DC high-schools tend to be smaller than their suburban counterparts and therefore are unable to offer as many choices

Suburban high schools in this Metro area commonly offer high school language credit to students who self prep and test out, or work on approved on line programs and do well. DC public schools haven’t embraced the Information Age like that.

Agree. Nobody should need to make these no no brainer arguments on DCUM.

German isn’t taught at the parochial hs we left BASIS for. But students can study it independently on clever software during the school day. Same for a dozen languages.

Without reasonable flexibility, achievement is stifled. That’s the story of DCPS and DCPCS.

When PPs refer to “Latin” the assumption is that the original is being discussed. Latin Cooper doesn’t so much have an 8th grade yet, let alone AP language classes. Nice that they teach Spanish though. AP German has been offered by the College Board for more than half a century, hardly an exotic subject. Who wins when BASIS is off the hook on teaching MS languages other than beginning languages in 8th grade. Nobody.

Anonymous wrote:For the most part, the way the DC charters popular with UMC families teach languages rivals DCPS for "pathetic and anemic." For example, for 13 years, the YuYing HoS didn't speak Mandarin above the most basic level and had never lived or worked in a Chinese-speaking country. The result was that she effectively did no outreach to the ethnic native-speaking community (mostly Cantonese speakers). As a YY parent and native speaker, I heard a few of her Chinese teachers mock her in their dialects right in front of her on a number of occasions. Other examples, BASIS permits no language study before 8th grade, and then only at the beginning level and Latin refuses to teach Spanish. DCI effectively attracts no speakers to its Chinese and French tracks and doesn't offer summer immersion programs to students. Over the years on DCUM, when posters complained about these embarrassing failings, they were roundly clobbered, told to shut up.

This is incorrect. Spanish is offered at Latin Cooper Campus.

I agree with you that the overall language instruction in DC needs a ton of work, but you should check your facts. There is enough information that supports your point, you don't need to rely on incorrect information.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Love how this thread immediately turned into a bunch of self-declared language-experts asserting that German is a worthless foreign language So American.

Barely any American learns ANY foreign language to a degree where they can really communicate with it. If "Utility is the name of the game" quit foreign languages altogether. YOu already (more or less) speak the world-ruling language, which is English.

Every bigger foreign language in the US has been in severe decline except Spanish, which is mainly a reason of the failing US education system (only in 16 of 50 states is exposure to a foreign language mandatory to get a high school degree). French, German, Italian, Portuguese... cuz y'all "experts" can't see the value in them it means they're dead in your eyes.

Go ahead, focus on your precious Spanish. No one outside the Americas and Spain itself gives a rat's but about Spanish. Can say that about every language (except English).

We live in the US and the Americas and Spain is a large enough swath of the world for it to be worth it. Who outside of Western Europe gives a rat’s butt about German?

We do. Most my ancestors were from Germany, I was an exchange student with Youth for Understanding in Munich for a year in high school and concentrated in German at an Ivy. I've work for the Dept. of Commerce in a job where I've often used my German for the past 20 years.

The question you should be asking is why many strong suburban middle and high schools in this Metro area routinely offer between half a dozen and a dozen languages from 6th grade while our DC public schools tend to offer no more than one, two or three, not very seriously as that other than perhaps for Spanish at DCI and maybe J-R.

Your ancestors were from Germany so we should teach German at DCPS schools? I think it would be more worthwhile to teach Amharic, and Nigerian Pidgin. There are more speakers of those languages in the DMV than German. The only reason I can think that people keep pushing German on this thread is that we are ultimately a Euro-centric country.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Spin the new linguistics classes however you want. This BASIS parent calls them a waste of time. Kids just aren't learning foreign languages in these classes. Factually correct that BASIS only permits students to study languages at the beginning level from 8th. The policy is clear from the get got, but it doesn't impress some of us one iota. Pathetic and anemic is right.

Feel free to drop out and lottery for DCI.

+1. Someone didn’t do his or her research.

Basis can’t be all things to everyone and it doesn’t prioritize foreign languages.

Go to DCI or pay for WIS if you want more emphasis on a foreign language.

Anonymous wrote:Spin the new linguistics classes however you want. This BASIS parent calls them a waste of time. Kids just aren't learning foreign languages in these classes. Factually correct that BASIS only permits students to study languages at the beginning level from 8th. The policy is clear from the get got, but it doesn't impress some of us one iota. Pathetic and anemic is right.

