language of Canada, on equal footing as English. By law anything sold in Canada must include both English and French labelling, software, instruction manuals etc. For parts of the US that trade a lot with Canada, French is at least as economically relevant as Spanish.
Quebec isn’t Canada.
Having to get documents translated is a cost of doing business in Canada. You don’t have to speak both languages to conduct business in Canada.
Quebec is in Canada, it’s also not the only Francophone region in Canada. There are also most certainly major economic zones in Canada where you would need to know French to conduct business. And I assume you could also hire a translator for Spanish, no?
But we’re talking about economic utility. Quebec isn’t Canada; it is much smaller.
In contrast, Mexico has a GDP near Canada as a whole and there isn’t a bilingual legal framework to support business deals. Furthermore, there are more Spanish speaking countries to make deals with in the Western Hemisphere; the closest that French has is Haiti.
Quebec is one of the most economically active regions in Canada. But we can out that aside for now because, again, Quebec is not the only francophone region in Canada. The province I’m from doesn’t even recognize French as an official language, yet there are people who live here who are born here, are educated here, and work here, and die here, all without ever achieving more that basic English proficiency because they are so immersed in the Francophone subculture here.
So if what you are worried about is legal frameworks, then yes, you don’t need your lawyer to be bilingual to do business with Canada in some cases. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that the people who you hope to do business with, and your potential customer base, might not know anything beyond broken English (if they know any English at all).
If you don’t live in a border state the chances of using a second language enough to really learn it well and become proficient are really small unless you have close family members that speak it.
I took a couple of years of Spanish in high school but live about 12 hours from the Mexican border so I didn’t use it enough to retain much.
Because it would upset the racists (republicans)
Hah!
We can barely teach kids English.
Why?
The answer is Republicans want to fund Christian schools instead, with various variations of extra steps.
Learning a second language might open perspectives and expose children to ideas. The GOP can’t afford such smart kids.
I’d say because half of america’s goals involve not understanding other cultures and believing whatever nonsense the corporate overlords want to say about them.
I still have to laugh at when american’s went on chinese tiktok to work around the possible bans, and the chinese were all like “wait, you really do have to pay out the nose for an ambulance ride, I thought that was propoganda by our government” meanwhile a lot of american’s were learning half of the horrors of china were extremely overstated or manipulated.
meanwhile a lot of american’s were learning half of the horrors of china were extremely overstated or manipulated.
Crazy how quickly the Chinese travel vlogs get demonetized on YouTube. Google execs really do not want you knowing how nice East Asian cities are.
As someone who is Chinese and living in the US, Americans who have not been to China overestimate its shittiness and people who have been to China once or twice overestimate its glamour. Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes. I’ve been to a tea plantation where there were a total of six electric plugs in the entire village and the toilets flushed with a bucket which had to be filled from a pump outside. It’s not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it’s a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US, where at least people usually have electricity and running water.
Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes.
One of the more notable achievements of the last two decades of Chinese economic improvement has been the degree of urbanization, particularly in the western end of the country. This used to be a point of criticism among western economists (Chinese Ghost Cities being a popular meme during the '00s/'10s). Now we just don’t talk about Chengdu or Lhasa or Lanzhuo at all.
It’s not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it’s a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US
In my experience, having done a little traveling through Appalachia and the northern end of the Gulf Coast, urban migration has solved a lot of the back country issues by hollowing out the country’s interior. If we didn’t build a highway through a chunk of the state, people just stopped living there.
Chinese rural communities have experienced a similar hollowing out, particularly in the 80s and 90s when the prosperity on the coasts fully eclipsed the poverty of the western interior. But because agricultural labor was seen as critical to social stability, the state simply refused to let people leave. The end result was an enormous black market population that became a nightmare to manage. And so the late Deng and Hu governments (and early Xi government - although by then much of the work was done) spent a significant amount of resources and labor back filling rural development. Hu, in particular, was a champion of the rural west thanks to his policy of low taxes and high investment.
This didn’t eliminate the developmental black holes on the Chinese map. But the expansion westward was its own kind of economic revolution. One that culminated in a virtual elimination of the poverty the country had become known for during the Reagan Era.
The difference in approach - demanding people move to the cities rather than demanding public spending move to the country - is a critical point of divergence between American Neoliberal and Chinese Socialist domestic policies.
I do have to agree with you there. Though too much urban migration does come with its own problems. Chief among them that I observe is that it severely depressed wages and lack of work. China is moving through its own sort of gilded age right now with rapid technological advancement and extreme inequality.
