Re: The benefits of multilingualism

On May 23, 10:22 am, Lance <LanceG...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 22, 5:02 pm, Paul Grieg <pgr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On May 22, 8:31 am, Lance <LanceG...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 18, 6:25 pm, Paul Grieg <pgr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"In my professional opinion, learning a new language can only do good
things,"
she believes. "Other languages are good for you at any age..."

That's only true, I think, if the child is well motivated. I found
science meaningful at school and thought learning French was a useless
hindrance to studying more interesting things. I was taken by the
wonderful logic of physics at an early age and thought French grammar
was pitiful by comparison. I largely gave up when  we were told about
'le' and 'la' (lesson 1) Why do cats or chairs have a specific gender?
Makes no sense at all! After that I spent French class thinking about
Einstein's twin paradox and the like, which I could have done better
at home (all that garbling from the stern woman at the front of the
class about  Pierre and Marie allezing down to la (le?) boulangerie,
and such enlightening activities, disturbed my relativistic
calculations).

You were obviously a very clever child.

Still, if you think about it, your remarks seem to be suggesting that
a child should be left to develop only one talent, one mental
capacity.

I'm suggesting that the child should be left to develop what
capacities they want. Why should a child be forced to pursue music,
art, literature, and sport? They might be given the gentlest of
introductions to them, and be allowed to drift in and out of them. But
if after 3 months of French my 11 year self said, "This le and la
stuff is rubbish I'm off to read Einstein in the library." Then why
not let me? The alternative is me sitting around disrupting students
who like the le and la stuff.

other things that people do and children are expected to learn
something about, would also have interfered with your reflections on
Einstein's twin paradox? So why pick on French as the one that got in
the way rather than music?

Because it's the one that *really* got in *my* way. It's the only
subject I was forced, kicking and screaming, to do for GCE, and the
only subject I didn't get an A in (I got an F!)

Einstein liked music, so I quite liked music :-) Anyway, the class
consisted mostly in sitting around listening to Beethoven -- we had a
very lazy music teacher. But (hey) this class worked for me! I could
listen to the music, or let it drift by as I considered black holes.
The teacher didn't disturb me with cries of 'the past tense,
numbskull!' There should be more relaxation in schools.

children should have a broad exposure to human learning and avoid
premature foreclosure, then learning another language is surely a good
thing.

I agree that a broad education is good. But why so much stress on
French at the expense of philosophy,  psychology, gardening,
meditation, yoga, sailing... The list goes on. I  can see an argument
for giving a student, say, a year of French and then encouraging them
to do some other subjects. Now that would be broad! This would give
them a chance to find something they like.

Grammar, including gender, is important in ruling out ambiguities.
Research (in The Psych Review, iirc) shows that languages with fewer
arbitary grammatical distinctions (like gender) generate more (a
greater quantity) ambiguous sentences. So there is a pay off for that
grammatical arbitrariness in the greater precision of what an be said
in the language.

Now that's interesting! Maybe if you had been my French teacher?...

I guess what I'm arguing for is a more child-centred approach, teach
them what they are currently interested in at the time, so that they
can actually enjoy school.

Because I enjoyed science, English and History so much, and did well
in them, it's a real condemnation of the school system that I don't
have happy memories of school. I was only doing science half the time
and things like French, forced brutal sports, metalwork,
excruciatingly boring religious assemblies, nasty teachers & pupils,
'play' time, really put the mockers on it.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

"I'm suggesting that the child should be left to develop what
capacities they want. Why should a child be forced to pursue music,
art, literature, and sport? They might be given the gentlest of
introductions to them, and be allowed to drift in and out of them. But
if after 3 months of French my 11 year self said, "This le and la
stuff is rubbish I'm off to read Einstein in the library." Then why
not let me? The alternative is me sitting around disrupting students
who like the le and la stuff."

So many value judgements here. One reason that children are not free
to simply choose whatever they will learn is precisely these value
judgements. A child is not in a position to know for sure what will
prove valuable to know.

English speakers seem to me to be incredibly arrogant in their
approach to other peoples' languages. You just assume that nothing
valuable will ever published in French or German or Russian, or
Japanese, or Chinese, so there is absolutely no need for you to learn
other languages. Yet Einstein wrote in German, and had no English
speakers read German, YOU would never have been able to read him.

Try switching your argument round to a French boy who is interested in
physics and doesn't want to learn English. Would you not say that he
is depriving himself of access to the very stuff he is interested in?
By Kant's principle of universalisation, what is good for the goose is
good for the gander. So English boys ought also to learn languages
that will increase their access to cultural products such as physics.

I don't disagree with your point, but the language of physics is
mathematics, rather than English or German.

I agree with your point about politics - I only got through my matric
Afrikaans because my brother got me a pass to read a banned book in
the city library. Afrikaans is not a difficult language to learn, but
in Natal it is possible to never hear anybody speak it and, then, it
was seen as the language of the oppressor.
.

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