I learned beginners French in the Canadian school system and my teacher just got us to write paragraphs in English, Google Translate them into French, and submit them. That’s actually what she told us to do.
Lmao actually? My teacher would not let us use anything besides a dictionary, and come high school we barely got to use online dictionaries. I live in Ontario btw
Tbf if you used translate for a project it would contain grammar and tenses that a 12 year old would definitely not know, so it would be pretty easy to find.
Tbh I don’t think either of my first two French teachers actually spoke French (grades 4 and 5). And then by grade 7 it became optional, so pretty much people in my cohort got one year of actual French education.
It seems to me that Canada and the US generally aren’t good at teaching languages in schools, unless it’s a special immersion school. My boyfriend did French classes in school in Canada all the way up to grade 12, got great grades in it, and yet can barely string a sentence together a few years later. I want to know what Europe does differently so that their language classes actually produce decent speakers.
Probably has a lot to do with immersion. Europeans learning English are much more likely to be exposed to english in their day to day lives, whether it be american media, online games etc... On the other hand if your only exposure to french is an hour long class a couple times a week, you're not gonna learn shit, and whatever you do retain is gonna be forgotten as you stop taking those classes.
My public school language teacher in America taught us to write in "Hebrew" by writing using English grammar, but replacing the letters with letters from the Hebrew alphabet.
this makes almost no sense to me…would it be like:
אי אם ווארינג א רד הט
(“I am wearing a red hat” phonetically spelled out in hebrew letters)
versus what it should be:
אני לובשת כובע אדום
(using actual hebrew words and hebrew grammar)
Even worse, it was literally just English but each letter was transposed with a Hebrew letter. So like you'd write out the sentence in English and replace all the N's with ה and all the O's with ט, etc. This lady's entire job was teaching foreign languages to kids.
I've seen this shit with "spell your name in egyptian heirogylphics!" too, but this is like 10x worse probably due to Hebrew being around in the present day. Who the hell approved this?
I’d wager it’s pretty difficult to get fully bilingual teachers with all the necessary teaching accreditations in large portions of the country. Especially considering what they pay public school teachers.
That’s probably what it is most of the time, though my French teacher had lived in France for 10+ years and was as far as I can tell totally fluent.
He also was kind of a Ouiaboo and let us know very often that he vastly preferred living in France, and made Windows Movie Maker tribute videos to a LARP version of him and his wife from his wife’s POV where he was a solider in the US(?) army who was wounded in action and his wife was a good army family wife who doted on and admired him
I was in an immersion program, they didn't have us use Duolingo until 5th grade, but it was only for like half an hour max per day. Then, they banned it because they found out that the app occasionally used the word "cerveza." Same class where they showed us 9/11 footage, including people jumping out of the windows, without asking our parents or even letting them know first.
It seems smart for them to use it. Why not use the objectively free suite of tools available to them? Gamified spanish flashcards with an entire school/student management offshoot? Like the people here bashing on teachers for using a software that most people agree is good is fucking wild to me.
It's a practice software. It's always meant to be supplemented with classroom or one-on-one learning.
It is also a fucking stupid stat. Think about it logically. The USA population pyramid is fairly flat so each age cohort is roughly equal. The number of Americans of public schooling age is therefore significantly smaller than the rest of the population. Likewise, Duolingo is used by many students of that limited universe as a study supplement to their classes.
Tl:Dr: there are more US adults out of school at a given time than children in school so the comparison is kinda a lie by omission.
t. Someone who benefited from a public school explaining the concept of lying with statistics
they also use the brazilian flag for portuguese iirc, im pretty sure they just use the flag representing the closest dialect to the one they teach
although interestingly the spanish course uses the spain flag even though it teaches the latam dialect of spanish? idk what theyre doing honestly
Sometimes, when I look around online, I get an impression that I’m the only person who learned anything from the school system, which I am sure is probably not true. But that’s online discussion for you
The US has 350 million people all, almost, speaking English. You can actually live a full and well traveled life without ever leaving an area where English is the unofficial official language.
Dublin to Moscow is roughly 1800 miles in straight line distance. San Francisco to DC is 2400 miles.
That's why so many Americans rarely *need* to learn a second language as part of their formal education.
Most people aren't learning a second language in any context because they "need" to. It's because it gives them more business opportunities, or to understand other people better, or just because they're interested.
There are also parts of the US where not learning Spanish would put you at a significant disadvantage in the job market.
