Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

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IronMike
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby IronMike » Thu Apr 29, 2021 12:31 am

einzelne wrote:And since there's zero practical reason for learning Esperanto

Because it failed as a lingua franca does not mean there is no practical reason to learn Esperanto. Why not just say you're not interested in learning it or investing the time in learning about it, instead of implying that those of us who work on Esperanto are wasting our time?
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby eido » Thu Apr 29, 2021 12:35 am

I live in the United States, and in my state, at the time I graduated high school (HS), if you passed a certain number of years of language courses during HS, you were exempted from the general education university language requirement should you have attended an in-state school.

However, I wasn't made aware of that requirement until my junior (3rd) year, and I'd already achieved the number of years with the right grades. Despite that, I decided to take 1 more year of my chosen language.

So, as you can see, I was intrinsically motivated and far from lazy, as much of what I know of Spanish comes from my teen years. I was in a depressive state, however, when I entered college, so I picked a major I didn't fit into at the time and just took the language credit.

Though, I would have gladly taken a placement test to determine an appropriate level and take a course right for me with enough rigor. I wasn't going to shy away from that, even knowing less than I do now. It's just as well that on my second try at college, when I was aiming to enter a Spanish program, I tested into the highest level offered before graduate-level courses.

And that's all from a mixture of self-study and hard work. My teachers weren't cruel or horrible at teaching. I remember really enjoying my HS classes. My teachers were engaged and ready to take on curriculum-based challenges. I really pushed myself as a student and it's the class in which I most excelled.

I know my experience is a lot different from what a lot of people in or out of the US have gone through when learning languages younger than 18. I just thought I should note that some teachers do work hard to deliver quality lessons and explanations, and there are indeed a variety of learners based on culture and need.

I do see though how it's annoying that people are given everything and still muff it up, when those given nothing can do a lot.

We can compare the students from my HS classes, who were constantly complaining about the difficulty of Spanish, and a Mexican woman I used to work with, who learned English primarily aurally as she had few means to do so otherwise. (I think I've mentioned her here before.)

I was in I believe, again, my junior year, when I met into an attractive freshman student. A soccer player. (No romantic attraction here, relax.) He said, "One more year and I'm done. One more year." It used to annoy me, because his attitude seemed to spread throughout the class and create chaos.

On the other hand, we have a middle-aged woman who works to support her children through college when she never went. She probably had some English classes in school but she never mentioned them to me. All she said was to improve her pronunciation and listening comprehension, she listened to English-language radio broadcasts while still in Mexico and when she immigrated. She now has good command of idioms and slang, and good diction and enunciation--all without losing contact with her native tongue.

Just think, what if the sportsman would have tried a bit harder? I bet he would've found so much to like in the world of fútbol!

But I understand, I really do... different people learn differently, and we all come from different places in life. We'll all get there someday.
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby David1917 » Thu Apr 29, 2021 1:44 am

Lots of anecdotal back-and-forth here, which does nothing for sweeping statements.

We know it is a fact that USA'ians are notoriously monolingual. It is largely cultural. That breeds laziness. I mean, it's gotten to the point that it's too much to ask people to know how to multiply a restaurant tab by 1.2 in order to calculate a tip - now either the restaurant provides those options for you (15, 18, 20%) or you get a nice app where you can punch in the total and it does all the scary math for you. People can complain all day long about how much they don't "get" math or "get" languages, but both are untrue. You do and can "get" them, you're just given an impetus not to, and people naturally take the path of least resistance. That is the definition of laziness. I should maybe add that I don't mean that it makes you a bad person to be lazy.

In the university I've been at for several years, we see each new cohort of freshmen is less well-read and less motivated than the year before. We read "essays" that are barely coherent drivel. Students that do service-learning complain about having to take 15-minute walks to their service sites (during the day in an extremely safe and over-policed campus). Students that study abroad in Mexico piss and moan about walking around Mexico City and Oaxaca while the 50-year old woman leading the trip is bewildered at how - ready - lazy these kids are. And though I'm at a small state school, I've also spoken to colleagues at "better" universities like Georgetown. There, a prof in the early 2000s had stopped assigning books because he could not get students to read them, and could only assign articles. If you go to a university and you are unwilling to read a book, you have made a major mistake in your life. No matter what the subject is.

