Learning a Foreign Language
... makes you smarter and more cosmopolitan. Duh.
Now let me be blunt. America does not want anyone to speak anything other than English and does everything it can to stamp out other languages. It works like this. Draconian policies attack people who speak other languages, such as Native Americans and immigrants. Almost all foreign language classes in schools are designed to fail. Why? America doesn't introduce them until after the window starts to close. That happens at the onset of puberty and most schools don't offer a foreign language until high school. If they REALLY wanted people to learn those languages, they would introduce them in preschool or kindergarten like all the countries with actual foreign language programs that produce actual speakers of multiple languages.
If you have kids and you want them to learn a foreign language, introduce it immediately and give them lots of immersion experience. Look for a bilingual babysitter, learn a heritage language as a family, join a language nest, choose an immersion preschool, move to a civilized nation, etc. Because if you wait for the public school to do it, the chance of success approaches nil. The only people who are good at learning foreign languages after childhood are folks with high linguistic intelligence and/or those whose window doesn't close normally.
Now let me be blunt. America does not want anyone to speak anything other than English and does everything it can to stamp out other languages. It works like this. Draconian policies attack people who speak other languages, such as Native Americans and immigrants. Almost all foreign language classes in schools are designed to fail. Why? America doesn't introduce them until after the window starts to close. That happens at the onset of puberty and most schools don't offer a foreign language until high school. If they REALLY wanted people to learn those languages, they would introduce them in preschool or kindergarten like all the countries with actual foreign language programs that produce actual speakers of multiple languages.
If you have kids and you want them to learn a foreign language, introduce it immediately and give them lots of immersion experience. Look for a bilingual babysitter, learn a heritage language as a family, join a language nest, choose an immersion preschool, move to a civilized nation, etc. Because if you wait for the public school to do it, the chance of success approaches nil. The only people who are good at learning foreign languages after childhood are folks with high linguistic intelligence and/or those whose window doesn't close normally.