Mandarin and poetry from age 9

[Sysman]

I'd agree with this as long as it's not pointless languages like French and German that aren't used that widely. Mandarin and Spanish would be much more useful.

French and German are very useful to me thanks.

Unless you are planning to go to South America or Mexico what use is Spanish except for holidays?

[Sysman]

Would certainly agree on this, if for example you have learnt a language such as French a romance language it gives you a good basis for other languages such as Spanish or Italian.

Agreed.

I've been learning Dutch for a while now and while it won't have much use outside of certain countries and certainly only in The Netherlands, South Africa and certain former carribean colonies of the Netherlands. But it will help with German and French from a grammatical point of view ( already speak French).

I found that what was left of my Dutch helped with Swiss German. It has also helped when I worked with Soutch Africans.

Though why the OP has a problem with kids learning a foreign language at an earlier age is beyond me??

Britain and Ireland are certainly behind the rest of Europe in their attitude towards encouraging youngsters to ensure they are fluent in another language. I don't know how many other Europeans I've met and they can at least speak one other language.

Why on earth are we so insular in our attitude towards languages?

I really quite envy the European attitude to foreign language education. Neither my school French nor my school German were really up to the job of working in those languages and I needed further lessons to get me there.

At school there was too much emphasis on grammar and writing in order to pass exams, rather than teaching you how to converse.

[Sysman]

There are more general cognitive benefits to bilingualism as well. It actually makes you smarter.

And a surprising number of people around the world are bilingual.

[Sysman]

It also helps when learning another language to have a good grounding in your own. If I hadn't been taught basic grammar and what nouns, verbs, adverbs, participles etc... were I'd struggle with the language course I'm doing at present.

Best language for any basis in modern romance languages and some mixed anglo-saxon languages is Latin, especially where grammar and declensions are concerned.

As a case in point, Latin had prepared me for all the cases in German. something which my sister had big problems with.

The native Spanish speakers on my German course also had great difficulty with cases in German.

[EternalOptimist]

Being able to speaka da other languages is overhyped. It's always possible to communicate across the language barrier, if you have to

but poetry ? well thats culture that is

some culture....


I want some fud
but I dont speaka da lingo so good
So I'll have some flied lice
an a pint of lager. nice



I'm all cultured out now...

[Sysman]

It also makes you think about your own language. I now know far more about English grammar, thanks to learning German, than I ever learned in school (although I am completely confused about what to capitalise ).

You capitalise nouns.

Nobody's mentioned the obvious point about French and German, which is that they're the easiest for English speakers to learn. If it's about encouraging kids to think, rather than just teaching what's perceived as the most useful skill, then starting with something that's relatively easy and close to English has got to be better. And then Mandarin can come later.

I wish I'd stuck with French after O-level. It took me until I was 36 to think about learning another language.

Yes I wish I'd stuck with my French and German after O-levels. I did an exchange with a German family which helped a lot. I should have done the same with French as well. Fortunately I was working in Europe from my mid-twenties.

[Sysman]

I imagine German cases would be much less of a shock to anyone who'd studied Latin at school.

Absolutely. I remember very little of my Latin now, but it definitely gave me that advantage for both German and Russian.

[Sysman]

In my Soviet secondary school we had English lessons by age of 10 and solving differential equations by age of 13.

Latin and French from the age of 9 here. I can't remember when we stated calculus but it was definitely 12 or 13.

[AtW]

Latin and French from the age of 9 here. I can't remember when we stated calculus but it was definitely 12 or 13.

Full AK disassembly and assembly with closed eyes by age of 15...

[Sysman]

Full AK disassembly and assembly with closed eyes by age of 15...

Could do that with a 303 by 13. Perhaps not with closed eyes though.

Could do a Bren gun too, and fired an SLR on a rifle range.

That rifle range was in Northern Ireland, so it was probably when I was 12, for it was before the start of The Troubles

I was in the Officer Training Corps at Skool