I mean the whole school I went through kept nailing in our heads how much a foreign language would benefit you. I guess this went under the noses of whoever like teaching kids to balance a checkbook.

Go on radio.garden and try to find non-english music. My point is it's wild how much English has become a common language worldwide, even if it's not the first language

If every state had a different language they'd be more like europeans that have second and third languages as a normal thing. But it's almost all English, everywhere all the time unless you are near Mexico.

Because the system is designed to make it so you never leave and you never have the upper hand.

Ok so well then all the work is on OUR kids then and not the rest of the worlds kids to learn American? Why is the world so unfair to USA? We are too big of a country, it is unrealistic to learn languages, even one is hard given how rural and unique the American countryside is. The only hope we have is if pickup trucks evolve to be able to speak for us and keep us connected when we finally become unable to learn even a single language.

It hasn't really been an economic necessity or cultural priority like other countries.

Most countries who have a population who speak more than one language usually either have a variety of languages spoken within/near the country or rely on ESL speakers to participate in the international workforce.

With English being the current lingua franca, Americans already know the current dominant language. There is really only one major language which is relevant to neighbors, but Americans are usually in the more dominant economic position and there is a cultural aversion to adopting Spanish more.

Because it would upset the racists (republicans)

I'd say because half of america's goals involve not understanding other cultures and believing whatever nonsense the corporate overlords want to say about them.

I still have to laugh at when american's went on chinese tiktok to work around the possible bans, and the chinese were all like "wait, you really do have to pay out the nose for an ambulance ride, I thought that was propoganda by our government" meanwhile a lot of american's were learning half of the horrors of china were extremely overstated or manipulated.

Americans always have the upper hand in other countries by simply speaking English louder and slower until our needs are met.

Back in the renaissance ancient Greek and Latin were needed to study ancient texts, so knowing them was needed for university. These requirements lasted into the 20th century so high schools taught it for college track students. These days they'll take any language. The methods of teaching and the structural contours of this shape how language learning is thought of to this day

We needed ~"3" levels of language classes to graduate in my school (7th and 8th grade effectively counted as 1 level, so it was really 4 years). You could elect to take extra if you wanted.

In my own experience, if you pick up another language but don't use it on an at least a semi-regular basis, your skills in it get real rusty real fast.

English has 1.5B fluent speakers spread across the entire globe. Hardly an insular language.

This is far more about discrimination - freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services, segregating English speakers from minority speakers, abolishing First Nations language and culture.

Also very important to keep Americans from reading foreign language press.

Rednote's been a fascinating natural experiment in cross cultural communication that we need to repeat at scale

meanwhile a lot of american’s were learning half of the horrors of china were extremely overstated or manipulated.

Crazy how quickly the Chinese travel vlogs get demonetized on YouTube. Google execs really do not want you knowing how nice East Asian cities are.

Because the US educational system is not made to give students the upper hand anymore, it's meant to make yall obedient and dumb enough so that what's going on politically could happen.
An educated public would've never voted for Trump.

Learning a second language takes a lot of time and effort, and I don’t think the US likes either of those things, not the funding required for them.

I know it varies from state to state, but where I’ve lived it’s an “elective” in that you got to pick which language to take of the available options (some schools might only have two choices, others four or even five), but taking a certain number of foreign language credits was required for graduation. If you wanted to go beyond the minimum and had room in your schedule you could.

Same way where I grew up in South Dakota, except each school only taught one language.

This is the correct answer.

If you live in SE Asia for example you speak your local language at home but you need to learn English for work.

If you already speak English at home then you already know how to speak English at work.

Everyone coming up with conspiratorial reasons why this is not the case but it's much simple than that. It's not feasible and it's expensive and the returns aren't really worth it.

Kids in school have a bunch of other subjects they have to learn besides foreign languages. You can add one or two languages but then at some point you will need to remove other subjects to add more or you need to keep kids in school even more. Both are not really feasible. Then you need to hire teachers for all these new languages which most places won't do.