Feel free to drop out and lottery for DCI.

Spin the new linguistics classes however you want. This BASIS parent calls them a waste of time. Kids just aren't learning foreign languages in these classes. Factually correct that BASIS only permits students to study languages at the beginning level from 8th. The policy is clear from the get got, but it doesn't impress some of us one iota. Pathetic and anemic is right.

Anonymous wrote:For the most part, the way the DC charters popular with UMC families teach languages rivals DCPS for "pathetic and anemic." For example, for 13 years, the YuYing HoS didn't speak Mandarin above the most basic level and had never lived or worked in a Chinese-speaking country. The result was that she effectively did no outreach to the ethnic native-speaking community (mostly Cantonese speakers). As a YY parent and native speaker, I heard a few of her Chinese teachers mock her in their dialects right in front of her on a number of occasions. Other examples, BASIS permits no language study before 8th grade, and then only at the beginning level and Latin refuses to teach Spanish. DCI effectively attracts no speakers to its Chinese and French tracks and doesn't offer summer immersion programs to students. Over the years on DCUM, when posters complained about these embarrassing failings, they were roundly clobbered, told to shut up.

That is incorrect.

BASIS requires linguistics from 6-7th grade, which covers various languages. Then students have to study a single foreign language from 8-12.

That is 7 years of language study, including 5 years of a single foreign language.

True, as a general matter, DC public schools offer subpar foreign language instruction, and BASIS doesn't emphasize language study. But the language study at BASIS is at least equal to if not better than any of the non-"immersion" schools.

And public charter schools like DCI are really not that great; they are not true immersion schools and kids don't graduate fluent in a foreign language without parents who speak the language and/or massive supplementation.

The only way for a local kid to get fluent in a foreign language is to go to one of the international schools (for example, Rochambeau or the German School), enroll at WIS, self-study, and/or learn from their parents.

For the most part, the way the DC charters popular with UMC families teach languages rivals DCPS for "pathetic and anemic." For example, for 13 years, the YuYing HoS didn't speak Mandarin above the most basic level and had never lived or worked in a Chinese-speaking country. The result was that she effectively did no outreach to the ethnic native-speaking community (mostly Cantonese speakers). As a YY parent and native speaker, I heard a few of her Chinese teachers mock her in their dialects right in front of her on a number of occasions. Other examples, BASIS permits no language study before 8th grade, and then only at the beginning level and Latin refuses to teach Spanish. DCI effectively attracts no speakers to its Chinese and French tracks and doesn't offer summer immersion programs to students. Over the years on DCUM, when posters complained about these embarrassing failings, they were roundly clobbered, told to shut up.

Out of curiosity (based on reading this thread) I looked up how many people speak each language on Wikipedia. It's actually really interesting:

1. English - 1.456B speakers (380M 1st language, 1.077B 2nd)
2. Mandarin - 1.138B (939M 1st, 199M 2nd)
3. Hindi - 609M (345M 1st, 266M 2nd)
4. Spanish - 559M (485M 1st, 74M 2nd)
5. French - 310M (81M 1st, 229M 2nd)
6. Arabic (modern standard) - 274M (0 1st, 274 2nd)
7. Bengali - 273M (234M 1st, 39M 2nd)
8. Portuguese - 264M (236M 1st, 27M 2nd)
9. Russian - 255M (147M 1st, 108M 2nd)
10. Urdu - 232M (71M 1st, 161M 2nd)
11. Indonesian - 199M (44M 1st, 155M 2nd)
12. German - 133M (75M 1st, 58M 2nd)
13. Japanese - 123M (123M 1st, .2M 2nd)
14. Nigerian Pidgin - 121M (5M 1st, 116M 2nd)
15. Egyptian Arabic - 102M (77M 1st, 25M 2nd)
16. Marathi - 99M (83M 1st, 16M 2nd)
17. Telugu - 96M (83M 1st, 13M 2nd)
18. Turkish - 90M (84M 1st, 6M 2nd)
19. Tamil - 87M (79M 1st, 8M 2nd)
20. Yue Chinese (incl. Cantonese) - 87 M (86M 1st, 1M 2nd)
21. Vietnamese - 86M (85M 1st, 1M 2nd)
22. Wu Chinese (incl. Shanghainese) - 83M, (83M 1st, 0 2nd)
23. Tagalog - 83M (29M 1st, 54M 2nd)
24. Korean - 82M (82M 1st, 0 2nd)
25. Iranian Persian - 79M (57M 1st, 21M 2nd)

