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PaperclipPerfector  21hr ago (text post)   851 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 22, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Why is second language education so routinely terrible in the United States? (not sure if it is like this in other countries as well, but speaking to what I know). Not only do students almost never achieve fluency after nearly two decades in the system (grade school through college), but the entire academic structure seems completely in denial about what actually is effective at generating fluency. Research on second language acquisition has consistently shown that immersion based approaches with a small amount of grammar at early levels is much more effective than the grammar/translation method. Yet every language class I've been in, from middle school on has been laser focused on verb conjugations, and direct translations. I can excuse this at the high school level because teachers aren't exposed to the latest pedagogical research. But at universities where part of the job of many of these instructors is pedagogical research, this approach is frankly embarrassing and a huge waste of student's time.

I have two theories on why this might be the case. Firstly, immersion learning doesn't really lend itself to test-taking, which is a necessary part of the academic system. Secondly, there is no incentive to actually teach language effectively at scale: Americans don't need to understand foreign languages, and the ones that do want to become diplomats or do business in other countries eventually seek out immersion approaches on their own.

I think this applies in a lesser sense to the entire educational structure in the US, baring maybe doctorate level education. There's so much useless crap in the system that doesn't help with the learning or retention of relevant information. Bryan Caplan makes a compelling case in The Case Against Education that this is by design because the point of education is signaling. I think he's mainly correct, which is why the lib bandying of education as a panacea to society's problems makes me want to tear my hair out.

I'm not convinced it's America. A lot of countries seem to have working mass English education, with some notable exceptions being Japan, to a lesser extent China, and historically (though not anymore) France. At the same time, a lot of European countries force kids to learn a third language at school too, and at least in Germany I have not observed that going any better than second-language instruction in anglophone countries.

The best-fit model for this is something like "school does nothing, and kids will learn a language if and only if they need the pop culture of that language". The rare examples of masses failing to learn English are just the rare countries that produce enough good stuff of their own.

If you really want to doompill, America can barely teach people english, much less a second language.

As much as I wouldn't mind hearing French or German in casual parlance in my day to day wanderings, I think we've got a ways to go.

(I hate the New York Times and expended an unholy amount of work trying to find an archived version of that article.)

Also, there are alot of historical reasons as to why second languages were stamped out.

In Canada, we have French Immersion schooling, where students are to speak, and be spoken to, only in French from kindergarten to gr 9, and from grades 10-12 are to take some high school courses in French (French, and usual history, and gym in slacker schools). I was involved in this system for years, as a student and then as a teacher. It doesn't work. It's effective at the early stages because the bar for "early stage speaker" is so low, in the same way that you can do almost anything at the gym if you are a total beginner and still see results.

"Immersion" means "oral language only," but the only people who learn languages that way are toddlers. After age 3 the paths of those who can read, those who are read-to, and those who get only oral language are set, and the latter group are never going to be good at language (among English-speaker, these are the people who seen a movie last night where a guy drownded). The midwit meme would show the midwit saying "actually, having the sort of parents who read to you is what makes you good at reading, not the reading itself," but it's definitely the reading. Spoken language flies by too quickly for you to grasp the nuances of the grammar, and your conversational environment is extremely limited in the sorts of topics it covers- home, maybe work; in school, French immersion students know all the different words for binders, folders, duotangs, etc, but that isn't very useful on les rues. The only way to broaden your vocabulary and build even a descriptive theory of grammar is to read widely and see the different constructions so you can look back at them and puzzle over them a little bit every time, which compounds into understanding. In English, when this doesn't happen, you get "what I wish I knew before I started med school," "I swum in the pool," "irregardless," "the ancestral tenants," etc. And that's after 25 or 30 years of immersion- with little kids, after a couple of years of immersion, you get "Last day we goed at school," which is how most immersion students sound when they speak foreign languages.

My theory of language learning is that you can't learn the way a small child does if you are not a small child. Adults improve their native language skills by reading and writing, and so foreign language learning needs to yank you up to read/write level as fast as possible, and that requires boring grammar drills and vocab practice (with translation exercises being the funnest possible combination of these) until you become literate in the language, at which point you get better very quickly. But since boring grammar drills are boring, few people make it out of this stage.