The real problem is a standardized education and the fetishization of college degrees created in the postwar boom from the GI Bill and Dept of Ed loan systems. You get credentialed, but you don't get smart or educated. It's not for everybody, and we do a disservice to people by removing the dignity from trades and otherwise manual labor.

Anyway, this is all off the topic so, back to that.
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby David1917 » Thu Apr 29, 2021 1:56 am

Regarding Prof A's statement, I've skimmed this thread and skimmed the original years ago. Lots of weird arguments and bickering over the definition of "educated" and "should" and "why." Lots of attacks against him that are made by people who apparently did not read his opening paragraph where he says this is not a judgement, but a suggestion for a fulfilling life. Even some weird digressions into what is "necessary" and that being only English. This is not a utilitarian recommendation.

Perhaps it should be reworded to "Six languages to learn to enhance your life, but only if you want to and are inclined in the humanities, and it's like totes fine if you don't this is just a suggestion"

Yes, you can have a fulfilling life without learning six languages. Yes you can be smart or "educated" without doing so.

But if you have intellectual curiosity about the world around you, learning six languages will (could maybe probably) aid in that discovery. And given that, someone who has something of an authority on the subject decided on this formula. Is it for you? Maybe, maybe not.

I do think that aside from one's native language, you ought to learn the next most spoken language where you reside. Learning the ancient or archaic forms of your native is probably nice, too. Even the ability to understand Shakespeare would be a reasonable goal, for example. So that's 1.5. I would say some random and more distant language would do nothing but give you a broader understanding of the world at large, but choosing it and sticking to it if you're not interested in languages for languages' sake like Prof A is a tough sell. But if you're not a shut-in, there's probably some distant culture that's interesting to you.
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby golyplot » Thu Apr 29, 2021 2:48 am

David1917 wrote:Lots of anecdotal back-and-forth here, which does nothing for sweeping statements.

We know it is a fact that USA'ians are notoriously monolingual. It is largely cultural. That breeds laziness. I mean, it's gotten to the point that it's too much to ask people to know how to multiply a restaurant tab by 1.2 in order to calculate a tip - now either the restaurant provides those options for you (15, 18, 20%) or you get a nice app where you can punch in the total and it does all the scary math for you. People can complain all day long about how much they don't "get" math or "get" languages, but both are untrue. You do and can "get" them, you're just given an impetus not to, and people naturally take the path of least resistance. That is the definition of laziness. I should maybe add that I don't mean that it makes you a bad person to be lazy.

In the university I've been at for several years, we see each new cohort of freshmen is less well-read and less motivated than the year before. We read "essays" that are barely coherent drivel. Students that do service-learning complain about having to take 15-minute walks to their service sites (during the day in an extremely safe and over-policed campus). Students that study abroad in Mexico piss and moan about walking around Mexico City and Oaxaca while the 50-year old woman leading the trip is bewildered at how - ready - lazy these kids are. And though I'm at a small state school, I've also spoken to colleagues at "better" universities like Georgetown. There, a prof in the early 2000s had stopped assigning books because he could not get students to read them, and could only assign articles. If you go to a university and you are unwilling to read a book, you have made a major mistake in your life. No matter what the subject is.

The real problem is a standardized education and the fetishization of college degrees created in the postwar boom from the GI Bill and Dept of Ed loan systems. You get credentialed, but you don't get smart or educated. It's not for everybody, and we do a disservice to people by removing the dignity from trades and otherwise manual labor.

Anyway, this is all off the topic so, back to that.



You can call native English speakers lazy when you find a country where everyone learns Thai, Uzbek, etc.

Yes, learning English takes considerable work if it's not your native language. No, that doesn't mean that anyone who doesn't learn a useless language is lazy.
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby einzelne » Thu Apr 29, 2021 3:43 am

IronMike wrote:Because it failed as a lingua franca does not mean there is no practical reason to learn Esperanto. Why not just say you're not interested in learning it or investing the time in learning about it, instead of implying that those of us who work on Esperanto are wasting our time?


Sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. Frankly, I hadn't noticed Esperanto listed in your profile the first time you asked me about it, otherwise I would've been more measured in my response. To my defense, been unpractical doesn't necessary bear a negative connotation. A lot of good comes from totally useless things.
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby einzelne » Thu Apr 29, 2021 5:05 am

I happen to reread Deleuze's Proust et les signes this night and came across the quote which made me recall my own learning experience (not only in foreign languages). We assume that there's one magic method which would fit all and that it's just about a bad teacher or a lazy, unmotivated student. The reality is actually is more complex and mysterious. We think that our failures were but a waste of time, but what if our wasted time was an essential component of learning? To complicate things, each of us has his/her own instructive history of failures.

This is why, when we think we are wasting our time, whether out of snobbery or the dissipation of love, we are often pursuing an obscure apprenticeship until the final revelation of a truth of “lost time.” We never know how someone learns; but whatever the way, it is always by the intermediary of signs, by wasting time, and not by the assimilation of some objective content. Who knows how a schoolboy suddenly becomes “good at Latin,” which signs (if need be, those of love or even inadmissible ones) have served in his apprenticeship? We never learn from the dic- tionaries our teachers or our parents lend us.


That's why it is so difficult to come up with a good language course since they presuppose an average Joe and don't take into account our unique personalities. I think Joseph Jacotot was the first to recognize this problem: starting with an abstract idea of a student which needs to be guided by a teacher is ultimatelly doomed to failure. I would highly recommend the book The Ignorant Schoolmaster by Jacques Rancière who engages with his ideas deeply, not only pedagogically but also politically and philosophically.

PS. And another relevant quote borrowed from the preface of Feynman’s lectures on physics: But then, "The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” (Gibbon)
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby Ug_Caveman » Thu Apr 29, 2021 7:35 am

David1917 wrote:Lots of anecdotal back-and-forth here, which does nothing for sweeping statements.

We know it is a fact that USA'ians are notoriously monolingual. It is largely cultural. That breeds laziness. I mean, it's gotten to the point that it's too much to ask people to know how to multiply a restaurant tab by 1.2 in order to calculate a tip - now either the restaurant provides those options for you (15, 18, 20%) or you get a nice app where you can punch in the total and it does all the scary math for you. People can complain all day long about how much they don't "get" math or "get" languages, but both are untrue. You do and can "get" them, you're just given an impetus not to, and people naturally take the path of least resistance. That is the definition of laziness. I should maybe add that I don't mean that it makes you a bad person to be lazy.


I'm not arguing this point anymore - I refuse to be labelled as "lazy" because I struggled with language learning at school despite immense effort being put in.
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Apr 29, 2021 2:48 pm

Pikaia wrote:
rdearman wrote:This thread was started based on the musings of a hyper-polyglot...

And this has reminded me of how some CEOs of tech companies have opined that all students should study coding. It is indeed in their interest to have lots of coders to choose from when hiring!

I don't think I can add anything to the discussion other than noting that reading through it was worth it, if only for the mental image of Prof. Argüelles cackling maniacally as he becomes a billionaire off the backs of an army of Latinists :lol:
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Re: Six languages an educated person should know (Prof. Argüelles)

Postby Le Baron » Thu Apr 29, 2021 7:31 pm

einzelne wrote:
IronMike wrote:OK, your opinion.


Hey, you asked! :D No need to rehash the same old debates about Esperanto. The arguments from both sides are well known.

I never learn languages for languages sake. The cultural archive has to be really big to convince me to start a new language.
I don't have time to learn all the languages I would like to know. Heck, I don't even have enough time to read everything I want to read in the languages I already know! And since there's zero practical reason for learning Esperanto (it failed to become lingua franca), you won't change my mind.


That is probably true for the 'natural' languages most people aim to learn. However getting functional in Esperanto is so much quicker and easier that it's hardly comparable. I met a group of French people here through an Esperanto meetup, which allowed me to start actively practising French again in person. I also met a Spaniard who invited me to a birthday party and thus other people I now know for increasing Spanish contact.

There's one fellow (Spanish) I can only speak to in Esperanto because he can't speak English and his Dutch is very broken. Through him I met his wife who is a teacher at Instituto Cervantes, which has again been useful to me. Of course it doesn't mean that you can't make contacts through other means, but I did it with Esperanto which is supposed to be useless and impractical 'in the real world'. And like I said, the effort is so much reduced, why wouldn't people learn it? Most of the people learning Japanese never get to Japan and never get fully conversational, so how practical is that?
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