What are the foreign language trends among children of elites now? What are some considerations in picking a language.

[Anonymous]

Any trained monkey can learn to count to 10 in a foreign language, and I don't see the benefit of being able to count to 10 anyway.

Real fluency ( the kind that can naturally maintain a conversation ) requires real commitment. Nannies in the target language from birth to age 10, full immersion school starting at age 3, yearly study abroads. I would estimate from experience that the cost to get to real fluency is at least half a million dollars.

[Anonymous]

Latin.

Modern languages aren't terribly useful unless one becomes fluent in them, which takes years and regular practice. Even one or two years' worth of Latin will be useful in improving one's knowledge of English and History.

That said, I disagree with the notion that the study of Latin is useful for law or medical school. Medicine and law use derivatives of medieval Latin, which is a corruption of the classical Latin that is taught in schools. It certainly won't hurt, but it won't help, either.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Any trained monkey can learn to count to 10 in a foreign language, and I don't see the benefit of being able to count to 10 anyway.

Real fluency ( the kind that can naturally maintain a conversation ) requires real commitment. Nannies in the target language from birth to age 10, full immersion school starting at age 3, yearly study abroads. I would estimate from experience that the cost to get to real fluency is at least half a million dollars.

Our kids went from PK-4 through 12th grade in schools that were either full immersion (just PK-4 & K), then 50/50 English/Mandarin (1st - 5th grades), then more like only 30/70 Mandarin/English (6th - 12th grade), with a few 2 week trips to China or Taiwan thrown in which included brief homestays. We are a Black family so pretty much no one mistakes my kids for native Chinese speakers, but literally since they were about 6 or 7 yrs old, native Mandarin speakers (and plenty of majority Cantonese speakers too) are stunned and comment how well they speak Mandarin, and also when they are reading or writing how well they do both. This is 3 kiids who had different levels of ease/difficulty with learning Chinese, but they all are constantly commended on how amazingly they speak, and how nearly fluent they sounded by 11th and 12th grades.

Most here will know where they went to Pk-5 and 6-12th. It's a public school, the trips to China and Taiwan were incredibly good deals and kids who couldn't afford the trips got aid to go. They may not be fluent but the oldest 2 have gotten several offers now from companies that are either Chinese companies doing business in other countries (not just the US) or American companies doing business in China. And their level of conversant or conversational is considered more than enough to do their jobs well. Only when technology or science terms uniquely Chinese in origin come up do they really need help understanding or explaining, otherwise they do great.

This is a very long way of saying that over those 14 yrs of PreK4-12th grade, we paid at the most $30,000 for 3 kids and if we couldn't have afforded the trips, they would still have been able to go and it would have been down to paying about $5,000 through all those years.

Nothing even CLOSE to $500,000.00 and they are fairly close to fluent at this stage (and very high scoring though not fluent in reading and writing).

[Anonymous]

Same PP, to clarify, oldest one has graduated college now, and middle is in college but has worked summers. It's through college jobs that they met the businesspeople who made them other job offers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Same PP, to clarify, oldest one has graduated college now, and middle is in college but has worked summers. It's through college jobs that they met the businesspeople who made them other job offers.

Congratulations, and you should be proud, seriously. I had a colleague who is full blooded American but has a Ph.D. in Chinese and served as an interpreter for the U.S. Army to the Chinese Army. (His job was to avoid a miscommunication that would lead to a nuclear holocaust.) He would tell me that DMV public school students in immersion programs couldn't understand "good morning" in Chinese even by the 12th grade. You should be proud, but your DC's are an outliers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Same PP, to clarify, oldest one has graduated college now, and middle is in college but has worked summers. It's through college jobs that they met the businesspeople who made them other job offers.

Congratulations, and you should be proud, seriously. I had a colleague who is full blooded American but has a Ph.D. in Chinese and served as an interpreter for the U.S. Army to the Chinese Army. (His job was to avoid a miscommunication that would lead to a nuclear holocaust.) He would tell me that DMV public school students in immersion programs couldn't understand "good morning" in Chinese even by the 12th grade. You should be proud, but your DC's are an outliers.

We are proud, thank you. But "outliers" means that the majority "can't understand "Good morning" in Chinese by the 12th grade", that's the only way my kids are exceptions. Yet somehow my youngest is almost out of that school, it's been a good 5 yrs since the last time I was daily at the elementary school (where I had way more contact with the Chinese teachers on a daily basis), and my DH didn't even go into that school as much as I did and neither of us ever took Chinese lessons. And yet somehow, "Good morning" is one of many phrases we STILL can say and remember to say (though I've totally forgotten how to answer), while literally all of our kids friends, even the ones who went to different middle schools and high schools, they all still have a level of conversational Chinese that means they all know and understand how to say WAY MORE than "Good morning" and they weren't all the best in the classes nor did they take Chinese language outside of regular school classes. A few did do Chinese outside of school, but I'm not including them in the ones who still to this day didn't even finish middle or high school in a dual language program but can still have whole conversations in Mandarin though their vocabulary and understanding has definitely dwindled from their 5th grade levels.