So language classes don't work because in North America, school is supposed to be fun or stress-free or whatever, and so language teachers have to play restaurant or grocery store with the kids, and these allow everyone to learn maybe 15 words in 90 minutes, which is six minutes per word, assuming no one forgets anything. So taking a couple of classes in highschool will never get the average person there, just as gym class won't make you fit. As Napoleon himself complained: "Since sixt week i learn the Englich and i do not any progress. Six week do fourty and two day. If might have learn fivity word for day I could know it two thusands and two hundred. It is in the dictionary more of fourty thousand; even he could must twinty bout much of tems for know it our hundred and twenty week, which do more two years. After this you shall agree that to study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged." If a genius on St Helena (nothing else to do) couldn't do it, why would a vaped-out TikTokker in grade 10 be able to do it?

PS: The immersion-equivalent for teaching native English speakers is called "whole language," and it bears much of the responsibility for the terrible literacy results sweeping the continent. So if we don't trust English-immersion to teach English speakers English, why would we trust immersion to teach foreign languages?

French immersion students know all the different words for binders, folders, duotangs, etc, but that isn't very useful on les rues.

Is this just kindergarden / early elementary level? Otherwise I'd expect them to pick up some vocabulary related to math, science, history, art... the stuff they're supposed to be learning while at school. Reading classical literature and writing essays about it in French should help too.

If a genius on St Helena (nothing else to do) couldn't do it, why would a vaped-out TikTokker in grade 10 be able to do it?

If Napoleon's English was that bad, how did he communicate with his best friend? Was this a teenager who randomly knew French, or did she struggle through his pidgin?

I counter your example of Napoleon with the example of Pablo from Dreaming Spanish who learned English, French, and Thai through immersion learning. There's a whole community built around Dreaming Spanish that has learned that language in the same way that Pablo has. I too have learned Spanish and considerable amounts of Italian merely through reading, watching TV and YouTube, and vocabulary lookups. So I call bullshit on your theory: you can indeed learn in the same way that a small child does. Of course I doubt either myself or Pablo used the pure immersion learning you speak of in the immersion school. The amount of time a small child needs to learn a language is immense: 12 hours a day for the first 5 years of life, plus constant exposure for the next 10-15 to truly reach fluency. No adult has that kind of time, unless you only interact with speakers of your target language.

Adult language learning is different from child language learning because we can use higher level reasoning processes to accelerate the acquisition process. We can deliberately review and study vocab, we can make comparisons to our L1, we can look up grammar rules. We can choose specific immersion opportunities that maximize acquisition. Thus we can accelerate a process that requires 10s of thousands of hours into a process that requires mere thousands or perhaps even hundreds of hours.

Taking your 6 words a class example: assuming 200 days of language education a year, multiplied by 12 years of grade school, you should get to around 14,440 words, which is more than enough to read most basic texts.

"reading" is the first method in your list of ways you learned Spanish.

So? You can do immersion with reading the same way you do it with listening.

Ah. That’s not what immersion means. “Immersion” means there’s no way out, you are totally submerged; the metaphor connotes sink-or-swim. All language coming at you is the target language, and the only outgoing language that will work is the target language. For Japanese immersion, you have to move to Japan so that you can never English your way out of a situation. If that’s not practical, you need to go great lengths to create those conditions elsewhere. And these conditions need to be in long chunks- all day, preferably all your waking life for whatever period. Therefore you can’t get “immersion” from reading if you’re reading at home, because you can just close the book and read something else, and you have dictionaries and translators available. YouTube immersion makes even less sense, because you can just watch another video. It’s studying, it’s learning, but it’s not immersion. It’s bathing or showering or something.

What do you guys mean by immersion?

Therefore you can’t get “immersion” from reading if you’re reading at home

Eh... I feel like this is way too strict. Arguably this would make immersion impossible these days, because the gateway to your native language is right there in your pocket, whether you live in a foreign country or not.

What do you guys mean by immersion?

Learning by interacting with the natives, in any form. It can be talking to them, it can be reading books, or consuming their media. The more you do it, the more "immersed" you are.

Imo, most people's grasp of grammar and structure in their native language is not great. One advantage of the grammatical approach is that it forces people to finally confront the structure of language in general and thus also their own.

Imo, most people's grasp of grammar and structure in their native language is not great.

They might not know any grammatical terms, but native speakers speak grammatically in their dialects.

