Quote:
Originally Posted by Coach
Oh strange. For some reason I thought it was way higher. Obviously my Canadian education gave me little background into other languages, and I took French to grade 12!  . I do think French is more useful in places people may not realize (a lot of Africa, for instance).
Yeah, either way, my point is if you travel, most other places people speak multiple languages and I think we should be making a better effort as the world (particularly the "East") gets closer. |
That's a pretty common misconception in Canada, imo. If I was rating languages by global usefulness I'd go something like:
English
Mandarin Chinese
<big gap>
Spanish
Cantonese
Arabic
<big gap>
Russian
French
Japanese
Korean
Farsi
Turkish
etc.
We picked Spanish for our kids because I think it's way more likely they'll end up completely fluent vs trying to learn Chinese. They already have great accents. It's quite interesting how aggressive other parents are (even those whose kids aren't learning a language) about how French is obviously better and more important.