[Sca-cooks] Re: Languages

[phoenissa at netscape.net]

"Randy Goldberg MD" <goldberg at bestweb.net> wrote:

Of course, I'm hardly one to comment, since the
>only two languages I've studied in any depth are both dead (Latin and
>Yiddish).
>
>Avraham

Hey!!  Latin's not dead...it's immortal! ;-)  (I'm afraid I know nothing about Yiddish, though.)  Besides, dead languages are totally cool - I'm majoring in Classics, so I get to spend all my time reading ancient Greek and Latin.  Yay! :-)

I have to agree that American education doesn't put nearly enough emphasis on studying foreign languages.  Even if you don't think you'll need languages for travel or whatever, linguistic skills are fully as important as, say, math skills.  I know for a fact that at my high school, those of us taking advanced foreign language classes - especially Latin - understood English grammar much better because of it.  (Conversely, I have friends who have studied Spanish for eight years and still can't put two sentences together.  And we live in California! ;-p)  I think one of the most interesting language-educatino situations I've seen is in Lebanon - there, everybody (at least in the last two generations) is trilingual.  Arabic is still the official language for government etc., and of course it's part of the culture.  But nearly all the modern schools were set up during the Fench mandate after WWI, and thus nearly all the classes are taught in French.  Then English is taught as the first foreign language.  (And most kids are pretty serious about studying it, so they can study abroad or at the American University in Beirut.)  As a result, *everyone* knows three languages really well.  It's truly impressive.

Both my parents speak four languages fluently: Arabic, French, English, and Italian (in that order).  The only ones I'm really fluent in are French and English - I can understand some spoken Arabic, and I read Italian quite comfortably but I can't speak more than a few words of either.  Eventually I'll study them formally, but for now, I feel like four languages (two modern and two ancient) is enough for me to handle ;-)


Vittoria


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