Language policy

[suyongli]

Over the last few weeks, it seems that there's been a minor skirmish going on in the Australian's Higher Education opinion section over language teaching programs in Australian schools. Everyone agrees that Australia should become more multilingual, the issue is which languages should be taught. (How they should be taught and even saving languages

Comments

[pappubahry]

Non-alphabet languages should be avoided unless you really need them. They take an enormous amount of effort to learn. The lack of an alphabet holds back Chinese literacy rates. A wide-scale teaching of thousands of Chinese characters to Australian students looks to me like a vast waste of educational resources.

I highly recommend Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, which I think I've recommended to you before.

More generally, I'm a bit meh with regards to language teaching.

[frazicus]

Speaking as someone who has learned Italian, French, Mandarin, Latin and Ancient Greek (in that order), and also as someone that despite all that learning, couldn't string one sentence together in ANY of those languages, I biggest hurdle was until university, no one had bothered to explain LANGUAGE to me. It was all very nonsensical, and I didn't see the point. My first semester of latin was spent trying to understand what they meant by conjugate, rather than on learning the words and rules

[frazicus]

"I biggest hurdle was until university" should probably read "My biggest hurdle, until university, was..." See, my learnin' did me no good.

[majoru]

Working in education, I'd have to say there are far worse problems with our educational system than a lack of emphasis on second language acquisition

Offering my opnion

[xenelle]

The the grammar I learnt in primary school was difference between your and you're, what nouns and verbs are, we did have spelling tests though. Most of the grammar I learnt was in French which I chose because I didn't want to learn another alphabet, and as Dad took French in high school I thought he'd be able to help me. The only choice of languages was French and Mandarin Chinese

[sugaryfun]

Hmm...
Personally I consider the four years I spent studying Japanese (both in school and in private tuition) a total waste of time, particularly the Japanese classes I did in high school, where for some reason they didn't start with teaching hirigana or katakana, and expected us to work out how to pronounce things written in romaji (it's way easier with the Japanese characters because it's broken down into sounds).

You're right about how it depends where you live which languages are most useful. oops gotta deal with baby...

[sugaryfun]

There, baby quietened