Speak? English and Spanish. Write? Same two. Read? Those two, plus Portuguese, Italian, French, and German.
Yeah, I kind of used "speak" in the sense of "know", I guess, but of course one can know a language in a way without being able to speak it well. Maybe it was badly phrased, then.
Perhaps so. Sometimes, I like to have precise speech
My high school graduating class was only 58 and it was in a very tiny rural town (despite me living in a Nashville exurb 15 minutes' drive east), so if any Spanish were really learned, it was a very pleasant surprise. So too little emphasis back in the early 1990s, obviously.
Sounds like, yes - would've been a good bit better if you'd had to continue Spanish until finishing HS, one imagines. Though as ent mentions, I imagine learning Spanish is becoming far easier now everywhere in the US, not just in the Southwest anymore.
I used to live in areas where Arabic or Urdu was spoken as much as English (grad school housing) or where some of the street signs were in Spanish as well as English (South Florida), so after a while, you pick up elements of it, if you so desire.
Now for UT's history program, if I had completed my Ph.D. I would have been expected to have at least reading fluency in German and either French or Latin, considering my specialization was German cultural/religious history.
Yeah, I've noted before that American top universities are often quite impressive in their language education and requirements, unlike the high schools. A comparable history program here would also expect reading fluency in German and French without devoting any classes to it (but then reading fluency in German is very easy to obtain if one's native language is Dutch), but for programs that require more exotic languages (by our standards), American universities can easily stand the comparison. Although when it comes to majors and minors in, say, Japanese or other non-western languages, I've been given to understand American (and British) universities focus too much on academic knowledge and too little on working knowledge and speaking proficiency in those languages. Or so people say. Of course, the nature of your universities - the major/minor system, the general requirements - make it logical that an American student of for instance Japanese wouldn't be able to spend as much time learning Japanese as a Belgian one would.
I'm not for sure if you have a good picture there. In the modern languages classes I've taken, the emphasis was always on speaking and listening before on grammar and writing and in my intermediate and advanced classes (both German and Spanish), virtually all of the instruction was given in those languages rather than English. In addition, majors (and some minors) are encouraged to do study abroad programs for a semester or two to pick up specific dialects and nuances that might be overlooked, so after 450 hours or so of language exposure (saying a minimum of 10 classes in the language major at 3 hours a week, 15 weeks a semester), I would imagine some degree of fluency would be expected, and in more than just academic readings.
As for the major/minor system itself, the purpose is to do more than just have a fancy technical school certification. I had 132 hours on my degree. 51 was in history, 12 in political science, 12 in Latin, 6 in German (I audited my third and final class, so I wouldn't have to worry about assignments while I was working on my undergraduate honors thesis), 15 in literature and composition classes, 9 in anthropology, 8 in geology, and the rest in electives. I like to think I got more exposure than if 75% or more of my classes had been history courses.
Imperialism FTW? 
You might say that, yes.
As someone who studied under two Marxists, I do believe I would say that
Illusions fall like the husk of a fruit, one after another, and the fruit is experience. - Narrator, Sylvie
Je suis méchant.
Je suis méchant.
/Survey: Foreign language knowledge in Europe (and elsewhere)
- 24/09/2010 01:37:42 PM
1210 Views
Re: /Survey: Foreign language knowledge in Europe
- 24/09/2010 02:10:57 PM
631 Views
Re: /Survey: Foreign language knowledge in Europe
- 24/09/2010 03:32:09 PM
583 Views
That is rather sad to say the least.
- 24/09/2010 04:15:32 PM
818 Views
Indeed
- 24/09/2010 06:23:52 PM
620 Views
Re: /Survey: Foreign language knowledge in Europe
- 24/09/2010 04:00:04 PM
701 Views
Re: /Survey: Foreign language knowledge in Europe
- 24/09/2010 05:47:09 PM
657 Views
Interesting.
- 24/09/2010 06:04:30 PM
612 Views
Re: Interesting.
- 24/09/2010 06:42:02 PM
758 Views
Re: Interesting.
- 24/09/2010 07:05:44 PM
668 Views
Re: /Survey: Foreign language knowledge in Europe (and elsewhere)
- 24/09/2010 09:38:05 PM
757 Views
Re: /Survey: Foreign language knowledge in Europe (and elsewhere)
- 25/09/2010 05:49:05 AM
738 Views
Self-study can be worth as much as formal classroom study, I suppose
- 25/09/2010 03:43:14 PM
714 Views
Certainly it can.
- 26/09/2010 12:35:56 PM
720 Views
Re: /Survey: Foreign language knowledge in Europe (and elsewhere)
- 25/09/2010 04:54:40 PM
858 Views
Re: /Survey: Foreign language knowledge in Europe (and elsewhere)
- 25/09/2010 07:38:29 PM
783 Views
Re: /Survey: Foreign language knowledge in Europe (and elsewhere)
- 26/09/2010 12:07:19 AM
800 Views
They should have asked about second languages rather than foreign languages.
- 26/09/2010 11:34:27 AM
635 Views
Re: /Survey: Foreign language knowledge in Europe (and elsewhere)
- 27/09/2010 03:18:30 PM
691 Views