Interesting. Yes, here in the US we don’t learn other languages much. I took one qt (or maybe more, long time ago) of German in College, didn’t do well. Prof passed me with a C, but I had to promise not to take any more German.
When my Wife and I traveled, we were often mistaken for Canadian. Flat MidWestern accent.
I find this fascinating. We lived in the UK for five years where my brother and I picked up a British accent. Which we gradually lost after switching to an American school. My background is in languages. Mostly ancient but a few modern. For eighteen years my ministry was with people from other countries most of whom their first language is not English. I often try to guess where people are from based on their speech pattern. Sometimes I’m right. And sometimes I miss.
Could someone guess where we are from based on how we speak?
Rick67, definitely non-Americans identify us pretty quickly by our speech.
I also enjoy guessing about where people are from based on their accents. I was talking one day to a nice very dark-skinned clerk at a gas station, whose accent sounded French-based to me. I asked politely where he was from. My guess would have been Haiti. Wrong; Benin, but at least I got the Francophone base right.
SHIREHOME — I took a single German class in college as well. After the first test my professor handed me a drop slip and said, “Herr Ambi, if I were you, I would sign this and hand it in.”
It’s an enormous disservice to our youth that U.S. elementary schools don’t include foreign language immersion as a standard part of the curriculum. Being bi-lingual and learning to play musical instruments definitely opened or reinforced neural pathways in my brain that I find useful in many different areas. There is no question young brains are very receptive to this.
There is a big, plastic section of the mammalian brain (I forgot which lobe it’s located in) that all mammals use to augment something important to their species; echolocation for cetaceans and bats, enhanced vision for eagles and other predators, enhanced olfactory ability for canines, ursines… Language is one of homo sapiens’ super powers and we have a big chunk of our brains ready to focus on it, if we give it a chance.
I speak Jive.
E.g.: “Hey, knock yo’self a pro, Slick. That gray matter backlot perform us down; I take TCBin’, man!”
Translation: “Don’t be so naive, Arthur. Each of us faces a clear moral choice.”
*Seriously. I attended a mixed-race high school; plus I played football. Lotta jive-talkin’ with the bruthus, I got down with it pretty damn good, uh huh.
“Took a course…”
No human ever learned his or her first language by taking a course and almost no human prior to 1800 (or so) learned multiple languages by taking a course. We all have the capability to learn to communicate with others in our environment.
Just because you didn’t succeed in a school setting doesn’t mean you can’t do it. You can! As exhibited by the great polymath and auto-didact neophile, huxley!
Another, bugaboo of mine, vis a vis language instruction in U.S. schools; the USA is the only country that pushes its citizens to learn the language of its predominant, immigrant underclass. This is dumb.
Middle and upper class Chinese are not encouraging their kids to learn Tagalog and certainly not the Turkic that Uyghurs speak. An educated Chinese student will study English and French. Maybe Russian.
Middle and upper class Europeans are not encouraging their kids to learn Turkish, Arabic, Polish or Romani.
Not only would American kids typically get more use (and, potential economic benefit) out of learning Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, French or Russian… Learning Spanish is a virtue signaling sop to U.S. immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Those immigrants are learning English, just as the Poles working in Germany learn German and the Roma living in France learn French. Just as our ancestors who came to America. In 1920 middle and upper class Americans weren’t paying for Italian or Gaelic lessons for their children.
Comey and James, protected again. These Fed Judges are out of control. No wonder the average Rep thinks there are two justice systems.
Rufus wrote: “Not only would American kids typically get more use (and, potential economic benefit) out of learning Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, French or Russian… Learning Spanish is a virtue signaling sop to U.S. immigrants from Mexico and Central America.”
Hmm. There’s no question American education falls woefully short when it comes to teaching foreign languages. British state schools gave me a great start with French and Latin.
I understand your concern about pushing students the language of our “predominant, immigrant underclass”. However when it comes to “which language besides English is useful” Spanish is a strong candidate. Not all Spanish speaking immigrants are comfortable with English. My wife teaches elementary and she has a ton of Spanish-speaking students. Are they supposed to be learning English? Sure. And they do. Some pretend they don’t understand English to avoid doing their work.
Which other language is most “useful” on an everyday basis will depend on where in the United States one lives.
Several years ago I read a remarkable book Babel: Around the World in Twenty Langauges by the Dutch linguist Gaston Dorren. It’s about the twenty most widely spoken languages. Some on the list would surprise no one. Some would. Such as Portugese and Vietnamese. And Javan (!?!).
I’m torn on promoting Mandarin. Right now the West needs to isolate and contain the People’s Republic of China. Learning and using Mandarin gives the Middle Kingdom a measure of soft power. We need to strengthen ties with other Asian nations.
Rufus has raised an excellent question. Which languages should American students be learning? And why?
In 1920, few people in Ireland spoke Gaelic at home, though a residue did so in the western part of the island. It’s taught in schools so people have some facility in it they wouldn’t have had a century ago.
==
Instruction in Spanish in this country did not appear ex nihilo in 1965.
==
Classical languages were once commonly taught in American schools, but they’ve been in decline for four generations. Indo-European tongues with large numbers of native speakers have been preferred for some time and that would include Spanish, French, German, Italian and Russian. As we speak, it is unusual for youths to obtain baccalaureate degrees in foreign languages. The Digest of Education Statistics hasn’t been updating their granular data post COVID. As of 2017-18, baccalaureate degrees awarded in foreign languages were as follows:
==
Spanish: 6,011
French: 1,436
German: 697
Japanese: 560
Chinese: 466
Russian: 296
==
An additional 818 degrees were awarded in Classics, which includes some language instruction.
==
One other thing. The employment-to-population ratio among whites, ‘Asians’, and ‘hispanics’ is almost precisely the same. That among blacks is about 10% lower. The homicide rate among hispanics is currently around 6.2 per 100,000, higher than it is for whites but not off the charts (and near the national mean). The lumpenproletariat among the hispanic population is not proportionately bloated.
