Would you recommend to a high school student these days? Spanish would seem to be the go-to in the US, but my girls both took French and the way things are looking, that might work out, too.
Any clever insight amongst The Hive?
Would you recommend to a high school student these days? Spanish would seem to be the go-to in the US, but my girls both took French and the way things are looking, that might work out, too.
Any clever insight amongst The Hive?
Spanish, Mandarin, or Hindi.
Since typically only the first is available at the high school level, I'd start there.
Spanish and German are both pretty easy. French pronunciation is kinda hard and the spelling is rather un-phonetic (worse than English), but it's not really harder than Spanish otherwise.
I wish I learned more Spanish in the one year I took it in High school , that was a long time ago and who would have known how important it is now ,
Mandarin or Japanese , your kids are probably going to meet more Chinese people in the future , but Japan is still one of the top countries. and maybe J-pop can help with that :)
From a practical standpoint in the US, Spanish makes the most sense. From a business standpoint, Mandarin or Hindi.
I think I would have done better in French, because of the teachers in my middle school, but have admittedly used the little Spanish that I have quite a bit - and I don't think I've ever had a time that I really wished for French.
It depends on the teacher. My two boys took French because the teacher was a cute little hottie, and the Spanish teacher was a grumpy old bat.
1988RedT2 said:It depends on the teacher. My two boys took French because the teacher was a cute little hottie, and the Spanish teacher was a grumpy old bat.
Whereas I took French because... I don't know why actually, because the Spanish teacher was a cute little hottie, and the French teacher was a grumpy old bat.
And Spanish would have been literally 100x more useful over the years. Even in the late '70s Spanish was already the better choice.
I took French and have used it very little. Maybe 20% of my current community speaks spanish; if i knew any I'd be using it all the time.
LOL. Yeah, personally I took Spanish. I had a variety of teachers in the four years I was a student. None was a cute little hottie, and I don't recall what the French teacher looked like.
I took French immersion in school so I ended up bilingual. Outside of certain areas of Canada and France, it hasn't been useful - but it's very helpful there even if my accent is so bad the French thought I was Swiss. In the US, Spanish would be a better choice. In Australia, you'd want Japanese. So I guess the moral is that you want the second language that suits where you're going to use it. :) I haven't spoken French in years, although being able to read it still comes in handy occasionally.
I was traveling with a group of polyglot friends from German and Holland. We hit Belgium and stopped at a restaurant. With all of our languages, the only one we had in common was English. And the only person who spoke French was myself. So I had to order for everyone and translate the menu. And "menu French" has nothing to do with the actual language!
Listening to my wife trying to pronounce French words using Spanish rules is hilarious.
Have them read a lot and get very, very good at English. Easily the most useful language to master.
Other than, I'd recommend Brazilian Portuguese. It's fun, sounds cool, and I like most of the Brazilian people I've met because of it.
I work at a major DoE R&D facility and we've had the same surge of Indian and Chinese immigrants that every other engineering profession has. None of them expect me to speak Chinese or Hindi. I suspect they'd prefer that I didn't. They're all trying to learn English.
I have both Spanish and French in the repertoire and Spanish has been used 100 times more than French.
With Mexico set to replace China as the US's manufacturing plant of choice and also taking over as largest trading partner, being able to do business in Spanish could be a big advantage to any career path you follow.
Spanish and turn them on to DuoLingo.
Turbo_Rev said:I'd recommend Brazilian Portuguese. It's fun, sounds cool, and I like most of the Brazilian people I've met because of it.
Find something they'll have plenty of opportunities to use right now. If they're anime otaku, Japanese would make sense. If they have friends who have a different first language, try whatever that is. If your town has an immigrant community large enough that there are a lot of signs out in their language, that one might be handy.
Overall, Romance languages (Spanish, Portugeuse, French, Italian, and other Latin-based languages), German, or Dutch are pretty easy for English speakers to pick up compared to more distant languages. But I'd go with useful over easy.
I did French immersion and it's been useful at times, but that's in Canada. Where it really came in handy was when I spent 2 months in Chile for work, as it made learning and understanding Spanish much easier, due to the common Latin roots, as mentioned above.
+1 for learning a language that one has an opportunity to use. It's surprising how quickly one gets rusty if you don't have a chance to regularly use a language. For example, French is my first foreign language (we had to take two in school), but I haven't used it properly for at least a decade and at this point I'd had to do a full immersion to even get some of that back. Even though English is actually my third language I sometimes have the impression that I'm most fluent in it because I use it every day.
As a native speaker I'm slightly bemused about the ease of learning German, but that might just be me. Admittedly it's not as complicated as French can get, and it does very much depend on what level of fluency one tries to attain, but it can also get quite complicated. Not complicated in the sense of learning some of the languages in SE Asia as at least German and English have common roots.
Took French in HS and college and enjoyed it enough.
But I would say Spanish, no contest.
(Plus the French won't hear me butcher their language, and go straight into English in my limited experience there).
Spanish will let you fake Portuguese to an extent. You can at least communicate between the two if you use context and similarly-rooted words.
Mandarin would be a great one to learn. Hindi is highly represented, but Hindi-speaking areas typically have excellent English training.
I took French because I live in Canada in the summers. Dumb idea. Learning French and then going somewhere they speak Quebecois is like learning British English and then going to Oklahoma. Remarkably different languages. Only thing it did for me was help me read road signs in Quebec.
GameboyRMH said:Spanish and German are both pretty easy. French pronunciation is kinda hard and the spelling is rather un-phonetic (worse than English), but it's not really harder than Spanish otherwise.
French spelling made a lot more sense to me once it was explained that all the unpronounced cruft at the end was the indicator of how to conjugate or whatever.
This was about six months ago...
RX8driver said:I did French immersion and it's been useful at times, but that's in Canada. Where it really came in handy was when I spent 2 months in Chile for work, as it made learning and understanding Spanish much easier, due to the common Latin roots, as mentioned above.
My Mom took multiple years of Spanish and French in high school. She accidentally did her French homework in Spanish once. It was the same teacher so she got partial credit 
It's hard to explain what Québécois sounds like to someone who speaks English. It's 18th century Norman that was left to evolve in an isolated colony. It's a thick accent with a lot of slang. Kinda like Newfoundland English :)
People from Quebec can understand Parisian French, but not necessarily vice versa. Like when my grandmother visited me in Australia and could not make heads or tails of how my friends spoke.
I can work through some Italian reading due to the connection to French. Hasn't been terribly useful in life overall :)
In reply to Keith Tanner :
As a non speaker, Quebecois sounds to me like someone who speaks English but not French trying to speak French. The term "Quebecker" suddenly made sense.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
It sounds like gargling with air.
Whatever interests them most.
Are they interested in taking vacation or studying abroad in a foreign country? Then learn that language.
If not... then it really doesn't matter.
Caveat: American Sign Language (ASL). Even though I forgot almost all of it, I actually found learning ASL to be valuable. Helped me understand and appreciate a surprisingly large portion of the community. Also just generally fascinating as a language. Seeing how the human language-making ability takes what would normally be done with sound, but makes it spacial. Deaf poetry is amazing and hypnotic.
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