Another issue is with the way they teach languages in schools. They expect you to pass a test and not actually learn the language so a lot of the languages will not "stick" as the students lack immersion and practice with that language. I can speak for myself, I have learned two languages besides my native language in school: French and English. I had French since 2nd grade, which is 10 years of French classes and English since 5th grade which is 7 years of English classes. Today I can speak English fluently and like 3 words of French. The difference was that I was always immersed in English, though video games, movies, songs and so on. Not so much with French. I have noticed the same pattern with most of my friends and family members.

Wait...

Sorry, but I really am failing to make the connection between how learning a second language as an optional class leads to "freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services". You don't even need to speak English to access those most of the time. In my city, nearly all public services are available in English and Spanish at the minimum, and frequently Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian as well.

The problem in the US is that besides English, you might be exposed to some Spanish. And not much else unless you seek it out. Or have immigrant friends. Without consistent practice, and some more native speakers, any learned language just rots away.

I learned German for several years in college. It was fun. Went to a local brewhouse with my classmates and talked in simple german while we had dinner, it was a good time. Now, other than my own attempts at saving my whithered skill, and a couple bedtime songs for my kids, I don't use it.

And even when I was better at it, using it as a tourist in germany was moderately helpful, but it wouldn't have been nearly enough skill to pass any kind of immigration language proficiency exams.

Because school in the US isn't about creating a well educated population.

As someone who is Chinese and living in the US, Americans who have not been to China overestimate its shittiness and people who have been to China once or twice overestimate its glamour. Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes. I've been to a tea plantation where there were a total of six electric plugs in the entire village and the toilets flushed with a bucket which had to be filled from a pump outside. It's not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it's a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US, where at least people usually have electricity and running water.

I really am failing to make the connection between how learning a second language as an optional class leads to “freezing migrant families out of public sector jobs and services”.

American public school kids don't normally get access to electives until at 6th grade (sometimes not until 8th or 9th grade depending on the state and district). So "optional" in theory is a deliberate effort to delay bilingual learning in practice.

Mono-lingual populations are more easily primed towards hostility against minority speakers. So your senior staff is biased towards English as a primary language when hiring the next generation of public workers. And these workers are increasingly both unable and unwilling to provide services in secondary languages. This creates a natural barrier for any minority speaker from even interacting with public bureaucracies.

In my city, nearly all public services are available in English and Spanish at the minimum, and frequently Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian as well.

Bigger and more egalitarian cities, with large minority-language populations can staff their departments with fluent minority-language speakers. And under more liberal and egalitarian governments, they do. But as the population grows more reactionary, these kinds of skills get drummed out of the bureaucracy.

This isn't even a new problem in government.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 2,500 troops Tuesday about the foreign-language skills he championed as a congressman, an active-duty Army officer was complaining about the paucity of military personnel who can speak anything other than English.

But it has become an increasingly domestic issue, as fascists take command of the bureaucratic core.

On March 1, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 13166, which designated English as the United States’ official language. This Executive Order is no longer theoretically in effect, and existing federal civil rights laws and regulations require language access for individuals with limited English proficiency in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.

Nonetheless, numerous federal entities are pursuing policies prioritizing English as the only language, effectively reducing or eliminating Spanish.

Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes.

One of the more notable achievements of the last two decades of Chinese economic improvement has been the degree of urbanization, particularly in the western end of the country. This used to be a point of criticism among western economists (Chinese Ghost Cities being a popular meme during the '00s/'10s). Now we just don't talk about Chengdu or Lhasa or Lanzhuo at all.

It’s not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it’s a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US

In my experience, having done a little traveling through Appalachia and the northern end of the Gulf Coast, urban migration has solved a lot of the back country issues by hollowing out the country's interior. If we didn't build a highway through a chunk of the state, people just stopped living there.

