Quote Originally Posted by VHSLhelper View Post
Personally, I think HS is too late to "learn" a foreign language. I took French in 9th & 10th (being told 2 years of a FL was basically req'd to get into a good college), but had forgotten most of it by the time I walked. FL's should be taught (req'd) in elementary school... not as a HS elective.
Agreed on all of this. I took French for 4 years in HS and 2 in college, and I'm no more fluent in speaking it as I was before I started.

Also--I don't know if anyone has ever heard of the comedian Russell Peters--but he's a fellow of Indian descent that lives in Canada (he has dual citizenship in the US). He performs all over. I heard him interviewed on Sirius radio one day, talking about his travels and performances in the Middle East--and he said something that sent a chill up my spine...

"The crazy thing about folks in the West is that we're lazy and we don't truly want to learn anything about Middle Eastern culture. For the most part, we believe that they're all ragheads over there living in squalor, but just about anywhere you go in the Middle East, you will find a solid majority of folks who speak English very well. They see all the TV that we see. They get the same newscasts. And they know what we're saying because they see it as an advantage to know what we're about. They can understand us, but they know that if they speak Arabic that we won't understand them. They have the upper-hand in that way."
Sad but true. We should start teaching Foreign Language classes, at least 5-6 different ones, all the way through school starting in early Elementary school. I'm not saying teach them all the languages, but at least expose them to, say: Spanish, French, German, Arabic, and Chinese. Once they're exposed to all of them, they can choose a couple and keep up with learning them all the way through school.

The technicals of pulling off a plan like that I'd leave to the educators--but I believe it's starting to become necessary for us as a country to do something like this.