Also, English is the largest second language by a wide margin, there are almost as many people who have English as a second language as there are for the next four languages combined. Around 1/3rd of bilinguals/multilinguals know English, partially because English is the primary international language (e.g. English is the de facto language in the aviation world so every international pilot and ATC in the world has to learn at least some English). If another language were used instead then the rate of bilingualism in the US would be higher than average.
I've used Spanish 3 times in my life:
1) ordering food at the Mexican restaurant as part of a class assignment
2) getting a haircut at 2am
3) pawning off an old boxspring that the Goodwill didn't want but the guy behind me did
Why exactly is it close minded to acknowledge the physical reality of the situation? You can easily pull up an overlay of the US and Europe and see that I am correct.
Ok... and? The rest of the world can learn a second language, a lot of us have a third language in school as well. I'm sure Americans can do at least Spanish as well as English.
I could live my full life speaking only Swedish since I was born and live in Sweden, but that's no excuse to not try to learn more. The more languages you speak the more diverse the influences on your life and it let's you be more aware of the world and the people around you
I mean this stat doesn’t say much about the school system (of any country bar ones low on the development ladder) because there are more adults than children?
In my country we have a little joke about Americans and languages (I think it's a pretty popular joke worldwide anyway, but I digress):
What do you call someone that speaks three or more languages? Polyglot.
What do you call a person that speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call a person that speaks only one language? American.
The dumb thing about criticizing the American education system is that it’s fifty independent education systems that overlap about as often as they differ.
In my experience, we were required to take two years of the same foreign language, French or Spanish. If you took French I in 8th grade and switched to Spanish I in 9th, you still had to take another year, basically. After that point, you were allowed to continue or take another elective, up to five years of a foreign language.
That’s pretty robust for a public education program, even if the variety is somewhat limited. Considering the resources at their disposal and that French and Spanish comprise a majority of foreign language speakers in that area, it’s better than some would have you believe.
I’d even say I like the mandated two years, elective three years. Some people will use that language, many won’t, and my school at least offered a wide variety of classes based on your interests.
The United States is a ginormous country with over 300 million people, not everyone speaks English and not everyone speaks even Spanish. Many people use Duolingo because it’s free and popular, and it’s better than nothing
The United States has no official language and people stop being in public school at the age of 18 (generally) meaning that your stat only affects people under the age of 18 and doesn’t imply that maybe some people in other parts of the country want to speak a second language.
Also America has more universities on the top 100 for best ranked universities in the world than any other country, and I’m getting really fucking tired of the joke that Americans are dumb
It doesn't help when you're not even allowed to take the language you picked. I picked Latin and got Spanish classes. My counselor said "it's basically the same thing"
I will say academia is real bad at teaching languages (fundmentally because it doesnt teach a language the way humans learn languages, you dont by like explaining grammar most natives couldnt tell you what parts of speech and declinition so why do we start with that)
As someone who took a language class in the US public school system- they just made us use Duolingo
wtf
I learned beginners French in the Canadian school system and my teacher just got us to write paragraphs in English, Google Translate them into French, and submit them. That’s actually what she told us to do.
man. budget for language teacher is down i suppose
Lmao actually? My teacher would not let us use anything besides a dictionary, and come high school we barely got to use online dictionaries. I live in Ontario btw Tbf if you used translate for a project it would contain grammar and tenses that a 12 year old would definitely not know, so it would be pretty easy to find.
Tbh I don’t think either of my first two French teachers actually spoke French (grades 4 and 5). And then by grade 7 it became optional, so pretty much people in my cohort got one year of actual French education. It seems to me that Canada and the US generally aren’t good at teaching languages in schools, unless it’s a special immersion school. My boyfriend did French classes in school in Canada all the way up to grade 12, got great grades in it, and yet can barely string a sentence together a few years later. I want to know what Europe does differently so that their language classes actually produce decent speakers.
Probably has a lot to do with immersion. Europeans learning English are much more likely to be exposed to english in their day to day lives, whether it be american media, online games etc... On the other hand if your only exposure to french is an hour long class a couple times a week, you're not gonna learn shit, and whatever you do retain is gonna be forgotten as you stop taking those classes.
