Why do we think students should learn French and German, wonders linguist John McWhorter, rather than Arabic and Chinese?
Out of the 6000 languages in the world, why is it so vital for smart people to learn the one spoken in one small European country of ever-waning influence and its former colonies? Isn’t the sense of French as a keystone of an education a legacy of when few met foreigners who spoke non-European languages, French was educated Europe’s lingua franca, and the elite who went to college often had plans to do the Grand Tour?
That is, is knowing French really so obviously central to engaging what we know in 2010 as the world, or is it that French is a kind of class marker? You know: two cars, a subscription to the Times, and mais oui, Caitlin knows some French?
December 29th, 2010 | 11:08 am
Whatever may be the current status of France, the country stands close to the historic heart of Western civilization. Those of us who harbour an allegiance to that civilization are naturally inclined to take an interest in France, visit France, and learn some French.
In Canada, French is one of our two official languages.
December 29th, 2010 | 11:28 am
A foreign language is more than a tool acquired for use in the current job market. It helps own understand one’s own past. Not only are French and German language and literature essential parts of Western civilization, but English language and literature is indebted to them both.
The combined pragmatic/”post-colonial” approach to foreign languages and Western civilization is lamentable. The former dismisses French and German because they don’t help one get a job. The latter dismisses them because they are part of supposed “oppressive” system not worth saving. First Things should stand against both.
December 29th, 2010 | 11:40 am
This sentence from the article caught my eye: “For example, it would appear that many technologies we create, such as ones to combat climate change, will increasingly be actually tested in China, whose political system is better at making real plans than ours and apparently will be for a long time.”
Is McWhorter being ironic? It is hard to tell. McWhorter is quite correct when he says that a communist dictatorship is better at making plans that a messy demoacracy like ours. But the tone of his sentence is almost one of bemoaning. The very essence of our constitutional structure is that it makes it hard (or at least harder) for the governemnt to command its citizens. Does McWhorter not understand that or does he regret it? Again, it’s hard to tell.
December 29th, 2010 | 12:02 pm
French and German are much easier to learn coming from English than Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc. By far the majority of students forced to learn a foreign language as a hoop through which to jump in getting a bachelor’s degree will never use their language before forgetting it. Since this is the case, why not let them learn easier languages? Indeed, in my area German is gone and French is about to go, leaving Spanish as the only foreign language in high schools. This has the triple advantage of being a) one of the easy languages to learn, b) being useful, c) being a language a sizable chunk of the students already know from home. Anyone who wants to broaden their choices can opt to do it at college if it makes sense for their career.
December 29th, 2010 | 2:27 pm
Of course, German is not a Romance language …
December 29th, 2010 | 3:43 pm
What I don’t understand is why we only generally learn one foreign language.
An educated westerner 200 years ago was expected to know their own native language, latin, greek, and then probably a fourth (english/french/german most likely).
Today we’ve completely dropped the Latin and Greek and replaced it with nothing. The problem isn’t what languages we study, it’s that we barely study languages at all.
—-
Also, if I can add as a personal anecdote, even as a first year university student of Arabic, who also took six years of Spanish, I really wish I had also taken French…
December 29th, 2010 | 3:53 pm
And for the record, that was Carter’s gaffe, not McWhorter’s. The word “romance” doesn’t even appear in the original article.
I’m a huge fan of McWhorter but I have my reservations about this one. I suppose that if one had the ability and opportunity to learn only one language, ever, then it’s arguable that it would be one that would enable one to communicate with a significant number of people likely to be encountered. But rather than taking that reductionist approach, I’d expect a linguist to advocate wider language learning — no reason to confine ourselves to just two (or as is more realistically the case even with most educated Americans, one.) Since most of the people of the world are conversant in more than one language, there’s no reason the children of an affluent culture such as ours shouldn’t easily be able to acquire three.
December 29th, 2010 | 3:55 pm
I should clarify — if you only have the ability or opportunity to learn one language *besides your native tongue*, then it’s arguable that it should be one that enables you to communicate with a lot of people. It’s really tragic that we, as a bunch of literate, relatively affluent people, even have to have this conversation about “what’s the one and only non-native language we should learn”?
December 29th, 2010 | 4:05 pm
McWhorter is spot on in general (though I noticed that odd statement and cringed also, Barry). I would not use the term class marker so much as “culture” marker – a declaration of allegiance to European culture, especially as expressed by the upper classes. Conservatives are expressing their allegiance to historic European culture, liberals to current European culture. Pick other ways to express those allegiances, thanks. The added value in understanding Western Civ because one has a mild familiarity with an historically important European language is negligible, unless feelings are our sole aim.
