Those of you who did take a foreign language in high school or in college,
regardless of whether you remember any of it, what made you decide to take
one?  Was it interesting, or did you have it forced on you?  If you didn't
end up taking one, why not?

Griz

71 responses total.

How did you manage to go through college without learning a foreign language?

Many majors, eg. engineering, do not require students to take a
foreign language.

Why did I take one in high school?  Well, the school required that we
take one.  We had a choice -- either French or Spanish.

I don't remember why I took French in high school.  I started it a year
late and hence was in French class with kids a grade behind me.

An English professor in college kind of inspired me to take Greek.  I
studied it for a school year -- three quarters -- sticking with it even
as the class gradually shrank from 40 to about 7.  Staying with it became
a point of pride, I guess.  Still, I didn't work hard enough at it to
attain any kind of mastery, and I have retained little of it.

I studied Yiddish because it is the language of at least some of my
ancestors (unlike either French or Greek!), and because I feel tremendous
fondness for it.  It was also very accessible, taught by one of my fellow
grad students in the College of Architecture at Cornell (he later went on
to grad school in linguistics).  I hadn't expected it to explicate some of
my father's Yiddish expressions -- I thought I understood them all -- but
it did.

I took French in High School because I needed a language and I thought it
would be easier than German (what my family wanted me to take ;)  ).
In college I took a year of French because I was familiar with it and 
needed a relativly easy course.
I took two years of Greek and one of Hebrew because I had to, but now I'm
glad I did because they both became interesting to me.

I needed a language in high school for college, so I took Spanish.  It
was either that or French, and the French program was known for being
completely useless (i.e. you didn't come out of it fluent).  It was
very easy for me to learn.  
  
Hebrew and Akkadian came later, when I was taking NES and looking at
the possibility of graduate school.  Biblical Hebrew is a very beautiful
language; I really enjoyed studying it.  Akkadian....well, let's call
it "challenging" and leave it at that.

I took a year of German in High school.
Why? I don't know. It wasn't forced opon me. But It was fairly easy.

        My high school offered only Spanish.  I tried it briefly, but didn't
like it, and dropped it with relief.
        My college (Michigan Tech) offered Spanish, German, French and
Russian.  If they had offered Greek I would have taken it; I had a Greek
friend, and also it's a language I thought I'd be interested in.
        You could also take Finnish at a small business college nearby (Suomi
College, of course, pronounced Soo-mi, not Swami).  I didn't have the
slightest interest in any of these five languages.  I wasn't required to
take one, so I didn't.

<jennie, a former speaker of Finnish, insists that the proper pronunciation
of Suomi College is:  Soo-oh-mee>

Griz

I took four years of Latin and two years of French in high school, plus
a year of German in college. Some of the most useful courses I have ever
taken (particularly the Latin).

Spanish was my first foreign language; I started it when I was fourteen and
a freshman in high school.  I liked it very much, but halfway through that
same year I became fanatical about the German language, so Spanish sort of
fell by the wayside.  I started French upon my return from Germany during
the second part of my junior year in high school, and loved it.  By that
time I was no longer too crazy about Spanish.  I started Finnish that year,
too, in night courses, but actually I learned most of that language through
writing letters to my Finnish pen pal and going to visit her during the
summer after my senior year in high school.

I started taking foreign languages because my father told me it was a good
idea, and at fourteen I couldn't think of any good reason why not.  I
continued them because I loved them.  Sometimes I wish I had time to keep
them up, but alas, I can no longer claim to be a speaker of anything but
German and English.  I'd really like to learn Russian, though, and learn
to speak Finnish as well as I do German and English, but I doubt I'll ever
have either the time or the clout.

I never actually had formal language teaching in Latin, although having had
Spanish, French, and many years of voice lessons certainly helps in 
understanding it.  Some of my linguistics professors have been horrified
that I've never had Latin, but I'll probably never have time for that,
either.

On the bulletin board in my office there is a button that reads:  "So many
languages, so little time."  So true....