For a purportedly socialist country, China lacks a lot of state infrastructure that comes along with that. The USSR guaranteed work and bread, at a minimum (mostly), but in China, a curious sight emerged which I observed in some of the poorer neighbourhoods of Hangzhou: old people pushing around carts of discarded cardboard boxes and tin cans. They weren’t employed as cleaning workers. They were collecting these to sell for their recycling value. And even though the Westerner might laugh at the notion of making a living collecting literal garbage for pennies, it only takes fourteen pennies to make a yuan and ¥5 will buy a bowl of rice, fending off starvation for another twelve hours. Now, homeless people collecting rubbish to sell for scrap does also happen in the US, but the US at least doesn’t claim to be a socialist country.
China has no functional social safety net, government assistance is minimal, and workers are exploited by a ruling class of wealthy elites with minimal interference from the state, in a shockingly similar way to capitalist countries. You cannot even form a real trade union in China, because all big companies are already “unionised” with workers represented by farcically corrupt organisations which work in tandem with the capitalist bosses.
I will give one more example: Coco is a nationwide chain of beverage stalls which sell tea, coffee, and juice drinks. I walked past a location in Shenzhen which was advertising that they were hiring. Their offer of pay: ¥200 a day, for a 10-hour shift, six days a week. In one of the most expensive cities in the country. I took a photo of this but I couldn’t find it to post.
Now, homeless people collecting rubbish to sell for scrap does also happen in the US, but the US at least doesn’t claim to be a socialist country.
The US doesn’t have guaranteed housing. China does. The major catch is that Chinese guaranteed housing is tied to your municipal “home city” and getting that changed is a pain in the ass. So the homeless people you’ll find in major urban areas are residents who left their rural neighborhoods in pursuit of a better life in the city and fell through the cracks.
That said, the low cost of living in China definitely improves the prospects of even the most desperately poor. What’s more, Chinese policy with respect to “internal migrants” is radically different from the US policy of mass criminalization and imprisonment.
Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises. For example, during the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s export-oriented economy, especially of manufactured goods, was severely hit, causing about 30 million migrant workers to lose their jobs. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when service and manufacturing jobs were seriously impacted, many migrant workers returned to their homes and land in the countryside.
The domestic policy around perpetual family ownership of property is critical to limiting poverty in China in a way very few other countries enjoy.
So when you say
China has no functional social safety net
I’m genuinely not clear if you know what you’re talking about.
I walked past a location in Shenzhen which was advertising that they were hiring. Their offer of pay: ¥200 a day, for a 10-hour shift, six days a week. In one of the most expensive cities in the country.
Shocking to hear they hadn’t filled the position.
Okay, so let me put it this way:
Housing might, in theory, be guaranteed in your home town. This is a strength of China’s system, I grant, and it’s one of the few examples of one of their socialist policies which actually somewhat works. Their national pension scheme is the other thing I can think of that functions decently well.
But it’s certainly no Soviet Union where if you go up to local officials and say “I have no job and I want to work”, they’ll find something for you to do pretty quickly.
Housing might, in theory, be guaranteed in your home town.
Idk why you’re trying to couch this as a hypothetical. Imagine trying to talk about Social Security this way - “oh well maybe in theory…” No, brother, the checks are in the mail.
People really do have family housing that really does exist for real in China.
But it’s certainly no Soviet Union
The Chinese Communist system was not organized under the Soviet model. Absolutely true. Maoism-cum-Dengism is not Lenin With Chinese Characteristics.
Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela also had their own district unique models.
if you go up to local officials and say “I have no job and I want to work”, they’ll find something for you to do pretty quickly.
If you go to your local Chinese jobs office, you’ll get a bureaucratic exam that determines your fitness for entry level positions.
23% of the population works in the public sector. That’s roughly 300M people - China Is Hiring.
But the private sector is also hiring, often with salary and benefits that outcompete public jobs. The idea that you need to be a trash picker to earn an income is flat out wrong.
and it’s not like this is at all unique to china, i’m pretty sure all the western countries are seeing the same thing happen just to a lesser degree.
Think of all the small towns in the US, they used to be lively places and now most of them are one step removed from being ghost towns. Same thing has happened here in sweden, the countryside is just a big suburb where everyone commutes to work in a city and barely any businesses survive.
Rednote’s been a fascinating natural experiment in cross cultural communication that we need to repeat at scale
When I was a kid in public school, everybody had to take a foreign language, the elective part was that we had a choice as to which language we took. Some chose French. Some chose Spanish. If you came from money, you also had the option to take foreign language courses at participating colleges, which opened up a lot of other options like German, Japanese, and Latin, amongst others.
