Bilingual in Europe versus USA

Hatunen wrote:



You seem to enjoy writing things that you can't support. As you claim
you want to educate people on usenet, how does not supporting
something help?

My first wife once confessed to me that she made up facts and
statistics to win, um, differences of opinion from me. Mixi seems
very much like my first wife in that regard.

It's too bad only one of those little bitches can be kill filed :-)

Sarah Banick writes:

Wow, what terrible school system did you go through?

An American one.

My public high school offered Spanish, French, German, and Latin.

Students don't make the connection between academic study of languages
and real cultures that give rise to them.

--
Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 10:06:18 -0700, Hatunen wrote:

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 10:12:19 +0200, Dave Frightens Me
wrote:

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 07:11:08 +0200, Mxsmanic
wrote:

Hatunen writes:

The procss is that someone making a claim should support it if
challenged, not that he should tell teh challenger to go and
"come across it eventually".

I'm not going to support it. If you're interested in knowing more,
you can look it all up. If you're not, don't.

You seem to enjoy writing things that you can't support. As you claim
you want to educate people on usenet, how does not supporting
something help?

My first wife once confessed to me that she made up facts and
statistics to win, um, differences of opinion from me. Mixi seems
very much like my first wife in that regard.

Did she fail to put out, like Mixi?

(oops, I shouldn't have said that!)
--
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DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com
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Sarah Banick wrote:

Wow, what terrible school system did you go through? My public high school
offered Spanish, French, German, and Latin.

Mine too, but they no longer offer that many.
It's a shame that they don't start teaching languages in elementary school.
Waiting until high school makes it too difficult to become fluent in a second
language.

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 20:01:30 +0200, Mxsmanic
wrote:

Sarah Banick writes:

Wow, what terrible school system did you go through?

An American one.

My public high school offered Spanish, French, German, and Latin.

Students don't make the connection between academic study of languages
and real cultures that give rise to them.

The real cultures that gave rise to them disappeared centuries
ago.

************* DAVE HATUNEN ) *************
* Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow *
* My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *

Iceman wrote:


Mine too, but they no longer offer that many.
It's a shame that they don't start teaching languages in elementary school.
Waiting until high school makes it too difficult to become fluent in a second
language.

And they don't teach practical languages other than Spanish.

Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and maybe Arabic or Russian
are more valuable than French or German. And even many universities
don't offer all of those languages.

French is useful in Canada, since it is officially a bilingual country, and being
able to speak both official languages opens more career opportunities.

B Vaughan wrote:


Wow, what terrible school system did you go through? My public high school
offered Spanish, French, German, and Latin.

Mine too, but they no longer offer that many.
It's a shame that they don't start teaching languages in elementary school.
Waiting until high school makes it too difficult to become fluent in a second
language.

Little children don't profit much from study of a second language,
unless it's immersion study. And then it has to be maintained
consistently or they forget it all again.

They pick up languages a lot faster than older children do. The idea is to teach
it and expand on the learning base, not to learn it and forget about it. Even
immersion is useless unless it is kept up. I have a good friend who was born to
French speaking parents in Quebec. When they moved to Ontario he and his brother
and sisters attended French schools for a while. Somewhere along the line they
switched to English schools and spoke English at home. I know that at least
three of them speak no French at all now.

"Dave Smith" wrote in message
...
B Vaughan wrote:


Wow, what terrible school system did you go through? My
public high school
offered Spanish, French, German, and Latin.

Mine too, but they no longer offer that many.
It's a shame that they don't start teaching languages in
elementary school.
Waiting until high school makes it too difficult to become
fluent in a second
language.

Little children don't profit much from study of a second
language,
unless it's immersion study. And then it has to be maintained
consistently or they forget it all again.

Even
immersion is useless unless it is kept up. I have a good
friend who was born to
French speaking parents in Quebec. When they moved to Ontario
he and his brother
and sisters attended French schools for a while. Somewhere
along the line they
switched to English schools and spoke English at home. I
know that at least
three of them speak no French at all now.

There are other factors involved; peer pressure among them. A
friend of mine from the Phillipines brought his kids up to speak
Tagalog as well as English and Spanish. They still understand
Tagalog but refuse to use it and will reply in English if he
asks them a question.



--
James Silverton
Potomac, Maryland

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 20:00:03 +0200, Mxsmanic
wrote:

Dave Frightens Me writes:

You seem to enjoy writing things that you can't support.

You're confusing ability with volition.

You're ignoring the word 'seem'.

As you claim you want to educate people on usenet, how does
not supporting something help?

People learn faster and better when they teach themselves.

So why do you mislead people by not backing stuff up?
--
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DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com
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On 24 Aug 2006 11:21:12 -0700, "Iceman" wrote:

Dave Smith wrote:
Sarah Banick wrote:

Wow, what terrible school system did you go through? My public high school
offered Spanish, French, German, and Latin.

Mine too, but they no longer offer that many.
It's a shame that they don't start teaching languages in elementary school.
Waiting until high school makes it too difficult to become fluent in a second
language.

And they don't teach practical languages other than Spanish.

Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and maybe Arabic or Russian
are more valuable than French or German. And even many universities
don't offer all of those languages.

Chinese is next to useless, coz it's extremely difficult to master,
and even by the Chinese is seen as an inferior language. Chances are
you will never need it in the business or social world. Japanese comes
in a number of flavours, but is only used in Japan. Even there, you
don't really need it to do business. And Portuguese is only of value
in Portugal and Brazil. Russian may be useful, but you would have to
be commited to wanted to deal with the Russians. I don't know anyone
who has learnt Arabic, but again, it's not a part of the world you are
likely to want to go to. In the UAE it's pretty much all English!

In summation, there really isn't an obvious second language to learn
in the world, unless you want to move to a specific place.
--
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DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com
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