Griz

I started Spanish in 8th grade because it was the only foreign lguage
being taught at my junior high.  I found it easy to read and write and
continued with it through high school and college.  College level
Spanish was the most fun because you spent the entire class period
conversing in Spanish with your classmates.  It was a neat way to
get to know people and I still stay in touch with a lot of the 
former students.  After 16 credit hours, I gave it up because I
had too many other courses that were required for my degree.  The
Spanish was just an easy "A" and not required.

what is Akkadian?

I almost learned french in grade school.  At least they tried hard.  I
gave it up in high school when I noticed my grade was going down each
year.

At the UofM, I made another effort to learn French, mostly because it
was again required.  After that failed, I tried Spanish.  Same story.
Basically, it seems at least not too hard to get started learning a new
language, but becoming really proficient seems to require more effort
than I'm willing to put forth.  I suspect the only really good solution
would be to actually move to somewhere where they speak only the
language, and not English, and stay there until I can understand what
they're saying and speak with them.

Despite my rather dismal record learning other languages, I'm still
quite interested.  The problems of machine translation have long
fascinated me, especially as it's in some respects a rather non-trivial
AI problem.  I've also acquired dictionaries and primers on at least a
dozen languages ranging from ancient egyptian to modern swedish.  The
field of linguistics also fascinates me, although there still seems to
be a lot of work left to do there.  It seems to have a lot of
connections with psychology, AI, and math that need a lot of work.

<jennie thinks Marcus should take a Cognitive Science class>

Griz

re :12, crudely, "Babylonian," although many more people than citizens
of Babylon spoke it; some form of Akkadian (ranging from Old Akkadian
all the way up to Assyrian) existed in Mesopotamia around that time.
(I can get the exact dates if you really care.)  

I took a semester of part time French in 7th grade.  I went to a high school
for junior high (our school district was growing faster than they could build
the school buildings) and I don't think that the teachers quite knew what to
do with us so they experimented with different approaches.  We (the 7th grade)
had to take split classes for one class period a day.  I think that for one
semester I had gym on Monday, Wednesday and alternating Fridays, French on
Tuesday and Thursday and Art on the other Friday.  The next semester it was
Music rather than French.  The only choice I had in the matter was the French.
I got to pick from French, Spanish or German.

I took Latin during 9th and 10th grades.  We moved from one high school
district to another the summer between.  I loved the Latin teacher I had for
9th grade, but the one I had for 10th was bad.  She was so bad a teacher (in
my opinion, anyway) that even though I enjoyed Latin, needed the credits
in Latin (I was planning a career in Nursing) and had planned on taking 
4 years of it, I dropped it after 10th grade.

I have studied at various times Spanish, Japanese, and Russian.  Spanish 
was in junior high, but only for one year.  I didn't like it much, learned
very little, and had no interest in continuing it.  Japanese I studied in
high school, in Japan, for one and a half years.  I learned more Japanese
than I did Spanish, but my teacher was <ahem> not very good.  I learned
more Japanese outside of class, trying to find the Fussa trainstation.
Russian I started in college.  I needed a language and wanted to get into
German (since I had Jennie(griz) as a live in tutor) but all the sections
were full.  So I grabbed an open section of Russian, still hoping that I
could pick up German later.  I discovered that I love Russian, and 
desperately want to visit the Soviet Union, or whatevers left of it.

Uh, they didn't speak much russian in many parts of the USSR...

I started studying French in 3rd grade.  There was one French teacher
who would go from class to class.  I think we saw her about 3 times
a week.  It was a terrific program (starting so early), but it was
later discontinued (of course, it cost money, right?).  I continued
taking French right through 11th grade, then took a year off.  Meanwhile,
I started German in 11th grade, because I was interested in all the
components of the English language, and German and French seemed to
be the best ways to get at that.  I took German for two years in high
school, then about two more years in college (mostly literature
courses), and also lived in the German house on campus, where we has
to speak German all the time.  I also picked up French courses again,
and later moved into the French house for two hears.

I picked up some Spanish when my family took a vacation to Mexico, and 
I later took an "Adult education" course in Spanish, but I know very
little of that language, except what I can figure out from general
knowlegdge of romance languages.  I took one year of college Italian
here at the U of M, and am planning to begin second-year italian in
January.  I have taught myself some very rudimentary Russian, and
would love to learn more, if I ever have time.  I have also dabbled in
Polish and a very tiny bit in old english.  Oh yes, I took latin for
about 3 months in 8th grade.  I hated the teacher, and the course was
only offered at 7 AM, so I soon dropped it.