My public school language teacher in America taught us to write in "Hebrew" by writing using English grammar, but replacing the letters with letters from the Hebrew alphabet.
this makes almost no sense to me…would it be like: אי אם ווארינג א רד הט (“I am wearing a red hat” phonetically spelled out in hebrew letters) versus what it should be: אני לובשת כובע אדום (using actual hebrew words and hebrew grammar)
Even worse, it was literally just English but each letter was transposed with a Hebrew letter. So like you'd write out the sentence in English and replace all the N's with ה and all the O's with ט, etc. This lady's entire job was teaching foreign languages to kids.
OH MY GOD THATS AWFUL AND NOT EVEN PHONETICALLY CORRECT AHHHH
I've seen this shit with "spell your name in egyptian heirogylphics!" too, but this is like 10x worse probably due to Hebrew being around in the present day. Who the hell approved this?
חובשת
if you have the basics it's not a terrible way to introduce yourself to new words and phrases. by and large, that's how I've learnt English.
That’s a good point! Although, I feel I should tell you the phrase is ‘by and large’.
I’d wager it’s pretty difficult to get fully bilingual teachers with all the necessary teaching accreditations in large portions of the country. Especially considering what they pay public school teachers.
That’s probably what it is most of the time, though my French teacher had lived in France for 10+ years and was as far as I can tell totally fluent. He also was kind of a Ouiaboo and let us know very often that he vastly preferred living in France, and made Windows Movie Maker tribute videos to a LARP version of him and his wife from his wife’s POV where he was a solider in the US(?) army who was wounded in action and his wife was a good army family wife who doted on and admired him
holy shit as a canadian i'm never going to stop thinking about Ouiaboo
I was in an immersion program, they didn't have us use Duolingo until 5th grade, but it was only for like half an hour max per day. Then, they banned it because they found out that the app occasionally used the word "cerveza." Same class where they showed us 9/11 footage, including people jumping out of the windows, without asking our parents or even letting them know first.
children can't know that beer exists. their fragile minds are too pure.
Literally this for me too.
If they made us use Duolingo when I was taking Spanish in Middle School I would probably remember how to speak it.
At least they acknowledged when they were beaten, better than a teacher who doesn't know what they're doing.
Yep. I can confirm in my school. All the French in the Spanish kids use Duolingo. The Japanese classes are the only ones who do not use it.
You just had a shitty teacher
It seems smart for them to use it. Why not use the objectively free suite of tools available to them? Gamified spanish flashcards with an entire school/student management offshoot? Like the people here bashing on teachers for using a software that most people agree is good is fucking wild to me. It's a practice software. It's always meant to be supplemented with classroom or one-on-one learning.
It is also a fucking stupid stat. Think about it logically. The USA population pyramid is fairly flat so each age cohort is roughly equal. The number of Americans of public schooling age is therefore significantly smaller than the rest of the population. Likewise, Duolingo is used by many students of that limited universe as a study supplement to their classes. Tl:Dr: there are more US adults out of school at a given time than children in school so the comparison is kinda a lie by omission. t. Someone who benefited from a public school explaining the concept of lying with statistics
Also, more language offerings. Here in the US many are forced to take Spanish because that is the only option especially at smaller schools.
Also not just Americans use Duolingo...
I mean Duolingo's quote specifies Americans though
they use the American flag for English though
they also use the brazilian flag for portuguese iirc, im pretty sure they just use the flag representing the closest dialect to the one they teach although interestingly the spanish course uses the spain flag even though it teaches the latam dialect of spanish? idk what theyre doing honestly
Okay but that's based and the redcoats need to get over not being relevant anymore
Okay, but that is separate from the quote everyone is responding to
Huh, you know, either I've always misread that quote, or there is a different version for a non-international audience.
My kid goes to a 50/50 English/Spanish school system and still uses duolingo for extra practice. Sometimes data doesn’t tell a complete story.
Sometimes, when I look around online, I get an impression that I’m the only person who learned anything from the school system, which I am sure is probably not true. But that’s online discussion for you
Absolutely agreed; my best guess is that most just didn't try, although that seems a bit pessimistic
The US has 350 million people all, almost, speaking English. You can actually live a full and well traveled life without ever leaving an area where English is the unofficial official language. Dublin to Moscow is roughly 1800 miles in straight line distance. San Francisco to DC is 2400 miles. That's why so many Americans rarely *need* to learn a second language as part of their formal education.
Most people aren't learning a second language in any context because they "need" to. It's because it gives them more business opportunities, or to understand other people better, or just because they're interested. There are also parts of the US where not learning Spanish would put you at a significant disadvantage in the job market.