If only that were true. Native speakers have incorrect grammar all the time. For example, people who say "him and I went to the store together". Not all the rules are something you pick up naturally, and a decent number of people simply do not care about using the language correctly.

It's not intrinsically incorrect to say "him and I went to the store together," though it's not standard American English. It's also not intrinsically incorrect to say "I and Bob went to the store" - even though grammar textbooks will tell you that "Bob and I" is correct, even SAE speakers usually don't find anything wrong with "I and Bob" and will use it.

Not all the rules are something you pick up naturally

Language is an emergent phenomenon and there is no central authority controlling what is acceptable and what isn't, especially in English. What's grammatical is defined by what is accepted as grammatical speech by native speakers of that dialect.

It's not intrinsically incorrect to say "him and I went to the store together," though it's not standard American English.

What's grammatical is defined by what is accepted as grammatical speech by native speakers of that dialect.

We are going to have to agree to disagree here. You seem to be a descriptivist, and I am very much a prescriptivist. So I think that "him and I went to the store together" is intrinsically incorrect, no matter how many people say it that way. They are using an object in place of a subject, which is incorrect grammar.

I think prescriptivism has its place when it comes to helping individual people communicate more smoothly or socially appropriately, but trying to apply it on a larger scale is basically nonsensical. If enough people have start saying "him and I went to the store together" then the analysis of the language simply updates to recognise "him" as functioning as a subject pronoun in that context (or more realistically, acceptable in a certain register of the language, but that's another topic). I'm fairly sure you already do this sort of thing: for instance, I'm going to bet you say "It is me" when you answer the telephone, rather than "It is I", despite the latter being technically "correct", according to prescriptivists.

I get a lot of the motive behind prescriptivism, particularly in an era when it seems like it's difficult to recognise the value of certain standards in behaviour, dress, or indeed language without some relativist going all "akshually" about how it's all just some cis-heteronormative construct or whatever. And if I'm helping a younger relative write a university or job application letter I'm definitely going to make sure they get their "he and I"s the right way around.

They are using an object in place of a subject, which is incorrect grammar.

Hopefully ye are always careful to use "ye" when ye mean the second person singular subject, and reserve "you" for the second person singular object - as was intended by our forefathers. "You" as second person singular subject is a sixteenth century corruption of English grammar.

In that case we can also say beginner-level students don't make mistakes, they just speak in beginner dialect.

It's not a real dialect because there are no native speakers.

Now, if you had, say, generations of people brought up speaking in ""beginner dialect""...

What even is a native speaker? Children have to learn their language too.

A native speaker is one who learned a language as a child.

People have been able to tell if kids are speaking grammatically since long before there were grammar books, so the relevance is not clear to me.

A native speaker is one who learned a language as a child

That's way too loose of a definition. I learned English as a child, and while I consider myself fluent, I'm definitely not a native speaker.

People have been able to tell if kids are speaking grammatically since long before there were grammar books, so the relevance is not clear to me.

My point is just that the kind of deconstruction games that are used to argue against prescriptivism can be used to argue against descriptivism as well. I think each of those frameworks has a grain of truth to it, trying to make sense of the world with just one of them will lead to absurd results.

That's way too loose of a definition. I learned English as a child, and while I consider myself fluent, I'm definitely not a native speaker.

When I say "as a child", I mean in the critical period. I don't mean as a twelve year old.

My point is just that the kind of deconstruction games that are used to argue against prescriptivism can be used to argue against descriptivism as well. I think each of those frameworks has a grain of truth to it, trying to make sense of the world with just one of them will lead to absurd results.

It's simply a fact that language rules are an emergent phenomenon determined by the, let's say, ummah made up of speakers of each language or dialect, and when Internet people say a particular construction is "incorrect English" they usually mean "incorrect SAE" even though it's grammatical in some other dialect. If you've got an argument against this, let's hear it.

Imo, most people's grasp of grammar and structure in their native language is not great.

Yes!

One advantage of the grammatical approach is that it forces people to finally confront the structure of language in general and thus also their own.

Nooo...

Only a few language nerds find topics like present imperfect or the dative case interesting and understandable. The rest treat it like algebra; arcane nonsense that you have to memorize just long enough to pass the exam and then never use for the rest of your life. And they are right. Nobody learns to speak a language like that. Nobody writes like that. It's useless knowledge.