Has that changed? Or perhaps it’s different in different jurisdictions?
For me personally, I wish Latin had been an option for me, as it’s used extensively in biology and it would have been incredibly helpful. In terms of foreign language courses I’ve taken, I’ve had Spanish, French, and German. I don’t use any of them, except on rare occasion I’ll hear/see something in Spanish that I can vaguely understand the highlights of given enough time. French is pretty much 100% useless in my day to day life. German has been helpful once or twice when watching a movie or listening to music, but otherwise, useless as well.
Keep in mind, however smart you are, most people are not that smart. They’ll never be curious enough or smart enough to learn another language. They don’t have enough exposure to another language to really remember it. It’s basically of waste of their time and educational money. I’m all for teaching these things in schools as electives, but forcing kids to learn multiple different languages? I think we should have universal/single payer healthcare, better medicare/medicaid, free school lunches (and breakfasts), true livable minimum wages, and a myriad other things first.
In Canada when I was growing up, if you didnt take french immersion, they made you take 1 french language class a year up until grade 10.
They also taught Japanese in my highschool and for senior year if you’d taken them all you could go on a trip to Japan.
Same experience for me. Once in highschool (at an English speaking school) you could choose to branch off from French and learn either Spanish or Japanese (or all the above) if you wanted to.
For me personally, I wish Latin had been an option for me, as it’s used extensively in biology and it would have been incredibly helpful.
My wife and I studied Latin in middle school and high school.
My kids were also able to take Latin in school.
Rather than list all the benefits of learning Latin, I found this, Top 10 Reasons For Studying Latin, which says it better than I could.
I would struggle to translate anything today (although I still know that all of Gaul is divided into three parts), but I know I have benefited from an improved understanding of English grammar and vocabulary.
Fight for Latin in your schools!
Because education in the USA is a sad joke? Republicans have been hollowing out education for the past 5 decades or so and they worked hard trying to shove fundamentalist christianity in schools and science classes specifically
The US is tucked and can get fucked
I know it varies from state to state, but where I’ve lived it’s an “elective” in that you got to pick which language to take of the available options (some schools might only have two choices, others four or even five), but taking a certain number of foreign language credits was required for graduation. If you wanted to go beyond the minimum and had room in your schedule you could.
Same way where I grew up in South Dakota, except each school only taught one language.
I’m 1.5 Gen immigrant to the US and idek Cantonese/Chinese volcabulary outside of basics, like 2nd grade level words, so I’m probably gonna be speaking a weird Canto-glish to my future children, or maybe just English only 🤷♂️
I even struggle to talk to my parents lol
Around me, the only language spoken with any frequency other than English is Spanish. In a half dozen different varieties. Even that wasn’t all that common until, maybe, 10 years ago. About midway through President Trump’s first administration.
Most schools encourage kids to take a language, but they are kinda a use it, or lose it thing. Unless you just happen to be part of a community or household that speaks a language other than English, you are unlikely to need it.
i mean… how often do you think spanish is used in the nordics? and yet a third language is mandatory, and most people pick spanish.
Sure it’s not like most swedes can speak fluent spanish, but it’s also not like they completely forget it. If they go to spain they’ll have a hell of a better chance at being able to talk to people than those who picked german.
A point. However, how far do you need to go to reach an area, that doesn’t speak your native language commonly?
We recently moved a fair distance, not too far as things go here. Roughly 2000 km. English language spoken by almost everyone throughout the entire trip. Plus 15 random languages from tourists and immigrants from around the globe. I could have gone another 2000 km and I still would have had to dig to find a community that had a common language other than english.
I would have had to travel 2000 km the other way to reach an area where a single language other than English was spoken by more than 5% of the population.
Maybe 1000 km, I forget about Creole in Louisiana, though I’m not sure how common that language is in the State. I just remember running across the language frequently while driving trucks in that area for a living.
We are a truly massive nation that largely shares a single language. Most of us, rarely ever leave a 250 km radius from where we were born. Most of us don’t have passports and will never leave the US.
Hell, I’m well traveled. I’ve been to 45 on the 50 States, and in all my travels I’ve only needed another language once. In Larado, TX, which is right on the border with Mexico.
There are small enclaves that speak an alternative language, but they are few and far between.
Would it be to the students benefit to learn a second language, sure. But it’s unlikely that the student would ever use whatever random language they were required to learn. Spanish and perhaps Arabic might occasionally be helpful, but not necessarily, depending on what part of the country (or trade) you’re they are in.
Because school in the US isn’t about creating a well educated population.
