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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   368 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 14, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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We homeschool our kid but this might be fraying our nerves too much.

The public schools here are generally terrible, and the private schools are either religious or hippie-woo garbage that I don't want to waste time at.

There are a handful of Immersion schools, however. Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.

We're white but my thinking is

  1. Chinese Immersion School will be full of kids of more upwardly mobile Chinese immigrants
  2. Their children will be better behaved and not a toxic/criminal influence on my kids, the way median white kids in my community would be
  3. Their children will be smarter and be a positive influence on my kids
  4. The school will probably have better academics and not that much on the liberal arts/woo shit because of the Chinese parents
  5. The rest of the white kids there are sent there because their parents all know this too
  6. To the extent that learning foreign languages is useful, Chinese is probably the least useless one out of the rest of those

Yes this is racist. But also... accurate? Thoughts?

Why would Japanese or Spanish be useless?

Oh I just don't believe in language transfer skills.

They all seem useless in terms of utility. Chinese maybe slightly less so because China is at least an ascending global superpower with billions of speakers.

Languages are ultimately useless, until they aren't. I think any of the three would be a good choice. Japanese would probably have a lot of the same benefits as Chinese, and it would open your kid up to working in neat liberal democratic Japan instead of crazy and bad and oppressive China (or Taiwan, I guess). There are a lot more admittedly insular Chinese speakers in America that could be spoken to, but Japan puts out a lot more cultural output, providing something you might actually want to use the language for.

I guess part of the consideration here would be that Spanish is relatively easy for an English speaker to learn, and Japanese and Chinese are not.

I never thought I'd be someone who could converse in Japanese. I actually think at least in the US Spanish would have a great deal of utility in just dealing with people, but then the positives you list regarding the Chinese school may not be part of the Spanish-school package.

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