Spent a couple of months in a German language school one summer in Luneburg, Germany in the late 1970s.
(not to far from the Elbe River , which back then in that region, was the boundary of E and W Germany. Even got to see W German Leopard tanks on maneuvers).
Several of the students that I got to know were from S. America (Argentina, Chile ) and one from Mexico. These native Spanish speakers found German very difficult.
The students from Finland and Iceland I met there found German to be a breeze and they were also fluent in English. Ditto for the student I knew from Switzerland, but he was not from the Swiss German part of Switzerland, though Swiss German is quite a bit different than “hoch Deutsch” (High German).
One of the students was from Japan; he too could speak decent English and we hung out together.
One day he and I decided to go into town to watch a movie.
Wouldn’t you believe it – the movie was (The Battle of) Midway ( !!!! ) , which made me feel very uncomfortable . ( I am not making this up).
Anyway, we did see the movie – all dubbed in German (very weird ) .
Also weird to be sitting next to my Japanese pal while on the screen yanks and japanese were in the process of bombing the crap out of each other.
Another time I was in France and I was speaking – in English – to a French tourist gal. She spoke perfect english, having gone to college in the UK.
I asked her why very few french people can speak English , given that they begin learning English in grade school.
She just shrugged her shoulders and said to me, “that’s a very good question.”
It would be – I think – a good idea for grade school students here in the USA to begin learning a foreign language, but given that they are not even learning how to read or write – forget about math !!! – they have enough on their plate.
Comey and James, protected again. These Fed Judges are out of control. — SHIREHOME
When I was following the political news a little, but not terribly closely, I thought I heard, “Oh, the Senate invoked the nuclear option.” So I paid closer attention only to discover that the truth was much more limited than that. As I recollect, Harry Reid and the Dems suspended the filibuster only for the purpose of moving on to the confirmation of Obama’s picks for the Federal Judiciary.
Ever the cynic these last couple decades, I immediately assumed that this was an important element in Dem machine politics to install a bunch of truly terrible judges in the Fed. branch.
JohnTyler,
The lack of ability of far too many American school children is not from a lack of available hours in the school day for instruction. It is how those hours are allotted and the methods of instruction.
My mother’s immigrant parents were bi-lingual and could probably ace current, High School, senior level instruction in math, science, grammar and literature; although I don’t think either attended school beyond the age of 13, and their total, in school hours would probably average out to about 5 years of elementary school, by modern requirements.
I have a friend who just retired from her job teaching nursing. Getting her students to take a pulse for ten seconds and multiply that number by 6 yielded very unpredictable results. Getting them to understand the chronological and numerical concept behind the practice was beyond pointless.
Growing up in Colorado I look back now and am amazed at the philosophy in my school district back then. Starting in first grade for me, 1958, and continuing through 6th grade we all had lessons in basic Spanish. Once we hit Jr High, we could take other languages. I stuck with the Spanish through high school in order to test out of college language requirements. It worked. Haven’t really used it much since.
I tried Japanese in grad school on a whim and found it, surprisingly, very easy to learn. Due to my current interest in K comedy and drama, I’ve tried some online Korean….boy is that a tough language!
I get confused for a Canadian with a confounding regularity. No way this Texas-born-n-bred speaker sounds like that… But our Australian cousins can be forgiven.
What’s tough some times is distinguishing the subtleties between how white South Africans speak and New Zealanders. It takes a few sentences…
From the “Holy Moly” file:
Everything you didn’t want to know about Bob Menendez but were afraid to ask…
And yes, it turns out that Menendez, working with al-Sisi, framed MBS.
Absolutely incredible story…
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. I used to think that I had a pretty neutral accent. But, over the years, I have come to realize that Pittsburghers apparently have a distinctive accent, that is easy to recognize, if you know it. I have had more than one stranger figure out where I was from, just from my accent. But I can’t hear it – a “Does a fish know he is in water?” kinda thing.
Pentagon threatens to court-martial Sen. Mark Kelly over ‘refuse illegal orders’ video
The statement also underscored that military retirees remain subject to the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] and reminded servicemembers that “orders are presumed to be lawful” and must be obeyed. The department cited federal statutes, including 18 U.S.C. § 2387, which prohibits attempts to undermine the loyalty, morale, or discipline of U.S. forces.
[…]
“The Department is reviewing his statements and actions, which were addressed directly to all troops while explicitly using his rank and service affiliation—lending the appearance of authority to his words,” Sec. Pete Hegseth said
To take the contrary position I had such a completely negative experience taking French in college that I promised myself when I was done I would never study another foreign language under any circumstance nor would I ever go to any French speaking locality. I was not interested in languages (I was a math/science guy) so 4 semesters seemed to me to be a big ask. (Especially after finding out that if I took what they said at face value, fluency, that meant 1000-1500 hours of study which would make it a borderline a major.) It didn’t help that by their own standards they weren’t keeping up their end of the bargain. (Which leads me to the conclusion in higher ed foreign languages requirements end up being little more than a form of hazing that the university inflicts on their students.) Suffice it to say the supposed return on investment that they claimed foreign language study would have never came to pass while simultaneously ruining any future enjoyment of said culture.
Life ain’t fair, General White Rage got away with his treasons but Mark Kelley (he’s an astronaut not just a rocket scientist(?)) may face Courts Martial. So sad, that Miley skated.
I’m about 30 months down the rabbit hole of teaching myself French using the, Comprehensible Input approach, i.e. learning a language is primarily about comprehending messages in the target language.
Output is output, a somewhat separate matter. Rufus and I have debated the point.
I have taken high school courses in Latin and Spanish, which help, but French was a blank slate for me.
I am a literary person so I chose novels for my input. Novels are actually the most challenging material in a target language. But it’s what I wanted to read, though it is the longer way around.
I now read about 30 words per minute with dictionary lookups and AI consultations. I can read a French novel in 2-3 weeks. I find that exciting. FWIW I am 73.
