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Comment by hamstercat | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, because the reverse issue exists within Quebec. I can't say how much better (or worse) it got recently recently, but I know that 15 years ago English classes in primary and high school were very, very underwhelming. I'm lucky enough that my school had an advanced curriculum available, but I have friends that didn't have this chance and even today they wouldn't be able to have a basic conversion in English. I think learning another language is great, especially when you're young since you have plenty of time to do it at that age.

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I graduated high school in Montréal in 2013. I never had an actually challenging English class, I learnt more watching south park, going to america and reading than I did in school. My friends that only relied on school didn't have the best English either, they perfected it by travelling.

A lot of people go to Cégep in English for this reason too, and it works out pretty well. English is a language you can just catch and learn through immersion, even more in North America where you're surrounded by it. I honestly don't think school is a good place to learn a language. You need to be fully immersed and for it to be a necessity. I learned more spending a weekend in an american household at 8 years old than in a year of English classes in elementary school.

Youth is the best time to learn new languages too, they're harder to acquire later in life for some reason.

I've learned 4 languages now. English - only language my parents spoke. French - did French Immersion Finnish - spent time in Finland in my teens and learned the language German - just started picking it up 3 years ago

The main difference I see is 2 things, time & immersion. I know less German after 3 years than I did through French Immersion, but I've spent way less time doing it, never had any formal instruction, and haven't spent 7 hours every week day having to talk and listen to German. I know more German than Finnish though, simply because I didn't spend as much effort actually learning Finnish, it all came from immersion.

Billinguism is a lie we've been fed for so long. So much money wasted, so many missed opportunities, no way to unite as a whole to change anything since the vast majority of canadians on either side of the fence just listens to his own language's media. The only issue is, you might not like my solution out of it.

I think you're confusing with having a united Canadian identity/culture/nation (à-la-PE Trudeau).

Also, nowadays, you probably want to speak more than two languages, or at least have some understanding of more than two languages. I'm always amazed by how many people in the US speak either French or Spanish or both (although, sure I have a very biased experience, being in tech circles). Tear down walls, speak multiple languages, it's 2017 and we have a global economy, adapt.

Why exactly would you want to speak several languages, if your interlocutor speaks English?

I'm French and I'm not religious about the French language itself. Everything would be so much simpler, including sharing cultural differences if all of humanity just spoke the same language.

English is the interop layer of human communication. It has imperfections but one imperfect standard is better than hundred or thousand of them.

Our common global culture is mostly shared in English. I wish the next generation, or the one after that, all speak English, maybe dialects incorporating local cultural differences. Then we could move forward as a species.

I don't think the friction brought by having so many different languages is worth it.

One language. One money. One metric system. That would be great.

People are afraid that local identities would be lost. Be the reason people stopped speaking their local language is because most of them don't see a benefit in it. We need to stop the romantic tale and get real.

Global unit system prospect is looking good for the long term I think, we only have a handful of them, if only the US could get its game together on this one it'd be a done deal…

We still have way too many electrical plugs plus combos for voltage/frequency, also a pain. Just had to buy a new hair clipper this morning because my European one didn't like the US mains.

It seems the stuff that involves direct human interactions is the worst, like having around two hundred different currencies. This one is fairly stupid in hindsight, since there is very little cultural value there. But language, the one thing that we use the most to interact with one another, tops everything with thousands of non-compatible variations… sigh.

Heh, I agree in theory. In practice, people speak very broken English, and it helps to understand where they come from. Of course, that goes both ways. As someone from Montreal/Quebec, I rarely meet someone from France who spoke good English, just saying. (and I'm sure they think the same of my French, even if it's my first language ;-)

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