Chinese rural communities have experienced a similar hollowing out, particularly in the 80s and 90s when the prosperity on the coasts fully eclipsed the poverty of the western interior. But because agricultural labor was seen as critical to social stability, the state simply refused to let people leave. The end result was an enormous black market population that became a nightmare to manage. And so the late Deng and Hu governments (and early Xi government - although by then much of the work was done) spent a significant amount of resources and labor back filling rural development. Hu, in particular, was a champion of the rural west thanks to his policy of low taxes and high investment.

This didn't eliminate the developmental black holes on the Chinese map. But the expansion westward was its own kind of economic revolution. One that culminated in a virtual elimination of the poverty the country had become known for during the Reagan Era.

The difference in approach - demanding people move to the cities rather than demanding public spending move to the country - is a critical point of divergence between American Neoliberal and Chinese Socialist domestic policies.

Some of the immigrant generation learnt English, but preferred to speak their native languages, especially at home. Their children largely grew up bilingual, but many chose to speak English, even to their immigrant parents. When this bilingual generation established their own homes, they usually spoke English at home. “Consequently, by the third generation, the prevalent pattern is English monolingualism, and knowledge of the mother tongue for most ethnics is fragmentary at best,” the study said.

I do have to agree with you there. Though too much urban migration does come with its own problems. Chief among them that I observe is that it severely depressed wages and lack of work. China is moving through its own sort of gilded age right now with rapid technological advancement and extreme inequality.

For a purportedly socialist country, China lacks a lot of state infrastructure that comes along with that. The USSR guaranteed work and bread, at a minimum (mostly), but in China, a curious sight emerged which I observed in some of the poorer neighbourhoods of Hangzhou: old people pushing around carts of discarded cardboard boxes and tin cans. They weren't employed as cleaning workers. They were collecting these to sell for their recycling value. And even though the Westerner might laugh at the notion of making a living collecting literal garbage for pennies, it only takes fourteen pennies to make a yuan and ¥5 will buy a bowl of rice, fending off starvation for another twelve hours. Now, homeless people collecting rubbish to sell for scrap does also happen in the US, but the US at least doesn't claim to be a socialist country.

China has no functional social safety net, government assistance is minimal, and workers are exploited by a ruling class of wealthy elites with minimal interference from the state, in a shockingly similar way to capitalist countries. You cannot even form a real trade union in China, because all big companies are already "unionised" with workers represented by farcically corrupt organisations which work in tandem with the capitalist bosses.

I will give one more example: Coco is a nationwide chain of beverage stalls which sell tea, coffee, and juice drinks. I walked past a location in Shenzhen which was advertising that they were hiring. Their offer of pay: ¥200 a day, for a 10-hour shift, six days a week. In one of the most expensive cities in the country. I took a photo of this but I couldn't find it to post.

They could, if they were economically relevant on the continent. Spanish and Portuguese are far more relevant when interfacing with international trade in the Western Hemisphere.

I pointed out cultural reasons for maintaining a language as well. The USA, as a country, has no current cultural reason to have portions of the country maintain a different language.

Quebec isn't Canada.

Having to get documents translated is a cost of doing business in Canada. You don't have to speak both languages to conduct business in Canada.

But we're talking about economic utility. Quebec isn't Canada; it is much smaller.

In contrast, Mexico has a GDP near Canada as a whole and there isn't a bilingual legal framework to support business deals. Furthermore, there are more Spanish speaking countries to make deals with in the Western Hemisphere; the closest that French has is Haiti.

Around me, the only language spoken with any frequency other than English is Spanish. In a half dozen different varieties. Even that wasn't all that common until, maybe, 10 years ago. About midway through President Trump's first administration.

Most schools encourage kids to take a language, but they are kinda a use it, or lose it thing. Unless you just happen to be part of a community or household that speaks a language other than English, you are unlikely to need it.