There are more efficient ways to learn French sufficient for basic conversation and functioning. but I don’t worry about it. I have come to see language learning as a journey, not a destination.
IMO the most important factor in language learning is motivation. One can’t self-learn a language with methods one dislikes.
So by all means, if you’re so inclined, take on a foreign language. It’s worth it. But give up on expectations of fluency in x months or even y years.
In terms of tools we live in a golden age of language learning.
Physicsguy, I took one yr of Latin in JrH (North Junior High, Aurora). I never even thought about taking a language in JrH or HS.
I watch a lot of foreign language TV on Amazon/Britbox, Acorn, MHZ. They have subtilties, but I find that I can sometimes understand some of the words, those closest to English.
When my great-grandfather came here from Ireland he still spoke Gaelic as a first language with a thin overlay of English. He went into battle (against the Confederates) speaking a sort of Gaelic-English creole. During the course of the war, before he was wounded and invalided out of service, his English improved substantially, a necessity for survival when his officers barked orders at him.
But a vestigial/ancestral Gaelic/Creole element remains even to this day, even in my own speech patterns. E.g., I still have a tendency of slipping and using Olde Sodde vocalizations — “idjit” (idiot), “Turs-day”, “Sar-ur-day”, youse (you [plural]), “dere, dis, dat, and da,” (there, this, that, and the). This also reflects the influence of growing up in greater Chicagoland — the classic Chicago accent, so brilliantly and accurately (not to mention hilariously) imitated by the “Super Fans” of SNL fame and the Blues Brothers, is a direct and near-descendant of the accent spoken in the West of Ireland, particularly County Mayo, where the vast majority in the first waves of Irish immigration to Chicago hailed from.
I’ll never forget, and always treasure, how on my first trip to Ireland I entered a gift shop in Westport (Co. Mayo) and the pretty young lass behind the counter beamed at me and said, “Hey, how youse doin’?!” I nearly ordered a “Polish, Chicago Style” (NO ketchup!), purely as a reflex.
Incidentally, there was a huge portrait- photograph of the Old Man (Hizzoner Richard J. Daley) prominently displayed on the wall behind her. When I expressed my astonishment, she explain that “My older brother is a Chicago policeman.”
Of course. I should have known…
My German great-grandfather on my father’s side came to American unable to speak any English at all. He continued to speak mostly in German until his dying day. My dad, his grandson, attended a German-speaking Lutheran school from Kindergarten all the way through eighth grade. In other words, he spoke German in the house and at school until he went off to high school.
When I was little he used to bounce me on his knee and sing German nursery rhymes to me, in what I eventually came to learn was a working-class Northern German dialect.
It’s custom made for bouncing Kindern auf den Knien.
… I had no idea “you’se” came from the Irish. After about a year living in Texas and being mocked for using it I transitioned to “y’all.” But I never adopted its plural, “all y’all.”
huxley:
The only language I can speak other than English is Spanish, which I took in high school. But “speak” is the wrong way to put it, because my knowledge of Spanish is extremely limited. However, I find that, although I probably speak it at the level of a 2-year-old, and understand very little spoken Spanish, I can read it a lot better than that, although certainly not well. And this after 4 years of it in high school! It was my weakest academic area.
Re: Youse
My understanding is that it comes from Irish English and Northern English but not Gaelic, using the add -s rule for plurals. You -> Yous -> Youse.
Gaelic second person plural: sibh.
@neo: And this after 4 years of [Spanish] in high school!
I get that and it’s a damn shame.
High school language courses are about checking boxes The best one can say is that they give students a leg up when they get serious about learning a language.
From my experience, what I have seen of others, and from what I read, is that learning a language takes thousands of hours of input. Thus the students who succeed:
* Start from elementary school and/or
* Study in immersion programs and/or
* Become motivated self-learners
High school language courses require a thorough rethinking to be at all effective. Which I don’t expect to happen.
On the Tucker Carlson kerfuffle with Heritage, after Heritage head Roberts damaged his own career and his foundation defending Carlson: Carlson has now thrown Roberts under the bus.
Yes, I don’t think most of my fellow classmates became proficient in Spanish, either. I also ended up hating studying Spanish and would dread trying to memorize that long list of vocabulary words and verb conjugations.
A plumber at my place in TX had what I thought was a Louisiana Cajun accent. (NOT a Nawlins [New Orleans] accent—more rural….) Turned out that he was from Montreal. With family that had made the Quebec-New England migration, and then his father moved to Montreal.
I have been exposed to MANY adult native Spanish speakers speaking English as a second language. Most of them could not pass for being native English speakers. Two exceptions were Venezuelans–one in Venezuela and one here in TX. Guess that they grew up with English. Another was a German national, son of an expat mining engineer, who grew up in Peru and only time in Germany was to get his university degree. He learned English as an adult while working in the oil field in South America. He was exposed to Texan accents, and like most adult learners of a second language, did not speak with the English accent he learned. But his modified Texas accent–softer than a TX accent–sounded as if he were a native of, say, Alabama.
(The author/academic Carlos Eire, one of the Peter Pan children who left Cuba, wrote that he learned a native English accent from watching Andy Griffith. Thus my recommendation that native Spanish speakers learn Southern/Tx US English.)
My late brother-in-law came to the US from Germany at age 12. He spent the summer being exposed to English—TV helped— and started school with English in September. Courtesy of spending 50 years in Mass, he had a slight Eastern Mass acccent.
Once I sat in a hotel dining room in a smaller city in India, next to a table of other Americans. They were there on business. One of them, a lovely dark-eyed and dark-haired Mexican-American lady, told me that Indians assumed she was Indian because of her Mexican Spanish way of speaking English. Spanish has crisp consonants and rapid speech pattern in common with Hindi-related languages.
Spent two weeks in France this past summer and ALL the young people spoke terrific English. Some British accented but so many had American accents I started asking if they had spent time in the US. Quite a few told me they honed their American English by watching ‘Friends’!
