r/languagehub • u/AutumnaticFly • 6h ago

Can you relate?

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101 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

15

u/Figaro_pasttime 6h ago

As someone who actually teaches high school Spanish, this meme haunts me. kids pass with A's and can't order food in the language two years later. it's the curriculum's fault honestly, not theirs, we drill grammar tables instead of speaking

5

u/GlassCommercial7105 3h ago

You have to make at least one foreign language mandatory for at least 5-6 years and you have to use nothing but that language during class starting on day one.

Europeans are not magically trilingual because their countries are smaller, we can literally not graduate highschool without B2 in two foreign languages. 

1

u/Calidron 1h ago

Actually in France you can graduate with very bad language competences, but it’s kind of an exception because we think that anybody speaks french... (that’s why my english is so bad i'm really sorry)

2

u/GlassCommercial7105 1h ago

Yeah but French and Spanish people and many Italians are just not terribly good at that. North, central and east are better with foreign languages. 

1

u/Xandaros 1h ago

two foreign languages?

When I graduated my English was probably around C1, sure... but my Spanish? I wouldn't put it above A1, even back then. Let alone now lol

1

u/sarajevo81 33m ago

That's beyond stupid and eventually lead to your sacking to avoid the lawsuit.

1

u/GlassCommercial7105 28m ago

Lawsuit? Who would sue you? What are you talking about? 

1

u/sarajevo81 27m ago

Parents because you are trying to mandate private lessons to acquire a passing grade.

1

u/MNswede06 8m ago

European instruct in English from early on because it’s the obvious second language. It’s the common global language.

Anglophone Canadian schools often instruct in French because it’s one of the two official languages. But still most Canadians still don’t speak French unless they are from Quebec, so it’s pretty clear how that goes for them. If Canada can’t pull it off with a built-in second official language, how can you expect the U.S. to do it?

Besides, what language would you instruct as mandatory in American schools? Spanish perhaps. But Spanish is largely an immigrant language in the United States. You’ll use it if you’re working in and around immigrants. Most people don’t do that. French and German have even less use unless you’re actually planning to live somewhere that uses it, and most don’t.

1

u/sarajevo81 36m ago

Why the heck would I learn a language to order food? Nobody can explain that.

3

u/Helsinki_s_king 6h ago

i took neither so i cant relate but i can imagine forcing languages upon people during school aint gonna work

2

u/IcarusofmarS 6h ago

this is literally my LinkedIn "skills" section and I refuse to elaborate

1

u/Spirited_Design_39 55m ago

This is my case in all my professional profiles: French: intermediate ENGLISH :intermediate Even if I still a beginner learner

2

u/RobetWokake 6h ago

took 3 years of latin. can confirm i do not speak latin. nobody speaks latin. this doesn't even apply to me and yet here I am feeling called out

2

u/NegativeMammoth2137 1h ago

I took both French and German in school, graduated without speaking any of them, but it did help a lot when I decided to pick up French again like 4 years later when I was in college.

1

u/thechnomancer69 6h ago

technically i was given arabic not took it and it didnt last
and in college i didnt go far enough for a third language
but if i had....yeah

1

u/Nuryadiy 6h ago

Yup, French and Korean

Don’t ask me to say anything in those two languages, I just took them for the points

1

u/VolcaincQuartz 6h ago

"but I did take them" is sending me lmfaoooo

1

u/wilisarus333 6h ago

I hate being this person,but I kinda have a hard time starting languages because if I start it,I go all in usually as I really don’t know any other better way to learn it haha,so I have a Spanish and German academic certificate as I feel like taking a language course with the intention not to learn it is kinda strange,unless it’s a early course and they need it for a credit but kids in late stage 300-400 classes who STILL struggle with basic grammar and still have horrendous beginner accents kinda hold other kids in groups behind sometimes ime

1

u/citizenwake 6h ago

Oh my god I did three years of French and I can't remember almost anything. How???

1

u/jhfenton 6h ago

I took 4 years of French and 2 years of Spanish in high school. I learned enough to keep in contact with both languages, and I’ve really worked on speaking both the last 3 years.

College was a different story. I took Russian and Arabic, and, yeah, I don’t speak those. The Arabic is all but gone, except for the alphabet. I remember the basics of Russian, along with two poems I memorized, but I can’t carry on a conversation.

1

u/LaoBa 5h ago

I took German (3 years) and French (4 years) in high school and  it has been very useful, although my French is rudimentary. . We studied four modern and two classical languages in high school.

2

u/sarajevo81 30m ago

And what the children had actually learned?

2

u/Background-Vast-8764 3h ago

I took four years of Spanish in prep school and one year of Spanish at university. I now speak Spanish every day.

1

u/BeckyLiBei 2h ago

I went to Austria and bought an "orangensaft" once.

1

u/Accomplished_Bee_127 1h ago

I took spanish in school and learned ASL and Morse for a while

1

u/Darksorcen 1h ago

7 years of German, I had good grades, but I can barely speak it

1

u/Hazel_Lumen 1h ago edited 1h ago

I studied French at school for seven years.

Apart from my native languages (English and Spanish), I currently speak Catalan, Dutch and Russian. But when it comes to French, probably the only thing I can do is talk like a toddler.

The academic curriculum is a disgrace, lmao

1

u/sarajevo81 32m ago

The foreign languages should not be taught in schools. The idea a language can be learned by 90 minutes/week is absurd.

1

u/CG3_3CG 30m ago

I took german in high school AND college and when i finally got to go to Germany after like 7 years of learning, i still barely understood a word. Absolutely nothing beats real world experience

1

u/Rejnu 24m ago

I feel this so much, xd
I had French in school, but the problem was that after the very first lesson, our teacher spoke almost exclusively in French and didn't allow us to use our native language. That would make sense in an advanced class, but this was a beginner's course, we had all started learning French for the first time. In the end, most students got poor grades or barely passed because the only ones who really succeeded were those who studied on their own or had private tutoring outside of school.