Reply to What do you think about a Japanese Immersion Public Charter in Ward 7?

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Reply to "What do you think about a Japanese Immersion Public Charter in Ward 7?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a fluent Arabic speaker, and I can tell you that my relatively worse Spanish, German and even, god forbid, my 100 or so words of French have been of FAR more use to me than the Arabic I spent years drilling into my head.  I'm a bit mystified by folks who are so enthusiastic about an Arabic charter.   The only people who wanted to talk to me about a job when I graduated were the CIA, and that's not a career path I'd be thrilled with for my kid.[/quote]

But we are in DC and many many industries doing work around the world would hire an Arabic speaker with another skill in a heartbeat over someone just with the skill and no language or nothing really useful. [/quote]

I get that you think this is true.  What I'm telling you is that I've been in the position of a graduate with skills and language, and this was explicitly NOT my experience.  Hiring companies cared about the skills, but not the language.  There seemed to be a pervasive idea (outside of the military and probably some NGOs) that Americans who are not of Arab descent can't really learn the language to a useful level.  This was definitely the case in industry.  Even the FBI thought that my Spanish would be more useful than Arabic,  even though I had one year of college Spanish and about two years of full-time intensive, graduate level immersion Arabic, plus having lived and worked in an Arabic speaking country speaking almost exclusively Arabic for two years.  I ended up getting hired to work in Europe using German and Spanish (both of which were far weaker than my Arabic).

If you've had a different experience, I'd love to hear about it.[/quote]

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