h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Interesting. In New York students are technically required to take 3 years of a language, I think, but as long as they can pass a language regent exam it doesn't actually matter.

I wish they would institute a second language in elementary school, quite honestly. Since all the research shows that past puberty acquiring a language fluently is well nigh impossible, you'd think educators would get the hint.

Advanced classes by PSAT score? Jeepers.

It doesn't always work, though. In some provinces of Canada, kids are required to take both French and English starting in kindergarten. They get the option to take other languages in high school, though, and then (at least, if they're my cousins) they forget most of it. I don't know if language-learning in a classroom could ever be fully effective.

(Though I am proud to say that I was watching a French news clip on YouTube last night and I understood it!)

In my experience it can if it's integrated into other classes. But I can see where that would be too complicated on a broad scale.

But my Montreal friends understand French ok, even if they can't talk it. And that's a step.

I have a Montreal friend with a German mother who's either fluent or perfect in English (his main language), French, German and Spanish...and another friend in Germany whose father was a Puerto Rican in the USMC and is perfect in English, German and Spanish. I envy both of them enormously.

We have a French friend who used to teach English, so he's fluent in both, speaks very good Spanish, quite good Portuguese, and a bit of Arabic.

... and I studied French for six years, by some miracle passed an O-level in it, and would struggle to order a beer in a Paris bar

You need to actually use a foreign language once you've learned it. I had 3 years of Spanish in high sachool and two semesters of French in college but then never had the opportunity to practise either. I've forgotten almost all of both. Then when I lived in Texas I learned a little survival Tex-Mex. But I haven't used that either for 14 years.

F, on the other hand, was a natural at languages. He never forgot anything he learned. He spoke fluent Portuguese and French as well as English. Portuguese was his first language. And he spoke passable German, Polish and Spanish.

I've always envied people who have a flair for languages.

I've asked my parents occasionally why they didn't raise us in Belgium