Great fluency in such a language is of some value, but even that is a great deal of work for little return. If one wishes to understand medieval popular theology via Dante, I would recommend starting with Dante, not an Italian grammar.
Micah, McWhorter’s article was about more than getting a job, and your sniffing is a powerful argument to me that he is right and you aren’t listening.
December 29th, 2010 | 4:48 pm
It used to be that one had to demonstrate the ability to translate a foreign language before acquiring a PhD. That’s increasingly abandoned, but in my experience, one reason to learn German or French is that a significant amount of scholarly material is available only in those languages. In my limited academic career, I’ve translated research papers from Italian, French, and Russian, all written within the last fifteen years. One of my students is translating something written in Latin a few centuries ago. I haven’t had the need to translate Arabic or Chinese yet. Chinese is probably a matter of time, though.
December 29th, 2010 | 7:42 pm
The reason to learn French is that it is a beautiful language. It also enables one to visit France and absorb what one sees and experiences. Dr. McWhorter seems to have forgotten that there are the liberal arts and the mechanical arts. The former are far too prevalent in secondary and tertiary education in our time, but for the minority who ought to receive some training as intellectual hobbyists, to impart French is to give something precious.
December 29th, 2010 | 10:02 pm
McWhorter didn’t say (contra the local commenters on the article, and some apparently here) that French et al shouldn’t be offered, studied, or even majored in. I’m surprised that an article about communication isn’t read more closely. ;-)
He said in a small school with scarce resources, it’s hard to argue that all other languages must of necessity be rejected in favor of the “traditional” offerings. Certainly people interested in studying original French, German, Italian, etc. works, should study those languages. But I don’t see why it’s a loss to civilization if every strapped liberal arts college doesn’t offer those languages, instead of other languages (which also have their great literatures) and are more widely spoken, while others continue to do so. IOW, NOT offering French can be a legitimate choice for an institution that wishes to offer Chinese and does not have the resources to offer both.
In a way, any argument based on the idea that if every liberal arts college doesn’t offer French we’ve lost something because then we can’t read Proust in the original is rather hypocritical, since the people in the last few generations who have used their college modern language requirement to do anything remotely close to that are few, far between, and the vast majority are French majors who couldn’t care less if a college they didn’t choose to attend didn’t offer it.
December 29th, 2010 | 10:25 pm
Assistant Village Idiot–
**McWhorter’s article was about more than getting a job, and your sniffing is a powerful argument to me that he is right and you aren’t listening.**
Which is why I said more generally “pragmatic” as well. McWhorter does mention the common humanity that different languages express, but most of his piece deals with why Chinese or Arabic is just as important as French or German, practically speaking, in 2010. Organizations such as the MLA, which he mentions, have done a horrible job of defending European languages, using the same wrong-headed pragmatic arguments for keeping them. Western universities need to teach Western languages because they are part of our shared culture, which Western universities *should* help to preserve and nourish.
And, sorry, but you can’t compare a longish blog post and a comment. Comments are meant to be short, not fully fleshed out arguments.
December 30th, 2010 | 12:56 am
Micah Mattix writes: “And, sorry, but you can’t compare a longish blog post and a comment. Comments are meant to be short, not fully fleshed out arguments.”
And looking back in horror the many typos in my comment above, I might add “And not even proof read at that!” ;-)
December 30th, 2010 | 8:20 am
He said in a small school with scarce resources, it’s hard to argue that all other languages must of necessity be rejected in favor of the “traditional” offerings.
It is not hard to argue. Chinese is a multi-dialect polytonic language with an ideographic script. Arabic is diglossic; classical Arabic, modern literary Arabic, and the major vernacular dialects of Arabic are (as a rule) mutually unintelligible in spoken form. Even fairly talented secondary school students have trouble mastering more than the fundamental of a foreign language in the time currently alloted for this at this time. If you assign them to learn Mandarin Chinese or Levantine Arabic, they ain’t gonna learn jack.
China will likely be an economic behemoth in the coming decades. The Arab world has been notable in the post-war period for anemic economic performance. Thomas Sowell is fond of citing the statistic of the number of internationally-recognized patents issued in South Korea v. the number issued in the Arab states. If you are concerned about practical matters, intensive instruction courses in Chinese or Japanese or Korean, designed for business executives and paid for by commercial companies like AIG and HSBC, would be in order. Leave the academically-inclined secondary school students to study French along with the half-dozen other things they study.
December 30th, 2010 | 8:51 am
Students in other countries learn languages because they need them, not to round out their education. Most native English speakers have no real need to learn a foreign languages. For those who have the skill, it is certainly a good thing for us that we have adept translators – which in military and diplomatic circles are in short supply for such key languages as Arabic and Chinese. But as a rounding-out device for one’s education, I don’t see the value of a European language. I grant that MLA and other politically correct organisations try to strike down the preeminence of European languages for other reasons – to undermine historical European culture in general, for instance. But that in itself is not a reason for us to circle the wagons around French language lessons, the dry husks of Western Civ.