Only a few language nerds find topics like present imperfect or the dative case interesting and understandable. The rest treat it like algebra; arcane nonsense that you have to memorize just long enough to pass the exam and then never use for the rest of your life. And they are right. Nobody learns to speak a language like that. Nobody writes like that. It's useless knowledge.

It might be useless knowledge (unless you're a language teacher) to know what "present imperfect" means. It is not useless knowledge to know how to use it correctly.

Why is second language education so routinely terrible in the United States?

Is it worse than second language instruction anywhere else? The main argument I hear for this is that Americans (and Brits) only speak English, while educated people everywhere else speak English as well as their own native language. But I'm fairly sure this has less to do with the superiority of their teaching methods and more to do with the following:

1/ The sheer amount of English-language media means they can spend hours every day being exposed to engaging content in their target language. 2/ Economic opportunities in English speaking countries mean there's simply a much stronger motive for these people than for a teenager in the US sitting through a French or Spanish class (you allude to this in your second paragraph)

Yeah, a lot of other countries that have English as a required second language throughout primary school and secondary education (Japan and Korea, for example) are terrible at it. University students who have theoretically been studying English for 12 years often arrive barely able to manage basic introductions or simple phrases.

Aren't continentals generally expected to learn their own country's official language, English, and a third language?

I live in Sweden. The vast majority of people I come into contact with speak English and Swedish. Almost none speak a third language (that I know of), unless they're originally from another country.

IME the whole "Europeans all speak 3-4 languages" meme is standard reddit European superiority complex.

Perhaps this is a class thing? Me and most of my friends can at least make our way in countries speaking our third language and understand media in it.

It is a broken form of the languages but enough of it is there to make yourself understood and would serve as a solid base for immersion based learning.

No. You might say they are expected to learn English, and even then the variance you'll see in the population is going to be pretty big. They definitely aren't expected to learn a third language, and in the case where they studied one, they're usually unable to actually use it.

I don't know if it's any better elsewhere: I've only ever studied in America.

I think the economic opportunities + sheer volume of media makes sense as an explanation.

The US actually discouraged second language learning for a period out of patriotism/final assimilation of Ellis islanders.

I'm also very skeptical of immersion as an adult language-learning strategy. The results based experts on adult language learning use grammar-translation- places like the US military's language academy, or missionary training hubs, use... classes, with blackboards and verb conjugation exercises and vocab flashcards. They also do immersion on top of it, but they start with grammar-translation.

Immersion as the sole means of learning is not as efficient as jump-starting it with grammar and translation drills. But it is key to actually becoming fluent. And you can eventually become fluent with immersion alone. You will never become fluent with grammar and translation drills alone.

I think you need to look harder if you're skeptical of immersion as an adult strategy. It is the current thing on language learning YouTube and has some pretty impressive results. That said, I think it's swung too far in the immersion direction: grammar and vocabulary drilling immensely accelerate the process. Pure immersion by itself isn't incredibly efficient.

You can, however, become fluent through immersion alone: see the millions or maybe even billions of Chinese and Europeans who learned English through watching TV. I don't think the same is true for grammar/translation: Latin instruction is probably the best example of this, where you have professors treating each sentence like it's grammatical puzzle to be solved rather than just reading the text like they would have been able to if they'd incorporated more immersion.

It seems worth noting that English is pretty hard on the uninflected end of world languages- for Spanish or Russian you have to memorize conjugation tables. I don't deny that immersion is a real thing that greatly accelerates previous lessons(which those chinamen and euros did have, even if they didn't make it all the way to fluency). I deny that it's sufficient for fluency in itself.

Well you would eventually learn the conjugations through immersion, it's just slow. I've experienced this through learning Italian where I eventually just figured out how to conjugate some basic verbs (esssere and avere for example). Of course in practice it would be dumb not to just learn them through grammar study: I've learned far more conjugations in a few weeks of Italian class at Hopkins than I learned through osmosis in the ~150 hours of immersion that I've done in the language.

My own personal approach is hybrid of the grammar study and immersion methods for this reason. Certain things are much more efficiently learned through deliberate study, like conjugations or prepositions, and honestly even vocabulary words. But to truly internalize them, immersion is key.

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