Larry King had the futurist, Marvin Cetron, on his show the other night.
A caller asked what languages will be important to know in the future.
I was a little surprised at the answer.

Of course, English will be the most important language, but I was a little
surprised at what he thought the second most important would be -- Chinese.
His reasoning was that more people speak some form of Chinese than any
other language in the world, and that over the next 10-20 years China
will become very important economically.

As a third language, Cetron recommended Spanish, especially for North
Americans as that market opens up.

Perhaps China will become important economically, but at this point the
language to know is Japanese, for precisely the same reason.  

Of course, it all depends on whether you view language as a means to an
end, or an end in and of itself.  How about you guys?

I have noticed a whole lot of job ads which call for fluency in the Japanese
language.  I have never seen one that calls for any knowledge of Chinese.

I was young and impressionable and experienced seven years of french, 
three in high school and four in college.
This was happily capped by a trip to France, and several to Quebec.
Ten years later, I remember none of the language.
Perhaps I should have concentrated on Japanese?

Heh.  Participate in the French item.  It'll come back to you.

I believe I have purged it from my system.

I've always been interested in language.  I made a few abortive attempts at
teaching myself German and then some classes in Portuguese supported by the
local consulate (my father's family is Portuguese), but I didn't seriously
start to work on a foreign language until my high school French.  I only had
a choice between French and Spanish, and French was more useful for the 
Canadian tourists in the summer.
 
Then, in college, I started looking into linguistics.  For the major, I needed
to learn a non-European language and ended up studying Arabic (I felt certain
ties to Arabic, given my Portuguese heritage and, besides, I was given to
understand that it would be quite useful).  I ended up hating linguistics and
Arabic was my favorite course that year.  Then I somehow ended up here, a 
grad student in Arabic.  Wasn't there a Roman poet who said "I love and I
hate"?

I studied German for three years in high school. A language was required,
but I do not recall all the alternatives. The German grammar I learned
became the basis for my understanding of English grammar (it being
the last grammar I studied) - probably to my eternal confusion of English
grammar. My mother spoke German in her family when I was very young but
by the time I learned it, she had forgotten it. For a long time all I
thought i retained were the songs - Die Lorelei (in totality!) in
particular. Then I went to Europe, fifteen years after my study of German
ended, and I discovered, to my utter amazement, that I could speak German.
However, I was a little rusty: my German acquaintances said that I spoke
German with excellent grammar, good pronounciation, but that my
vocabulary was terrible. It was, however, quite useful in travelling in
the 60s in Greece and Eastern Europe, where many people learned German
during the occupations. Then, I lived in Netherlands for two years, and
learned Dutch - and that was the end of my German: I speak it with a
Dutch accent (and in part, vocabulary).

I took two terms of Latin in jr. high--I too was turned off by a very bad 
teacher when my family moved from one school district to another.  I then
took both French (1 term) and Spanish (2yrs) in High school.  The French
took only a little, mainly because the teacher concentrated on reading and
writing and there weren't enough books to go around.  I didn't get a book
and I couldn't see the board (didn't get my specs til I was 23).  Even so,
I tested about 2 years ahead of myself in the "department wide evaluation"
on the vocabulary exam. It's in the grammar that I failed pitifully. ;)
I have my Quebecios grandpa to thank for that...he didn't speak any English.

Spanish I didn't do any better in class, but I was living in the Republic
of Panama and learned every day after school.  By the end og High School
I was being mistaken for a Costa Rican by Panamanians who didn't know me.
(Ie. I had an accentm, but it wasn't a strong one.)

In college, I took Swedish for a term, and then I married the boy who
inspired the effort and we spent the equivalent of 2.5 years in Sweden.
(over the course of many extended vacations.) Unfortunately my Swedish
never got beyond the "3 yr. old" stage.  I knew enough words to
describe around anything I didn't have the vocabulary for...but since
most Swedes speak English far better than I do they generally preffered
to switch over.  