When I was a kid in public school, everybody had to take a foreign language, the elective part was that we had a choice as to which language we took. Some chose French. Some chose Spanish. If you came from money, you also had the option to take foreign language courses at participating colleges, which opened up a lot of other options like German, Japanese, and Latin, amongst others.

Has that changed? Or perhaps it's different in different jurisdictions?

For me personally, I wish Latin had been an option for me, as it's used extensively in biology and it would have been incredibly helpful. In terms of foreign language courses I've taken, I've had Spanish, French, and German. I don't use any of them, except on rare occasion I'll hear/see something in Spanish that I can vaguely understand the highlights of given enough time. French is pretty much 100% useless in my day to day life. German has been helpful once or twice when watching a movie or listening to music, but otherwise, useless as well.

Keep in mind, however smart you are, most people are not that smart. They'll never be curious enough or smart enough to learn another language. They don't have enough exposure to another language to really remember it. It's basically of waste of their time and educational money. I'm all for teaching these things in schools as electives, but forcing kids to learn multiple different languages? I think we should have universal/single payer healthcare, better medicare/medicaid, free school lunches (and breakfasts), true livable minimum wages, and a myriad other things first.

But if you're looking at an American choosing a language based on potential job opportunities, Spanish is likely going to offer far more upside than French unless that American has certain ties which would make French more relevant to them. For large parts of the USA, knowing Spanish will be more locally relevant than knowing French.

It isn't saying that French is a bad language for Americans to learn, but that most of the country would likely see Spanish as more economically useful.

In Canada when I was growing up, if you didnt take french immersion, they made you take 1 french language class a year up until grade 10.

They also taught Japanese in my highschool and for senior year if you'd taken them all you could go on a trip to Japan.

The college I graduated from required a year of foreign language for graduation -- actually take it and pass, not just test out of it.

OK, that's not quite true. For some reason, the mathematics department was grouped with the languages for purposes of this requirement, so you could take a year of calculus in lieu of a foreign language if you preferred.

Unless you were a math major. Classes in your major didn't count, so all math majors absolutely had to take a foreign language.

Unless you were a dual major like math-physics. Dual majors could apply classes from both majors towards distribution requirements. I knew several "math" majors who took just enough physics classes to qualify as a dual major for the express purpose of not having to study a language.

For me personally, I wish Latin had been an option for me, as it's used extensively in biology and it would have been incredibly helpful.

My wife and I studied Latin in middle school and high school.

My kids were also able to take Latin in school.

Rather than list all the benefits of learning Latin, I found this, Top 10 Reasons For Studying Latin, which says it better than I could.

I would struggle to translate anything today (although I still know that all of Gaul is divided into three parts), but I know I have benefited from an improved understanding of English grammar and vocabulary.

Fight for Latin in your schools!

Generally not till highschool or college.

So you're old enough that it doesn't come easy and generally no one retains much without a lot of effort.

Japan tries to teach everyone English and it does not work well. Most people don't want to learn it and the way they teach it is also to a test not to communication. I have no faith that the same wouldn't happen in the US.

If you don't live in a border state the chances of using a second language enough to really learn it well and become proficient are really small unless you have close family members that speak it.

I took a couple of years of Spanish in high school but live about 12 hours from the Mexican border so I didn't use it enough to retain much.

We didn't have any foreign language classes until highschool. We had one month in 5th grade (~11 years old) where we went over some French, Spanish, and German like once a week. By the time I got to highschool, the only options were Spanish and French and I was only able to get into French due to the way they sorted people. That was fine for me, though, since I went to Canada basically every year. These were not, however, required. Some tracks would have things like Ag Sciences and more vocational classes instead. I graduated in the late '90s.

At least in my time, people going the "college prep" route generally were expected to take two years of a language in highschool. I moved for my final year to a bigger city and more affluent area and they had French, Spanish, Latin, German, and Japanese, though at least some of those were being phased out the next year (I think Japanese may have been phased out the year I moved there, but I had already had 3 years of French and was more focused on music classes as I thought I wanted to be a music teacher).