Never watched it but didn’t that show end before most twenty somethings were born?
Medal of Honor Recipient Dakota Meyer Roasts Dems Who Told Service Members to Disobey “Illegal Orders”
On X, Meyer called out Kelly again.
“Thank God @SenMarkKelly isn’t in uniform anymore and thank God he wasn’t the aircraft commander of the Enola Gay in 1945,” he wrote:
A man this confused about duty and responsibility would’ve never had the conviction to make the decisions that ended a world war and saved American lives.
If you’re telling U.S. troops to defy orders… you’re not a leader.
You’re a political arsonist lighting matches in a dry forest.
The impact of the Internet and streaming audio and video content on the percent of foreigners learning English is incredible! Especially, as you wrote, colloquial, American English. I have been astounded at the nature and speed of the change over the past 15 – 20 years.
I asked Grok AI about it, and here’s what it replied:
Key Insights on Changes
Early 20th Century (1925): English was largely confined to the British Empire (e.g., UK, India, Australia). Native speakers dominated (~80% of total), with minimal second-language use outside elites. The low percentage among non-natives (~1.6%) reflects limited global education and no mass media.
Mid-Century Shift (1950-1975): Post-WWII decolonization spread English as an official language in new nations (e.g., Nigeria, Philippines). Native numbers grew slightly, but second-language speakers surged from ~30M to ~300M due to schools mandating English. By 1975, the percentage among non-natives jumped to ~8%, as global population doubled but English education expanded faster.
Late 20th Century Boom (2000): Globalization, internet rise, and U.S. dominance in film/tech propelled second-language growth. India alone added ~100M speakers. Non-native outnumbered natives 2:1, pushing the share to ~14.6% of non-natives—nearly 10x the 1925 figure.
Recent Trends (2025): Total speakers stabilized at ~18% of world population due to faster growth in non-English regions (e.g., sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia). However, second-language percentage held steady at ~14%, with hotspots like Europe (38% of non-natives speak it conversationally) and Asia (e.g., 10-15% in China). Projections suggest it could reach 20% by 2050 if education/digital access continues.
Rick67:
“However when it comes to “which language besides English is useful” Spanish is a strong candidate.”
Useful for whom?
Yes, it’s useful to have at least a few Spanish speakers. But that group is easily filled by America’s millions of Latin American immigrants.
Promoting Spanish discourages assimilation. That, in turn, promotes division—which is exactly what America’s enemies want.
And there’s a huge opportunity cost to teaching most of our children Spanish: We will be safer if many of our people speak the languages of hostile powers and we will be wealthier if many of our people speak the languages of growing markets or wealthy trading partners.
Spanish-speaking countries are generally not dangerous, not wealthy, and not rapidly expanding.
Stinky Pete:
You’ve got a point there. I think it’s great that Americans learn foreign languages, but I really don’t like printing ballots in multiple languages or allowing enclaves of monolingual foreigners.
English is not even our lawful official language.
Surprisingly, Europe is much firmer on these issues. Immigrants are expected to learn the official language. Citizenship may depend on some degree of fluency. Most European countries provide courses, some free, in their languages to immigrants.
Europeans take their languages much more seriously than we do.
Huxley said: “My understanding is that it [youse] comes from Irish English and Northern English but not Gaelic, using the add -s rule for plurals. You -> Yous -> Youse.”
Yes. Irish English is the “creole” language or dialect I mentioned when I said that my great-grandfather spoke in a mixed “Gaelic/Creole” dialect. One could argue, with merit, that the present Irish-English is a creole-type dialect that has outgrown or grown beyond the status of a creole dialect into a proper dialect of its own. In the event my great-grandfather, as a child, spoke a dialect that was transitioning from pure Gaelic to Irish-English.
It would be fun to see a video of all the different American accents. I grew up in Michigan and didn’t think there was a “Michigan accent” until I lived elsewhere. It seems to be shared by most of the area around the Great Lakes–Chicago, Detroit, Northern Ohio, Western New York. Minnesota seems a bit more influenced by Canada for some reason.
I remember reading a book by some language expert, maybe John Ciardi, who said he could tell where in America someone was from with great precision from hearing them speak a few sentences.
I’ve also noticed that for immigrants, age 11 is around the cutoff for whether you keep the accent of the old country. My father had a cousin who was born in New York but moved back to Russia when he was around 6. When I met him he could still speak English, but with a Russian accent.
Rufus T. Firefly: Thanks for the link to that song. My father sang a variant of it. It went like this:
“Hopp, hopp, hopp,
Pferdchen auf gallop!
Ü ber Bach und über Stein
Aber brechtie Ich die Bein,
Hopp, hopp, hopp
Pferdchen auf gallipity-lopp!
Poor, little horse!
Do Germans ever instill rhymes or tales with happy outcomes to their children?
Rufus 8:38am – that “AI” you quoted on the spread of English is exactly why I think AI is nothing but a gigantic crock. Eg “Early 20th Century (1925): English was largely confined to the British Empire”. What were we speaking in the US, native American languages?
The US is not mentioned as an influence on the spread of English until the 1990s, “US dominance in film/tech”. Never mind the fact that half a century earlier at the end of WWII the US had half the global GDP and military outposts all over the world. Wake me up when AI gets anything even half right.
The one grain of truth is that because of its large population India probably has the largest share of English speakers – “post-colonial”. However the ubiquity of English as a lingua franca in commerce around the world is due to mid-20th century American dominance.
@ Gringo > “A plumber at my place in TX had what I thought was a Louisiana Cajun accent. (NOT a Nawlins [New Orleans] accent—more rural….) Turned out that he was from Montreal. With family that had made the Quebec-New England migration, and then his father moved to Montreal.”
The “Cajun” accent is short for “Acadian” (you can probably “hear” how the words changed over the years).
Follow the Wikipedia trail for the details (Acadia to Cajun to Longfellow to Evangine), but basically a portion of Louisiana was settled by refugees from French-speaking areas of what is now Canada.
