Over time, it's increasingly struck me as negligent (in most US localities) to teach anything besides Spanish. We've got a huge sub-population that faces all kinds of obstacles because the English-speakers can't communicate with them and we're fucking around with Latin?
My extended family on my dad's side speak Spanish and I took Latin in high school? I can't talk with 3 out of 4 of the guys working on my house!
Besides, that we have a sizable population that either has not yet learned English or has chosen not to does not create an obligation in others to learn their language. Are you certain it's more important to enable a sub-community that has not embraced the dominant language of the country, rather than be able to experience the thoughts of the ancients in their own Latin? To extend your argument, I live in an area with a large Hmong population that has not fully embraced English; should the schools here abandon education in all languages but English and Hmong?
It'd have been better for me to spend all the time in French class in France instead (eg instead of an hour a day for 3 years, 11 weeks, hell even a month). I've picked up more on Spanish and French in 2 weeks in other countries than I did in 3 years in a classroom.
There's a full immersion school around me for spanish, that seems to work a lot better.
I'm not against more languages as an elective, I just didn't manage to say so
Or for speaking with sub-populations, Arabic would probably be the most useful here. US =/= California and the South
Teaching Latin makes many languages after Latin trivial: the case system and inflections on the verbs, adjectives, nouns reveal a common theme across many IndoEuropean languages. Russian would too, I believe, having had Russian after 4 years of hardcore Latin. Polish would do better than Russian in this regard, since Russian has simplifications of grammatical distinctions still present elsewhere.
Not faulting any language, as English and Swedish, for examples, simplify things more complex still in German.
I just think if only one language were to be taught, it would be strategic for it to represent more than one present-day set of simplifications of a richer grammatical past, one to which people might be exposed in other modern day languages.
(Spanish and Italian, for examples, collapse/simplify some of the structure present in their main common predecessor. )
There are many free ESOL resources; regardless, English is hard.
Spoken English, with it's reliance on word order, lack of genders, relative lack of verb conjugations and noun declensions make it ridiculously easy to be understood in comparison to other languages. You won't be Shakespeare, but you will be able to communicate.
Written English, admittedly, is much harder (mostly because of the early standardization), but enough natives also have trouble spelling enough words that you can still be understood.
English is one of the easiest languages to speak badly, but one of the most difficult to speak well.
Also it has far more vowels than the average romance.
I agree, there are some, but is this in most of the US? That is what was claimed, without any backup. I do not think that English is harder than any other language, but it is always difficult to learn a new language. We agree there too.
It seems to me the argument is a bit backwards. If the poster cares about promotimg language skills for integration, why not address that instead of moralizing on people for not learning the right language?
I can workaround the bathroom issue; I can't workaround the other.
Maybe the solution is to teach said sub-population English?
That said, most schools have dropped Latin in favor of Spanish, French, or Italian for precisely the reason you state, especially in high school.