Comment

Likely House Judiciary Chairman Is an Anti-Immigration Extremist and Birther

77
Obdicut (Now with 2% less brain)11/11/2012 1:50:57 pm PST

re: #72 Achilles Tang

Yes and no. First, I certainly never suggested that being multilingual was a bad thing, and by illustration I refer to national spelling bees, in English, that are almost always won by bilingual children.

I didn’t say that you said being multilingual was a bad thing. I didn’t figure you figured it was.

When we have essentially homogeneous communities speaking only another language under normal circumstances they, children mainly, will indeed absorb English eventually, but unless it is more than accidental their language level will be poor and limit their prospect both within and outside their communities. Part of the education process should be to make that point clear to parents as well.

We don’t really have those that much, though. Mostly only in illegal immigrant communities. Otherwise, kids pick it up at school, from TV, on the street, etc. If you go to the Mission in San Francisco, you can hear Spanish, and you can hear English. Most places are like that. And I’ve never met a single anything-speaking parent who didn’t feel their kid should learn English. I’m sure there’s a few whackjobs around, but it’s very uncommon.

What does happen is that kids often get an accent which marks them as having grown up in a Spanish&English-speaking area. That can actually be detrimental to them in getting a job, etc, too.

As to the difficulties of learning a language, they are vastly overblown by those who have not tried, at least for the young, and immersion is the best way to do so. Any child can learn a language in less than a year if they have to and are given some help.

Well, sure. But a year of being taught math in a language you don’t understand will put you behind the 8 ball in a totally unnecessary way. So if a kid really isn’t fluent in English, trying to teach them in English is silly.

But really, the language-learning-immersion thing really only applies to kids and some adults. Many adults literally do not have the capacity for language learning. They may have all the effort, will, and be of average or above intelligence, but not have a facility with languages.