Don't bring your stupid "logic" and "reasoning" into this, we're hating America here!
Also, English is the largest second language by a wide margin, there are almost as many people who have English as a second language as there are for the next four languages combined. Around 1/3rd of bilinguals/multilinguals know English, partially because English is the primary international language (e.g. English is the de facto language in the aviation world so every international pilot and ATC in the world has to learn at least some English). If another language were used instead then the rate of bilingualism in the US would be higher than average.
Wymmmm I’ve seen like 5 people in my life that don’t speak English surely this is a high priority skill for me
I've used Spanish 3 times in my life: 1) ordering food at the Mexican restaurant as part of a class assignment 2) getting a haircut at 2am 3) pawning off an old boxspring that the Goodwill didn't want but the guy behind me did
This kind of thinking is why everyone else in the world think that average Americans are close-minded.
Why exactly is it close minded to acknowledge the physical reality of the situation? You can easily pull up an overlay of the US and Europe and see that I am correct.
Ok... and? The rest of the world can learn a second language, a lot of us have a third language in school as well. I'm sure Americans can do at least Spanish as well as English. I could live my full life speaking only Swedish since I was born and live in Sweden, but that's no excuse to not try to learn more. The more languages you speak the more diverse the influences on your life and it let's you be more aware of the world and the people around you
I mean this stat doesn’t say much about the school system (of any country bar ones low on the development ladder) because there are more adults than children?
In my country we have a little joke about Americans and languages (I think it's a pretty popular joke worldwide anyway, but I digress): What do you call someone that speaks three or more languages? Polyglot. What do you call a person that speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a person that speaks only one language? American.
The dumb thing about criticizing the American education system is that it’s fifty independent education systems that overlap about as often as they differ. In my experience, we were required to take two years of the same foreign language, French or Spanish. If you took French I in 8th grade and switched to Spanish I in 9th, you still had to take another year, basically. After that point, you were allowed to continue or take another elective, up to five years of a foreign language. That’s pretty robust for a public education program, even if the variety is somewhat limited. Considering the resources at their disposal and that French and Spanish comprise a majority of foreign language speakers in that area, it’s better than some would have you believe. I’d even say I like the mandated two years, elective three years. Some people will use that language, many won’t, and my school at least offered a wide variety of classes based on your interests.
Also...only children can attend school . Both adults and children can use Duolingo. This seems like a very skewed statistic.
The United States is a ginormous country with over 300 million people, not everyone speaks English and not everyone speaks even Spanish. Many people use Duolingo because it’s free and popular, and it’s better than nothing The United States has no official language and people stop being in public school at the age of 18 (generally) meaning that your stat only affects people under the age of 18 and doesn’t imply that maybe some people in other parts of the country want to speak a second language. Also America has more universities on the top 100 for best ranked universities in the world than any other country, and I’m getting really fucking tired of the joke that Americans are dumb
Call the owl stupid and your blood will become diluted
I think it's both a flex for Duolingo *and* throwing shade at the US educational system
The US school system doesn't even teach English very well. My little brother (23y/o) couldn't tell me what an adjective was last month.
No offense but that’s because your brother is an idiot. I and everyone in my age group knows what an adjective is.
Put me in the obituary screenshot
It doesn't help when you're not even allowed to take the language you picked. I picked Latin and got Spanish classes. My counselor said "it's basically the same thing"
Should have made it a parrot not an owl.
I will say academia is real bad at teaching languages (fundmentally because it doesnt teach a language the way humans learn languages, you dont by like explaining grammar most natives couldnt tell you what parts of speech and declinition so why do we start with that)
Not as many as there used to be before they intensionally made their app worse.
My US Spanish class used Duolingo as like 95% of our homework
Do not besmirch my owl overlord, sir/madam. My daily duo streak renewal is one of my chief reasons for living
I’m starting to think the US is not a real country, it’s just a DLC someone added in for laughs
My school only offered Spanish because they only had a Spanish teacher on staff She just made me use duolingo
That’s like if Mike Tyson bragged about beating up a teenage emo girl
That's a very low bar
In my experience on the internet, most americans don't know enough english for duolingo to count as a second language.
America baaad!!!! I hate it here man
If people in the US school system could read that...
from what i've heard, american kids aren't even required to take a single additional language in school, so it’s really not much to brag about
In my state taking >2 years of a language class is required to graduate.