I know this because in High School we studied Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline” : “The poem follows an Acadian girl named Evangeline and her search for her lost love Gabriel during the expulsion of the Acadians (1755–1764).
The idea for the poem came from Longfellow’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Longfellow used dactylic hexameter, imitating Greek and Latin classics. Though the choice was criticized, it became Longfellow’s most famous work in his lifetime and remains one of his most popular and enduring works.”
Still popular in the 1960s, at least with English teachers; probably no longer found in any of our benighted educational establishments, including colleges.
I don’t remember a thing other than the historical tidbit.
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Interesting. Yes, here in the US we don’t learn other languages much. I took one qt (or maybe more, long time ago) of German in College, didn’t do well. Prof passed me with a C, but I had to promise not to take any more German.
When my Wife and I traveled, we were often mistaken for Canadian. Flat MidWestern accent.
I find this fascinating. We lived in the UK for five years where my brother and I picked up a British accent. Which we gradually lost after switching to an American school. My background is in languages. Mostly ancient but a few modern. For eighteen years my ministry was with people from other countries most of whom their first language is not English. I often try to guess where people are from based on their speech pattern. Sometimes I’m right. And sometimes I miss.
Could someone guess where we are from based on how we speak?
Rick67, definitely non-Americans identify us pretty quickly by our speech.
I also enjoy guessing about where people are from based on their accents. I was talking one day to a nice very dark-skinned clerk at a gas station, whose accent sounded French-based to me. I asked politely where he was from. My guess would have been Haiti. Wrong; Benin, but at least I got the Francophone base right.
SHIREHOME — I took a single German class in college as well. After the first test my professor handed me a drop slip and said, “Herr Ambi, if I were you, I would sign this and hand it in.”
It’s an enormous disservice to our youth that U.S. elementary schools don’t include foreign language immersion as a standard part of the curriculum. Being bi-lingual and learning to play musical instruments definitely opened or reinforced neural pathways in my brain that I find useful in many different areas. There is no question young brains are very receptive to this.
There is a big, plastic section of the mammalian brain (I forgot which lobe it’s located in) that all mammals use to augment something important to their species; echolocation for cetaceans and bats, enhanced vision for eagles and other predators, enhanced olfactory ability for canines, ursines… Language is one of homo sapiens’ super powers and we have a big chunk of our brains ready to focus on it, if we give it a chance.
I speak Jive.
E.g.: “Hey, knock yo’self a pro, Slick. That gray matter backlot perform us down; I take TCBin’, man!”
Translation: “Don’t be so naive, Arthur. Each of us faces a clear moral choice.”
*Seriously. I attended a mixed-race high school; plus I played football. Lotta jive-talkin’ with the bruthus, I got down with it pretty damn good, uh huh.
“Took a course…”
No human ever learned his or her first language by taking a course and almost no human prior to 1800 (or so) learned multiple languages by taking a course. We all have the capability to learn to communicate with others in our environment.
Just because you didn’t succeed in a school setting doesn’t mean you can’t do it. You can! As exhibited by the great polymath and auto-didact neophile, huxley!
20 second Trollfarm vid.
Another, bugaboo of mine, vis a vis language instruction in U.S. schools; the USA is the only country that pushes its citizens to learn the language of its predominant, immigrant underclass. This is dumb.
Middle and upper class Chinese are not encouraging their kids to learn Tagalog and certainly not the Turkic that Uyghurs speak. An educated Chinese student will study English and French. Maybe Russian.
Middle and upper class Europeans are not encouraging their kids to learn Turkish, Arabic, Polish or Romani.
Not only would American kids typically get more use (and, potential economic benefit) out of learning Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, French or Russian… Learning Spanish is a virtue signaling sop to U.S. immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Those immigrants are learning English, just as the Poles working in Germany learn German and the Roma living in France learn French. Just as our ancestors who came to America. In 1920 middle and upper class Americans weren’t paying for Italian or Gaelic lessons for their children.
Comey and James, protected again. These Fed Judges are out of control. No wonder the average Rep thinks there are two justice systems.
Rufus wrote: “Not only would American kids typically get more use (and, potential economic benefit) out of learning Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, French or Russian… Learning Spanish is a virtue signaling sop to U.S. immigrants from Mexico and Central America.”
Hmm. There’s no question American education falls woefully short when it comes to teaching foreign languages. British state schools gave me a great start with French and Latin.
I understand your concern about pushing students the language of our “predominant, immigrant underclass”. However when it comes to “which language besides English is useful” Spanish is a strong candidate. Not all Spanish speaking immigrants are comfortable with English. My wife teaches elementary and she has a ton of Spanish-speaking students. Are they supposed to be learning English? Sure. And they do. Some pretend they don’t understand English to avoid doing their work.
Which other language is most “useful” on an everyday basis will depend on where in the United States one lives.
Several years ago I read a remarkable book Babel: Around the World in Twenty Langauges by the Dutch linguist Gaston Dorren. It’s about the twenty most widely spoken languages. Some on the list would surprise no one. Some would. Such as Portugese and Vietnamese. And Javan (!?!).
I’m torn on promoting Mandarin. Right now the West needs to isolate and contain the People’s Republic of China. Learning and using Mandarin gives the Middle Kingdom a measure of soft power. We need to strengthen ties with other Asian nations.
Rufus has raised an excellent question. Which languages should American students be learning? And why?
In 1920, few people in Ireland spoke Gaelic at home, though a residue did so in the western part of the island. It’s taught in schools so people have some facility in it they wouldn’t have had a century ago.
==
Instruction in Spanish in this country did not appear ex nihilo in 1965.