When you only hear and speak Mandarin from PK3 or PK4 through 5th grade either 100% of the school day or 50%, for those 7 or 8 years, you are not an "outlier" if you can hold whole conversations and still understand a good amount of Mandarin when you're 3 or 4 years out of those schools. And NO ONE doesn't understand "Good morning" or remember how to answer. Our kids were not outliers, most of the kids who finished 5th grade still understand and can say a lot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Same PP, to clarify, oldest one has graduated college now, and middle is in college but has worked summers. It's through college jobs that they met the businesspeople who made them other job offers.

Congratulations, and you should be proud, seriously. I had a colleague who is full blooded American but has a Ph.D. in Chinese and served as an interpreter for the U.S. Army to the Chinese Army. (His job was to avoid a miscommunication that would lead to a nuclear holocaust.) He would tell me that DMV public school students in immersion programs couldn't understand "good morning" in Chinese even by the 12th grade. You should be proud, but your DC's are an outliers.

Just adding: in all my comments on this, I'm talking about kids who did dual language from PK3 or PK4 through at least 5th grade. My kids' middle and high school also lets students who have zero Mandarin/French/Spanish (the 3 languages taught at the school) at grades 6 and 9, so if your friend making the DMV comment is talking about kids who started in 9th grade, maybe there's some truth to that. But even starting in 6th grade with Mandarin, only those who really struggle with the language are not going to understand Good morning or be able to have at least a basic conversation by 12th grade.

Anonymous wrote:We are proud, thank you. But "outliers" means that the majority "can't understand "Good morning" in Chinese by the 12th grade", that's the only way my kids are exceptions. Yet somehow my youngest is almost out of that school, it's been a good 5 yrs since the last time I was daily at the elementary school (where I had way more contact with the Chinese teachers on a daily basis), and my DH didn't even go into that school as much as I did and neither of us ever took Chinese lessons. And yet somehow, "Good morning" is one of many phrases we STILL can say and remember to say (though I've totally forgotten how to answer), while literally all of our kids friends, even the ones who went to different middle schools and high schools, they all still have a level of conversational Chinese that means they all know and understand how to say WAY MORE than "Good morning" and they weren't all the best in the classes nor did they take Chinese language outside of regular school classes. A few did do Chinese outside of school, but I'm not including them in the ones who still to this day didn't even finish middle or high school in a dual language program but can still have whole conversations in Mandarin though their vocabulary and understanding has definitely dwindled from their 5th grade levels.

When you only hear and speak Mandarin from PK3 or PK4 through 5th grade either 100% of the school day or 50%, for those 7 or 8 years, you are not an "outlier" if you can hold whole conversations and still understand a good amount of Mandarin when you're 3 or 4 years out of those schools. And NO ONE doesn't understand "Good morning" or remember how to answer. Our kids were not outliers, most of the kids who finished 5th grade still understand and can say a lot.

[Anonymous]

The language of love. It is considered, by many people, a foreign language. It takes daily practice.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Children of elites speak Russian, Hebrew, and Arabic.

Children whose families are Russian or Ukrainian or certain Eastern European countries speak Russian. Children with Israeli families speak Hebrew. Children who speak Arabic or Farsi or other Middle Eastern languages have families from there. Nothing related to elite.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Mandarin and French when it comes to elites.

Spanish is by far more useful of course. I speak all 3, and use Spanish a lot more in daily life by far.

What does this even mean, “elites”? Can you define the word based on how you are using it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We chose based on which program was known to have better teachers at our HS. In our case, French.

Our HS can’t find any French teachers, so kids have to take it online. Guess we’re not elite enough.

I don’t understand why people think French is elite. France is a tiny country. Belgium has some French communities, Haiti is French speaking, a lot of African countries have French as their official language. Canada where Quebec hung on to French with all their might but England still managed to take away the French language from many areas. England colonized Canada and mandated English.

Why would French be relevant enough for children to learn it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We chose based on which program was known to have better teachers at our HS. In our case, French.

Our HS can’t find any French teachers, so kids have to take it online. Guess we’re not elite enough.

I don’t understand why people think French is elite. France is a tiny country. Belgium has some French communities, Haiti is French speaking, a lot of African countries have French as their official language. Canada where Quebec hung on to French with all their might but England still managed to take away the French language from many areas. England colonized Canada and mandated English.

Why would French be relevant enough for children to learn it?

When I was in middle school I only had a choice of French or Spanish. I chose based on liking French food and the sound of the French language better, and it was literally each student's choice, I don't remember anyone saying their parents chose for them. But there was nothing elite about it, that was just the choices we had and I'd say students split fairly evenly in which language they chose. In my high school I don't remember which classes more people took, I just know the French classes were very full (but I think the Spanish ones are too). I wonder if my high school offers other languages now... I am curious, I'm going to look into that.

But no one had an attitude like "Oh, only puny little peasants take _____________ language". It was just whichever one you were interested in or whichever one had more open seats if you didn't care.

[Anonymous]

Same PP, btw I'm still so glad I learned it. I've been to 3 French-speaking countries (including France), and I still love the language and the culture.

[Anonymous]

Forget about stupid elites. Choose the language based on the people and the settings you can practice in.

Unless you have a different language background it’s likely going to be Spanish based on it being the second most spoken language in US. There are a ton of resources, TV programming, books, etc.

If you’re connected to French, Mandarin or Hindi, by all means try it, since you an interact effortlessly with native speakers.

[Anonymous]

This cracks me up.
But, as a person who might be considered globally elite, English.