For the record, my Romanian children arrived also fluent in Hungarian, with some French and Latin on board as well. They took Spanish here, which they could fudge in from Romanian in many cases. I don’t see any value-added for any of it now that they are in their 20′s, nor do they. My American sons were not especially adept at languages, and I note no loss, nor do they. They are as firmly Western in culture and outlook as one might hope for. Foreign language learning is not the best road home.
December 30th, 2010 | 10:30 am
Art Deco, how does the difficulty other languages mean that everyone should be offered only the traditional ones, and denied the opportunity to attempt others unless they’ve learned the traditional ones?
Neither McWhorter nor I am saying that the more traditional languages are a waste of time; the point is that there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to limit people who may be interested in learning Chinese to French, German, and Italian when they are not interested in those languages, simply because there are good reason to learn those languages. Just because French for example is relatively easy to learn and useful for academic and cultural purposes does not mean everyone should learn that, including the people who would rather learn Chinese. Why would it mean that?
“But that in itself is not a reason for us to circle the wagons around French language lessons, the dry husks of Western Civ.”
Exactly, AVI. I would hope the learning of the traditional languages for good old fashioned traditional purposes never ceases. But I fail to see why we must stake our ground on languages that everyone does not necessarily want to learn, and that very, very few people have learned to a conversational or high degree of literacy in our lifetimes, simply because the wrong people want to kill them for the wrong reasons. There should be a *good* reason to preserve something besides “those bad people want to get rid of it.”
December 30th, 2010 | 1:15 pm
Pentamom, the following:
1. What is the available talent pool to teach Chinese or Arabic?
2. What is the demand in a given local area?
3. What do you hope to accomplish in the time allotted?
This country has a dreadful problem with subjecting secondary school students to years of haphazard liberal education with poor focus. In most circumstances, adding on another ‘option’ which can be brought to fruition in only a tiny minority of students exacerbates problem.
Keep in mind also that 30% of the population live in rural areas and small towns. The critical mass of people present to offer (with any degree of economy) niche options simply is not there. I know of country school districts that employ a grand total of two language teachers. You think they should employ more? Who are you willing to can to employ a Chinese teacher for the five students therein who might have the slightest interest in such things?
I was given last year for Christmas a set of audio CD’s recording Studs Terkel’s radio interviews. They are unintentionally instructive, in that you hear Terkel in one interview after another lamenting the neglect of one subject after another in the schooling of our youth. We do not teach enough history, art, music, literature, etc. etc. Memo to Terkel, McWhorter, and Pentamom: there are only 16 hours in the waking day. What priority do you want given to what?
Now, there is considerable slack in the day of youths under 18. In addressing that, you have to push the educational apparat, parents, and youngsters in directions most do not wish to go. That would be fine with me, but I do not call the shots and neither do John McWhorter or the ghost of Studs Terkel.
I think if we were to replace our extant network of public schools with philanthropic institutions financed by state-issued vouchers and private donations, there would be market space for secondary schools with specialized missions (if state regulation so permitted). There might be a critical mass of people in metropolitan Louisville to provide for a language and literature high school which offered an option for the study of Chinese in a manner sufficiently intensive that you could learn something during your time there.
Until then, you are left with teaching youngsters languages for which the supply and demand are more prevalent. If you are, as is AVI, concerned about ‘value added’, your children should be in strictly vocational classes. The deficit of disciplined instruction in the mechanical arts is, pace Studs Terkel, the severest failure of our system of secondary education.
December 30th, 2010 | 4:20 pm
Art Deco, you misunderstand somewhat – me, at least.
I read most of Old English literature in the original. Two college semesters. That’s all very romantic, and Beowulf or Maldon certainly qualify as being important parts of our heritage. But I could have accomplished the same understanding of culture and context (and more) by simply reading Tolkien’s 1936 essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” There is plenty of value-added in a great many people in a society knowing where they come from intellectually, and as the West additionally has important values to share with the rest of the world, knowing its development in context is likewise useful in an entirely nonvocational sense. It is part of being a citizen of the West. But learning Anglo-Saxon, in which I was fairly facile by the end, added nothing. It is decoration. Thus also with French, frankly. There is every reason to learn about western European cultural development. There is little reason to do so by learning one of the languages. Therefore, French, German, and Italian have no claim to pre-eminence. There are practical reasons one might learn a language, and in a publicly-funded system where measurables are required, those should be the determinants. Your questioning the availability of instructors is a case in point – a very real practical consideration. What are colleges requiring? Another practical. Might a few of these children need it for work? Do many people in the region speak it as a first language?