...even after 7 years of living and breathing Spanish, much of what I knew
seems to have seeped out when I wasn't looking.  I an only sort of
follow the dialog on the Spanish channel anymore.

*sigh*

Don't sigh so hard - I envy you what you've got, Misti.  (A  lot of HS French
& some college, & when I heard a hockey game on the radio I had trouble
being sure it was hockey.  (I *think* they kept talking about "le disc".))

I'm still taking French (I feel so young: tenth grade, still), started in 7th
grade with something like someone elso up there has described: alternating
days of french and gym. I really like the language, and can usually read and
understand it when I hear it, but Ihave a _little_ trouble with grammar....
   I went to Russia for three weeks last summer. It was really great, and I 
_really_ want to learn the language (I love the sounds it makes!!!), but
1. I don't have time and 2. I don't know anyone who knows the language.
By the way, does anyone know of someone who could do a little translating
into Russian? I promised some kids at a camp that I'd write to them in 
Russian, and so far haven't exactly gotten around to it yet... been almost a
year and I am starting to feel a _little_ guilty...;)...

Emma,

I've heard that the UM Language Department can put you in touch with
translators. I think their office is somewhere in the Union.

thanks, maybe I'll try to find them after Finals...when I have time again...
(I'm not really supposed to be on here, but I suppose I'll study later..:))

Other languages, and competance therein, have been sort of a fantasy for
me. In HS, it was 4 years of Latin (ovr French and Spanish) because there
were more fundamentals in Latin. Still kicking myself for not starting and
continuing Greek, which was semi-offered in 7-8 grade, as an internal
corallary to the Literature class. 
  
I felt as if I cheated myself in college, taking a 3-in-1 Latin course for
my BA instead of a different language. 
  
However, when I was in Korea, I got into a language course RealFast and
it was totally absorbing. Still pays off, when I can find the right
people. Latin will always pay off. I'd like to be conversant in
Russian and for some reason, Hebrew, and perhaps another Romance language
and maybe Chinese. But at least the Russina and the Hebrew.

My latest language project is to try to learn a little Slovak, the
language of my ancestors.  We're planning a trip there in the fall.

The first time I saw an adidas shoe did it for me.  I said: that's a shoe!
I decided I had to learn the language of the people who created it.

And off he trodded .....

I first took a foreign language in 3rd grade: French.  Next, I studied Hebrew
in preparation for my eventual Bar Mitzvah.  In 7th grade, I took Spanish,
but flunked it due to an underwhelming effort to complete my assignments.
Now for the amusing part:  I went to try to take Spanish again in 9th grade.
There were about 40 people in the room, and the limit was about 25-30.
This was the first year that Latin was being offered, and since nobody at
all had shown up in the Latin room to sign up, the Latin teacher came into
the Spanish room to see if anybody knew Latin was being offered...
        I looked around, said "what the heck" to myself, and took four years
of Latin.  The only parts I really enjoyed were scanning Latin poetry, and
studying etymology of English words.
        I used my well developed skills with the English language to achieve
what success I achieved in Latin.  I think it was both interesting and useless.
I wish that I had spent the time taking a language that I could use, rather
than simply augmenting my command of roots, which would have resulted from the
study of any of the Romance languages.
        I took Hebrew in college, mostly because I figured that my odds of
success with it were greatest because of my early exposure.  If I had not had
a language requirement to fill in both HS and colllege, I probably would not
have taken language courses in either one.  I do feel, however, that given
a few months in an environment in which another language is essential, I
would have little difficulty picking it up and using it to my
satisfaction.   
        I have literally fantasized about being able to *think* in a language
other than English, but unless I spend some time living abroad, I fear that
this a fantasy shall remain...

I am really glad to see other reacting to all of these very interesting
topics, after some time of semi-silence. It is an interesting question
why "threads" fall silent. They are clearly not exhausted. It must be
that those that were maintaining the threads became exhausted, and
drifted away, and the island requires a new wave of immigration. Now,
I happen to be a fw for this conference, so I live here, and I want to
tell you it has been rather lonely, so I'm glad to welcome other, and
others that follow, to this land (we do have an offshore gaming ship
called "Letter Match", but not many visiting there have come to the
mainland).

linked to iq?

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