These are just absolute numbers (and likely very rough estimates, and another metric that is relevant is WHERE languages are spoken, as languages track both colonial patterns and immigration and that has a huge effect on how influential a language is. It's also relevant how many native speakers of a language learn a second language -- for instance Hindi is spoken by an enormous number of people but what percent of Native Hindi speakers also speak English? This lessens global demand for Hindi as a second language because British colonialism so heavily Anglicized India.

I don't think this list argues either against or in favor of more German language offerings in schools -- I think you can make the argument either way. It's more globally prevalent than Japanese, Korean, or Italian. Also, those three languages are interesting in that they are the 2nd language of very few people -- likely the fact that Germany accepts such a large number of immigrants greatly boosts the number of people learning it as a second language, whereas Japan, Korea, and Italy are much less cosmopolitan in this respect.

But certainly there are also arguments in favor of other languages before German -- Arabic and Russian being the big ones, I think, based on sheer number of speakers and value in terms of politics, commerce, and cultural understanding. Arabic is fascinating as the language that unites a large number of people whose native dialect is something else -- it is to the Arab world what Latin once was to the Western world.

My attitude is that more language is better, and I think the way DCPS approaches languages is pathetic and anemic. I also think the development immersion charters and the existence of DCI has probably made DCPS more complacent on these issues than it could be otherwise, and in so doing it does a disservice to students. I'd love to see not only German, but also Arabic, Hindi, and other languages offered. This city is so internationally diverse and also holds such an important position in the global political landscape, it is sad that our school system isn't really preparing its students to participate in that. I think learning Spanish as a 2nd language has enormous value (I speak Spanish and have studied it longer than any other language), but the idea that French and Mandarin are the ONLY other offerings necessary is just... wrong. It should be embarrassing to DC and it's people that we don't offer more.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The suburbs have sizeable bilingual immigrant communities that don't speak Spanish, unlike DC. Suburban immigrants lobby to have their languages taught in public middle schools and high schools. I have a sibling w/a spouse from Korea. They live in Fairfax and send their kids to heavily Asian Oakton HS, which teaches not just Mandarin, but Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese. The best big suburban high schools generally teach all 7 AP languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin, Japanese, Chinese. They also might teach Russian, Arabic and one or two more Asian languages.

DC public schools tend not to get pushback if they only offer French and Spanish, and possibly Mandarin (JR, Walls, DCI, BASIS). To my knowledge, on Latin teaches Arabic. None of them bother with AP German, right. Just no political incentive to offer more languages.

+1. 2% of DCPS is Asian, and likely similar in DCPCS though I can't find it via a quick Google search. Compared to 16% of MCPS and 27% of FCPS. If anything, DC schools should offer Amharic since DC is the second largest Ethiopian population outside of Africa.

Makes sense.

Require all students to study Amharic in middle school and high school.

That will be really useful if they need to work in an Ethiopian restaurant after they graduate.

Nein.

Anonymous wrote:The suburbs have sizeable bilingual immigrant communities that don't speak Spanish, unlike DC. Suburban immigrants lobby to have their languages taught in public middle schools and high schools. I have a sibling w/a spouse from Korea. They live in Fairfax and send their kids to heavily Asian Oakton HS, which teaches not just Mandarin, but Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese. The best big suburban high schools generally teach all 7 AP languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin, Japanese, Chinese. They also might teach Russian, Arabic and one or two more Asian languages.

DC public schools tend not to get pushback if they only offer French and Spanish, and possibly Mandarin (JR, Walls, DCI, BASIS). To my knowledge, on Latin teaches Arabic. None of them bother with AP German, right. Just no political incentive to offer more languages.

+1. 2% of DCPS is Asian, and likely similar in DCPCS though I can't find it via a quick Google search. Compared to 16% of MCPS and 27% of FCPS. If anything, DC schools should offer Amharic since DC is the second largest Ethiopian population outside of Africa.