==
Classical languages were once commonly taught in American schools, but they’ve been in decline for four generations. Indo-European tongues with large numbers of native speakers have been preferred for some time and that would include Spanish, French, German, Italian and Russian. As we speak, it is unusual for youths to obtain baccalaureate degrees in foreign languages. The Digest of Education Statistics hasn’t been updating their granular data post COVID. As of 2017-18, baccalaureate degrees awarded in foreign languages were as follows:
==
Spanish: 6,011
French: 1,436
German: 697
Japanese: 560
Chinese: 466
Russian: 296
==
An additional 818 degrees were awarded in Classics, which includes some language instruction.
==
One other thing. The employment-to-population ratio among whites, ‘Asians’, and ‘hispanics’ is almost precisely the same. That among blacks is about 10% lower. The homicide rate among hispanics is currently around 6.2 per 100,000, higher than it is for whites but not off the charts (and near the national mean). The lumpenproletariat among the hispanic population is not proportionately bloated.
Spent a couple of months in a German language school one summer in Luneburg, Germany in the late 1970s.
(not to far from the Elbe River , which back then in that region, was the boundary of E and W Germany. Even got to see W German Leopard tanks on maneuvers).
Several of the students that I got to know were from S. America (Argentina, Chile ) and one from Mexico. These native Spanish speakers found German very difficult.
The students from Finland and Iceland I met there found German to be a breeze and they were also fluent in English. Ditto for the student I knew from Switzerland, but he was not from the Swiss German part of Switzerland, though Swiss German is quite a bit different than “hoch Deutsch” (High German).
One of the students was from Japan; he too could speak decent English and we hung out together.
One day he and I decided to go into town to watch a movie.
Wouldn’t you believe it – the movie was (The Battle of) Midway ( !!!! ) , which made me feel very uncomfortable . ( I am not making this up).
Anyway, we did see the movie – all dubbed in German (very weird ) .
Also weird to be sitting next to my Japanese pal while on the screen yanks and japanese were in the process of bombing the crap out of each other.
Another time I was in France and I was speaking – in English – to a French tourist gal. She spoke perfect english, having gone to college in the UK.
I asked her why very few french people can speak English , given that they begin learning English in grade school.
She just shrugged her shoulders and said to me, “that’s a very good question.”
It would be – I think – a good idea for grade school students here in the USA to begin learning a foreign language, but given that they are not even learning how to read or write – forget about math !!! – they have enough on their plate.
Comey and James, protected again. These Fed Judges are out of control. — SHIREHOME
When I was following the political news a little, but not terribly closely, I thought I heard, “Oh, the Senate invoked the nuclear option.” So I paid closer attention only to discover that the truth was much more limited than that. As I recollect, Harry Reid and the Dems suspended the filibuster only for the purpose of moving on to the confirmation of Obama’s picks for the Federal Judiciary.
Ever the cynic these last couple decades, I immediately assumed that this was an important element in Dem machine politics to install a bunch of truly terrible judges in the Fed. branch.
JohnTyler,
The lack of ability of far too many American school children is not from a lack of available hours in the school day for instruction. It is how those hours are allotted and the methods of instruction.
My mother’s immigrant parents were bi-lingual and could probably ace current, High School, senior level instruction in math, science, grammar and literature; although I don’t think either attended school beyond the age of 13, and their total, in school hours would probably average out to about 5 years of elementary school, by modern requirements.
I have a friend who just retired from her job teaching nursing. Getting her students to take a pulse for ten seconds and multiply that number by 6 yielded very unpredictable results. Getting them to understand the chronological and numerical concept behind the practice was beyond pointless.
Growing up in Colorado I look back now and am amazed at the philosophy in my school district back then. Starting in first grade for me, 1958, and continuing through 6th grade we all had lessons in basic Spanish. Once we hit Jr High, we could take other languages. I stuck with the Spanish through high school in order to test out of college language requirements. It worked. Haven’t really used it much since.
I tried Japanese in grad school on a whim and found it, surprisingly, very easy to learn. Due to my current interest in K comedy and drama, I’ve tried some online Korean….boy is that a tough language!
I get confused for a Canadian with a confounding regularity. No way this Texas-born-n-bred speaker sounds like that… But our Australian cousins can be forgiven.
What’s tough some times is distinguishing the subtleties between how white South Africans speak and New Zealanders. It takes a few sentences…
From the “Holy Moly” file:
Everything you didn’t want to know about Bob Menendez but were afraid to ask…
“Gold Bar Bob Menendez acted against Americans to help cover up Khashoggi’s murder”—
https://nypost.com/2025/11/24/opinion/corrupt-sen-bob-menendez-acted-against-americans-to-help-cover-up-khashoggis-murder/
Talk about seriously uber-corrupt…
And yes, it turns out that Menendez, working with al-Sisi, framed MBS.
Absolutely incredible story…
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. I used to think that I had a pretty neutral accent. But, over the years, I have come to realize that Pittsburghers apparently have a distinctive accent, that is easy to recognize, if you know it. I have had more than one stranger figure out where I was from, just from my accent. But I can’t hear it – a “Does a fish know he is in water?” kinda thing.
Pentagon threatens to court-martial Sen. Mark Kelly over ‘refuse illegal orders’ video
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pentagon-threatens-court-martial-democratic-senator-over-refuse-illegal-orders-video
To take the contrary position I had such a completely negative experience taking French in college that I promised myself when I was done I would never study another foreign language under any circumstance nor would I ever go to any French speaking locality. I was not interested in languages (I was a math/science guy) so 4 semesters seemed to me to be a big ask. (Especially after finding out that if I took what they said at face value, fluency, that meant 1000-1500 hours of study which would make it a borderline a major.) It didn’t help that by their own standards they weren’t keeping up their end of the bargain. (Which leads me to the conclusion in higher ed foreign languages requirements end up being little more than a form of hazing that the university inflicts on their students.) Suffice it to say the supposed return on investment that they claimed foreign language study would have never came to pass while simultaneously ruining any future enjoyment of said culture.
Life ain’t fair, General White Rage got away with his treasons but Mark Kelley (he’s an astronaut not just a rocket scientist(?)) may face Courts Martial. So sad, that Miley skated.