The world needs translators, and those who can at least converse reasonably in any of a hundred foreign tongures. We can’t teach them all, even at minimal level. Therefore, schools deciding to offer a taste, or even a jump on fluency, might well choose a nontraditional language, perhaps even entirely nonconversational versions for reading fluency, such as Chinese or Arabic. The argument that German should be on the short list because Goethe wrote in it barely registers on the importance scale.
December 30th, 2010 | 6:07 pm
You cannot have the full aesthetic experience of reading a piece of literature by reading a translation. Neither can you appreciate mundane life in a country when not understanding what people are saying to you.
December 31st, 2010 | 1:08 am
Learn “dead” languages — classical Hebrew and Greek, Latin — to better understand what those who have gone before us are saying to us across the distance of all those centuries. Translations of the Bible, for example, are good and necessary, but don’t you think we should aspire to read scripture in the original languages? New Testament Greek is easier than biblical Hebrew, so start with that if you like. Take some classes. Buy a grammar book and a dictionary, although most Greek New Testaments will include at the back a dictionary that does the job. I agree with Art Deco, but I think that it’s not just the full aesthetic experience that you miss out on if you read only the translation. You also miss out on the fullness of the meaning. This is not always the fault of the translators. They’re often good. It’s just the nature of translation.
Lots of talk here about Chinese and Arabic. What about modern Hebrew? To learn any language is to make a statement, whether you intend to make one or not.
For centuries, Hebrew had been a “dead” language like Latin, used almost exclusively in liturgy and scholarship. That it’s a living language again is as miraculous as the reconstitution of Israel as a nation-state. Dry bones live again. It’s a lesson I wish Catholics would take. No natural language is something anyone is born with. Languages are acquired, usually through the effort of learning, which gives joy. Latin is no different.
December 31st, 2010 | 1:24 pm
Nicholas “…but don’t you think we should aspire to read scripture in the original languages?” No. Someone should, and pass on information to us. Nothing wrong with doing it yourself, if you want to. But while the impression of increased knowledge is great, the actual is marginal.
Similarly, Art Deco “You cannot have the full aesthetic experience of reading a piece of literature by reading a translation.” So? You can’t get the full experience without having written some literature yourself, either. Or learning a great deal about the context. Or living a life similar to the author’s (which may involve having your wife die of a dread disease, or having war break out around you, or working as a stevedore, or moving to the French countryside – there’s simply no end). Not having a meaningful definition of “full aesthetic experience” that does not depend ultimately on feelings, I can’t agree.
I get what people are saying. It’s a common idea. It is among many people of liberal-arts background unquestioned wisdom. That there is some gain to reading in the original, I grant. But I don’t see any convincing evidence that it’s very much. The rest is overrated: it’s emotion, and I’m challenging it as an idea we should put much energy toward.
The fondness for learning other languages as necessary to one’s education comes from eras when it was believed that other cultures had a great deal of wisdom that was otherwise unavailable. I don’t see that as the case now. Jesus didn’t put much effort into recommending it for its own sake. Paul and Luke, who were fluent in Greek, likewise give no word of praise for believers learning it. Nor, significantly, did the early church set up Hebrew schools for gentile converts so that they could grasp the nuances of Genesis.
I consider it important not simply because I like saying “who sez?” whenever something is lying around that “everybody knows,” but no one can locate the proof for (though I admit I do like that). I find that believing Christians who have some classical or traditional education come to conflate the faith with the vessel by which they received it, much as others intertwine faith with patriotism and small-town virtues, or faith with ethnic/family traditions, and have trouble separating them. It leads to wasted energy, defending pawns because we have renamed them queens.
January 1st, 2011 | 2:01 am
Chinese might be useful for adventurous young scholars. Sometimes, though, I wonder about the need for Arabic—I am reminded of all those Vietnamese language teachers and students in the US government in the 1960s. There was a glut in the 1970s, once the war ended. Although learning Arabic is difficult, learning the alphabet and writing is not—it should not have taken McWhorter’s fictional sophomore an entire semester to do it. I imagine most schools teach Modern Standard Arabic, then the graduates go abroad and can’t communicate with the locals because they are speaking in dialect. It would be difficult and expensive to provide language immersion for Arabic students.
When I lived in the Middle East and had not yet learned enough Arabic to get by, I used French. Before I learned enough Czech when I lived in Prague, I used German. I have found that many Arabs, Africans and Europeans know French. Many Europeans know German.
I’ve never regretted learning French, Latin and German. They have brought a lot of joy to my life, primarily because there is great literature in these languages. Arabic? Not so much.
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