= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
army1987 comments on The Future of Education - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (41)
That old status shibboleth. 4 natural languages! No, a rationalized system would be more like 'you learn English if it isn't your native language', and the extra time is used for other things (say, programming languages).
That would be unfair for non-native English speakers, who'll have to learn one more language than native English speakers. And as for the advantages of bilingualism (in addition to what FAWS says), see http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3175 -- though IIRC those effects require that you actually speak both languages on a daily base for years. But I agree that four languages is usually overkill. (On the other hand, the efforts needed to learn an n-th language when you are already fluent in (n - 1) languages decreases with increasing n, so if for some reason you'll have to learn Finnish at some later point in life, e.g. because you want to move to Finland, having learnt lots of languages before will definitely help.)
Anyway, using living languages among the most influential ones is a vast improvement over the Latin and Ancient Greek that some Italian high schools teach. (And the idea of teaching a sign language in schools is one that had never occurred to me, but which is not obviously wrong.)
Multiple languages has always meant someone is going to be screwed over in some sense. (Pity the Papua New Guinean whose language is not spoken even the next valley over, much less worldwide...) The main thing is to minimize the damage done.
That's interesting, but your caveat aside it's not all that great: one has a less than 50% chance of Alzheimer's so the expected time-value of 5 years of protection is 2.5 years, at the least valuable time of your life, in exchange for let's say a year of your youth? Not a slamdunk case for bilingualism (much less tri or quadlingualism, which is just plain signaling).