I’m about 30 months down the rabbit hole of teaching myself French using the, Comprehensible Input approach, i.e. learning a language is primarily about comprehending messages in the target language.
Output is output, a somewhat separate matter. Rufus and I have debated the point.
I have taken high school courses in Latin and Spanish, which help, but French was a blank slate for me.
I am a literary person so I chose novels for my input. Novels are actually the most challenging material in a target language. But it’s what I wanted to read, though it is the longer way around.
I now read about 30 words per minute with dictionary lookups and AI consultations. I can read a French novel in 2-3 weeks. I find that exciting. FWIW I am 73.
There are more efficient ways to learn French sufficient for basic conversation and functioning. but I don’t worry about it. I have come to see language learning as a journey, not a destination.
IMO the most important factor in language learning is motivation. One can’t self-learn a language with methods one dislikes.
So by all means, if you’re so inclined, take on a foreign language. It’s worth it. But give up on expectations of fluency in x months or even y years.
In terms of tools we live in a golden age of language learning.
Physicsguy, I took one yr of Latin in JrH (North Junior High, Aurora). I never even thought about taking a language in JrH or HS.
I watch a lot of foreign language TV on Amazon/Britbox, Acorn, MHZ. They have subtilties, but I find that I can sometimes understand some of the words, those closest to English.
When my great-grandfather came here from Ireland he still spoke Gaelic as a first language with a thin overlay of English. He went into battle (against the Confederates) speaking a sort of Gaelic-English creole. During the course of the war, before he was wounded and invalided out of service, his English improved substantially, a necessity for survival when his officers barked orders at him.
But a vestigial/ancestral Gaelic/Creole element remains even to this day, even in my own speech patterns. E.g., I still have a tendency of slipping and using Olde Sodde vocalizations — “idjit” (idiot), “Turs-day”, “Sar-ur-day”, youse (you [plural]), “dere, dis, dat, and da,” (there, this, that, and the). This also reflects the influence of growing up in greater Chicagoland — the classic Chicago accent, so brilliantly and accurately (not to mention hilariously) imitated by the “Super Fans” of SNL fame and the Blues Brothers, is a direct and near-descendant of the accent spoken in the West of Ireland, particularly County Mayo, where the vast majority in the first waves of Irish immigration to Chicago hailed from.
I’ll never forget, and always treasure, how on my first trip to Ireland I entered a gift shop in Westport (Co. Mayo) and the pretty young lass behind the counter beamed at me and said, “Hey, how youse doin’?!” I nearly ordered a “Polish, Chicago Style” (NO ketchup!), purely as a reflex.
Incidentally, there was a huge portrait- photograph of the Old Man (Hizzoner Richard J. Daley) prominently displayed on the wall behind her. When I expressed my astonishment, she explain that “My older brother is a Chicago policeman.”
Of course. I should have known…
My German great-grandfather on my father’s side came to American unable to speak any English at all. He continued to speak mostly in German until his dying day. My dad, his grandson, attended a German-speaking Lutheran school from Kindergarten all the way through eighth grade. In other words, he spoke German in the house and at school until he went off to high school.
When I was little he used to bounce me on his knee and sing German nursery rhymes to me, in what I eventually came to learn was a working-class Northern German dialect.
Fond memories.
IrishOtter49,
Pretty good odds this was the nursery rhyme: https://youtu.be/dkOaz-4HRk0
It’s custom made for bouncing Kindern auf den Knien.
… I had no idea “you’se” came from the Irish. After about a year living in Texas and being mocked for using it I transitioned to “y’all.” But I never adopted its plural, “all y’all.”
huxley:
The only language I can speak other than English is Spanish, which I took in high school. But “speak” is the wrong way to put it, because my knowledge of Spanish is extremely limited. However, I find that, although I probably speak it at the level of a 2-year-old, and understand very little spoken Spanish, I can read it a lot better than that, although certainly not well. And this after 4 years of it in high school! It was my weakest academic area.
Re: Youse
My understanding is that it comes from Irish English and Northern English but not Gaelic, using the add -s rule for plurals. You -> Yous -> Youse.
Gaelic second person plural: sibh.
@neo: And this after 4 years of [Spanish] in high school!
I get that and it’s a damn shame.
High school language courses are about checking boxes The best one can say is that they give students a leg up when they get serious about learning a language.
From my experience, what I have seen of others, and from what I read, is that learning a language takes thousands of hours of input. Thus the students who succeed:
* Start from elementary school and/or
* Study in immersion programs and/or
* Become motivated self-learners
High school language courses require a thorough rethinking to be at all effective. Which I don’t expect to happen.
On the Tucker Carlson kerfuffle with Heritage, after Heritage head Roberts damaged his own career and his foundation defending Carlson: Carlson has now thrown Roberts under the bus.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/11/tucker-throws-heritage-and-kevin-roberts-under-the-bus-after-they-defended-him/
huxley:
Yes, I don’t think most of my fellow classmates became proficient in Spanish, either. I also ended up hating studying Spanish and would dread trying to memorize that long list of vocabulary words and verb conjugations.
A plumber at my place in TX had what I thought was a Louisiana Cajun accent. (NOT a Nawlins [New Orleans] accent—more rural….) Turned out that he was from Montreal. With family that had made the Quebec-New England migration, and then his father moved to Montreal.
I have been exposed to MANY adult native Spanish speakers speaking English as a second language. Most of them could not pass for being native English speakers. Two exceptions were Venezuelans–one in Venezuela and one here in TX. Guess that they grew up with English. Another was a German national, son of an expat mining engineer, who grew up in Peru and only time in Germany was to get his university degree. He learned English as an adult while working in the oil field in South America. He was exposed to Texan accents, and like most adult learners of a second language, did not speak with the English accent he learned. But his modified Texas accent–softer than a TX accent–sounded as if he were a native of, say, Alabama.
