I really didn’t like taking a foreign language class when I was in school. I saw automatic translators on Star Trek and figured our technology would catch up to that. I was not alone. There’s a story, perhaps not completely true, that goes something like this. In 1956 the computer people said we would have 100% perfect translators in 10 years. 1966 rolls around and the same people say they need just 10 more years and they will be better than 99% accurate. In 1976 the computer folks were a bit more humble. They said in 10 more years computers will be able to translate successfully more than 95% of the time. Thus it was that in 1986 a Russian-English translator was ready for its test. The input was “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. This was translated into Russian and then the Russian back into English. The output was “The vodka is good but the meat is rotten”. Here is where you apply the worn out warning “something was lost in the translation”. More than 30 years later we might be getting close. If you try the same Russian-English experiment on Google it will come out pretty close. If you do a 3-language experiment you might get depressed again.
If I had the ability to formulate foreign language instruction in high schools I would do something like this.
First Semester Freshman Year – Latin. Emphasis on the phrases we used every day like “de facto” or “et cetera”. Cover conjugations and declensions just enough to know that they are there.
First Half Second Semester Freshman Year – Greek. Emphasis on the Greek alphabet. Math and other classes will use these symbols and it would be useful to not fear them.
Second Half Second Semester Freshman Year – A very shallow examination of other languages including Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Kanji, Mandarin, Cantonese, Swahili, Urdu, maybe others.
Sophomore and Junior years – Learn one foreign language. If you pick Spanish you will be expected to have lots of learning opportunities particularly if you live in the Southwest. Your instruction might otherwise be limited to computer classes such as Babbel or Berlitz.
Senior year – Need to produce some writing that shows a minimal proficiency in that language. For example, you might write a non-fiction article about Germany in German and be able to translate it to English for a suitable proctor. Alternatively, if you can spend 4 weeks before senior year in Germany, that might suffice. One problem with that idea is that you might pick Dutch as your foreign language and you could easily speak only English for 4 weeks in Amsterdam.
There is the problem of finding suitable teachers. In my school the story was that the Russian teacher was pleased with his students who were probably smarter students in the school. He gave almost everyone an “A”. The jocks found out that taking the Russian class was easy so they all signed up for it and the teacher was not happy. He gave out a lot of “D” and “F” grades. No one signed up for Russian. The teacher was gone.
