Mobile Technology and Business Morale

Agreed and bravo, Geoffrey.  I grew up in a multi-lingual community, and in a multi-lingual family.  I am a TEFL instructor, and I happen to know for a fact that students who have studied other languages (even in small doses) have a great advantage over those who have never studied foreign languages.

Unfortunately, those who are not exposed at a young age are at a disadvantage.  There are certain sounds the human ear cannot physically hear if it is not exposed to it during a crucial cognitive growth window.  If one can not hear a sound how, then, can one ever hope to speak it or to understand the nuances contained within the pitch?

So much of what is called language education in the USA is sorely lacking.  So-called “students” spend six years learning “so-called Spanish” and come out of the experience knowing nothing but their colors, their alphabet, and some nursery rhymes that are pronounced very poorly.

In contrast, I’m always humbled by how many people of different linguistic backgrounds take the trouble to come to English (English is my second language too) and how very hard many of them work at attaining proficiency!

I have always been skeptical of the magical notion that by learning a language you automatically become heir to an entire cultural tradition.  That’s an achievement that is out of reach for most learners.  Although I love his works, I still find it hard to see Shakespeare as “mine,” for example.

Great article, Geoffrey!  Though new to this site, I’ll be checking in often!

” I find it tragic that so many people report only starting to
understand English grammar when they took a course in Latin; it suggests
that linguistics departments are not offering good enough courses on
the grammatical structure of English.”

So you’re letting the K-12 English teachers off the hook, here, huh? Once upon a time, we expected students to learn grammatical structure by high school.  Today, you’ll be hard pressed to find many university English professors, much less high school teachers, who can correctly analyze the syntax of a three word sentence like “See John run”.

Even a lot of time with Warriner’s English Grammar and diagramming sentences (I’m that old) will not have the same effect as translating Latin or Greek into English and English into Latin or Greek.  Students are finally forced into a realization that not everyone thinks in English or structures thought in the same manner.  They actually have to analyze the structure and the underlying meaning.

Agree partially, but why restrict it to Latin or Greek?   Why not any foreign language?  

 I’d suggest that the foreign language should be outside the learner’s native language “family”:  if the native language and “foreign” language are too similar, some assumptions are never challenged. 

Latin is what was put forward and I only commented on languages of which I have some reasonable knowledge.  Include others by all means.  How about Finnish as well as Magyar?

Thanks for this insightful series of posts. I remember reading Laurence Summers’s piece in the Times when originally published and being slightly annoyed by his stance, but then couldn’t really come up with convincing counter-arguments. Thinking about it again now, I realize that the basis of my annoyance with Summers is a little self-centered: I grew up in Germany; like many of my compatriots, learned English in secondary school. I dare say that I now speak English just as well as most native speakers, but often find myself slightly frustrated when certain people here in the United States (hiring managers, for example) seem to belittle that mastering English as a second language is an accomplishment worthy of acknowledgment and indicative of someone’s “soft skills.” Of course, one shouldn’t really expect such appreciation from someone who has never immersed himself/herself in a foreign language — but that may in fact be one more reason why foreign language instruction ought to remain important and why the Laurence Summerses of this world ought to pause before they declare it irrelevant. Or, as a Chronicle article put it a few years ago: “Learning a language exercises the mind and enriches the spirit. It is a
fundamentally humbling process by which students learn that their
culture and way of expressing it are relative, not absolute. That
perspective makes them more open to other points of view, and more
likely to avoid one-size-fits-all solutions to the problems of the
world.” (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Real-Reasons-to-Support/47450)

whew!

the size of the catalog alone, all of the above (and below) reasons for studying languages, ought to be enough…and all the more caution against trying to settle on a power-point justifiication (which brings to mind the same futile try to find “uses” for the arts)…there are some helpful points about the wider cultural influence of grasp in friedrich schliermacher’s essay on methods of translation (“…methoden  des ubersetzens,” 1828, werke III),  in which he treats both the craft and the influence (on its ability to represent the literary, cultural and philosphical values in a work) of the qualification of the readership…and thence into the even wider issue, especially as its framed today, of cogent global citizenship…what we need to do, first, is work harder to get past the halting speech and writing that is, too often, the sad result of two-years of effort, to a kind of conversational and current events/history ease that brings a confident connection to the contemporary target culture…and from that confidence, further explorations formal or no…with all the emphasis on cultural studies these days we should be able to weave rigorous language study in there somewhere and get past the limits of subtitles and dubbing, not to mention larry summers.

I think lucky hits are a bit less improbable than Prof. Pullum makes them sound. The choice of a language and of a destination are often not completely independent rolls of the dice. And since languages come in families, the chances of learning a nearer neighbour of the one you want than French is to German are not too bad.

@ oriana_v — I doubt it is true that “There are certain sounds the human ear cannot physically hear if it is not exposed to it during a crucial cognitive growth window. ” In my first semester as a grad student in linguistics, I took a required course in phonetics for which a passing grade required that students achieve near-perfect scores on weekly dictation quizzes that covered the world-wide inventory of phonemes. Pretty nearly everybody did pass; first, those were powerful incentives, and second, the sounds were presented in contexts where the salient differences were distinguishable. We even had to learn to make these sounds; I can do Xhosa clicks, though not all the variants.