(The author/academic Carlos Eire, one of the Peter Pan children who left Cuba, wrote that he learned a native English accent from watching Andy Griffith. Thus my recommendation that native Spanish speakers learn Southern/Tx US English.)
My late brother-in-law came to the US from Germany at age 12. He spent the summer being exposed to English—TV helped— and started school with English in September. Courtesy of spending 50 years in Mass, he had a slight Eastern Mass acccent.
Once I sat in a hotel dining room in a smaller city in India, next to a table of other Americans. They were there on business. One of them, a lovely dark-eyed and dark-haired Mexican-American lady, told me that Indians assumed she was Indian because of her Mexican Spanish way of speaking English. Spanish has crisp consonants and rapid speech pattern in common with Hindi-related languages.
Spent two weeks in France this past summer and ALL the young people spoke terrific English. Some British accented but so many had American accents I started asking if they had spent time in the US. Quite a few told me they honed their American English by watching ‘Friends’!
Never watched it but didn’t that show end before most twenty somethings were born?
Medal of Honor Recipient Dakota Meyer Roasts Dems Who Told Service Members to Disobey “Illegal Orders”
https://thenewamerican.com/us/medal-of-honor-recipient-roasts-dems-who-told-service-members-to-disobey-illegal-orders/
Molly Brown,
The impact of the Internet and streaming audio and video content on the percent of foreigners learning English is incredible! Especially, as you wrote, colloquial, American English. I have been astounded at the nature and speed of the change over the past 15 – 20 years.
I asked Grok AI about it, and here’s what it replied:
Rick67:
“However when it comes to “which language besides English is useful” Spanish is a strong candidate.”
Useful for whom?
Yes, it’s useful to have at least a few Spanish speakers. But that group is easily filled by America’s millions of Latin American immigrants.
Promoting Spanish discourages assimilation. That, in turn, promotes division—which is exactly what America’s enemies want.
And there’s a huge opportunity cost to teaching most of our children Spanish: We will be safer if many of our people speak the languages of hostile powers and we will be wealthier if many of our people speak the languages of growing markets or wealthy trading partners.
Spanish-speaking countries are generally not dangerous, not wealthy, and not rapidly expanding.
Stinky Pete:
You’ve got a point there. I think it’s great that Americans learn foreign languages, but I really don’t like printing ballots in multiple languages or allowing enclaves of monolingual foreigners.
English is not even our lawful official language.
Surprisingly, Europe is much firmer on these issues. Immigrants are expected to learn the official language. Citizenship may depend on some degree of fluency. Most European countries provide courses, some free, in their languages to immigrants.
Europeans take their languages much more seriously than we do.
Huxley said: “My understanding is that it [youse] comes from Irish English and Northern English but not Gaelic, using the add -s rule for plurals. You -> Yous -> Youse.”
Yes. Irish English is the “creole” language or dialect I mentioned when I said that my great-grandfather spoke in a mixed “Gaelic/Creole” dialect. One could argue, with merit, that the present Irish-English is a creole-type dialect that has outgrown or grown beyond the status of a creole dialect into a proper dialect of its own. In the event my great-grandfather, as a child, spoke a dialect that was transitioning from pure Gaelic to Irish-English.
It would be fun to see a video of all the different American accents. I grew up in Michigan and didn’t think there was a “Michigan accent” until I lived elsewhere. It seems to be shared by most of the area around the Great Lakes–Chicago, Detroit, Northern Ohio, Western New York. Minnesota seems a bit more influenced by Canada for some reason.
I remember reading a book by some language expert, maybe John Ciardi, who said he could tell where in America someone was from with great precision from hearing them speak a few sentences.
I’ve also noticed that for immigrants, age 11 is around the cutoff for whether you keep the accent of the old country. My father had a cousin who was born in New York but moved back to Russia when he was around 6. When I met him he could still speak English, but with a Russian accent.
Rufus T. Firefly: Thanks for the link to that song. My father sang a variant of it. It went like this:
“Hopp, hopp, hopp,
Pferdchen auf gallop!
Ü ber Bach und über Stein
Aber brechtie Ich die Bein,
Hopp, hopp, hopp
Pferdchen auf gallipity-lopp!
Poor, little horse!
Do Germans ever instill rhymes or tales with happy outcomes to their children?
Rufus 8:38am – that “AI” you quoted on the spread of English is exactly why I think AI is nothing but a gigantic crock. Eg “Early 20th Century (1925): English was largely confined to the British Empire”. What were we speaking in the US, native American languages?
The US is not mentioned as an influence on the spread of English until the 1990s, “US dominance in film/tech”. Never mind the fact that half a century earlier at the end of WWII the US had half the global GDP and military outposts all over the world. Wake me up when AI gets anything even half right.
The one grain of truth is that because of its large population India probably has the largest share of English speakers – “post-colonial”. However the ubiquity of English as a lingua franca in commerce around the world is due to mid-20th century American dominance.
@ Gringo > “A plumber at my place in TX had what I thought was a Louisiana Cajun accent. (NOT a Nawlins [New Orleans] accent—more rural….) Turned out that he was from Montreal. With family that had made the Quebec-New England migration, and then his father moved to Montreal.”
The “Cajun” accent is short for “Acadian” (you can probably “hear” how the words changed over the years).
Follow the Wikipedia trail for the details (Acadia to Cajun to Longfellow to Evangine), but basically a portion of Louisiana was settled by refugees from French-speaking areas of what is now Canada.
I know this because in High School we studied Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline” : “The poem follows an Acadian girl named Evangeline and her search for her lost love Gabriel during the expulsion of the Acadians (1755–1764).
The idea for the poem came from Longfellow’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Longfellow used dactylic hexameter, imitating Greek and Latin classics. Though the choice was criticized, it became Longfellow’s most famous work in his lifetime and remains one of his most popular and enduring works.”
Still popular in the 1960s, at least with English teachers; probably no longer found in any of our benighted educational establishments, including colleges.
I don’t remember a thing other than the historical tidbit.