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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2679 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?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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.

My grandparents didn't get the French beat out of them at school for me to have to learn two languages.

If every American only knows English, then the rest of the world will have to learn our language.

I think some countries/cultures are just better at certain things than others, and it's almost random as to what and why.

Like, sure, we could make excuses why Americans don't need to learn other languages, and that's certainly part of it. But early Americans didn't need to know Latin, and yet apparently that was common enough to be a routine entrance requirement to Harvard and other universities. We also don't need to be good at niche winter olympic sports, yet we still consistentlly do well and are currently 2nd in medal count, behind Norway (which has the advantage of basically inventing most of the winter olympic sports). We are consistently bad at professional international football/soccer, despite spending increasingly large amounts of money on it, while tiny poor countries like uruguay and croatia do increasingly well at it.

Looking internationally, the pattern becomes increasingly strange. Germans do great at learning English as a second language. Dutch, even better! French... not so much. Swiss people learn English, but struggle with whichever of French/German is their non-native language. Meanwhile Belgiuns, Luxembourgians, and Alsace–Lorrainians (in my highly subjective experience) learn all 3 languages with no problem. 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics in the US are all over the place in terms of language skills, but tend towards English-only as they get more removed from their parent country.

In asia, it's even stranger. Japan has been heavily promoting English since the 50s, but is still terrible at it, despite massive amounts of English loanwords. Korea used to be pretty bad at it, but now seems very strong. Taiwan is incredibly strong at teaching ESL. I challenge anyone to find a consistent pattern there.

My only guess is that you need the right balance of resources and motivations. You need enough money to properly teach children a second language, but not so much money that they feel like they don't need to bother. They need to be constantly immersing with the second language, but not so much that they just forget their first language. They need to feel like the target language is "cool" and exotic, but not so distant that it's overwhelming. Basically, they need the right mix of "want" and need" to feel like "I will learn this language within the next 5 years"- not so quick that they give up when faced with drawbacks, but not so distant that they slack off and feel like it will never happen. Willing to spend some money to help them learn, but also willing to just grind and memorize.

But early Americans didn't need to know Latin, and yet apparently that was common enough to be a routine entrance requirement to Harvard and other universities

Honestly this might be part of it. You can't really immerse yourself in Latin without a time machine, but you can get by pretty well if you spend a long time banging on the grammar, which is exactly how we teach most languages today

apparently that was common enough to be a routine entrance requirement to Harvard and other universities

The university educated percent of population was, it must be said, quite small. Latin was simply expected of educated people at the time, and a college prep education would have included it(and Greek).

As somebody who studied two foreign languages not in the US, I can testify it's not uniquely US problem. In USSR, studying a foreign language was a requirement in the secondary school. Almost nobody achieved fluency this way, and the typical result was abysmal. The only way to achieve any result was to use a private tutor (either one on one or group), this is how I learned English, and the difference between approaches had been very pronounced. I suspect it's still pretty much this way (though now, given the Internet, there are better options). Well, there were also venues for diplomats, scientists, spies, etc. but those weren't for common people. I suspect many if not all major public education systems look this way.

This is also contradicts the assumption that it's only a matter of incentives. Knowing English (or, to a lesser degree, any popular foreign language) gave a person access to a variety of opportunities, but the purpose of the school system had never been to provide these opportunities. The purpose of the system were to drudge through the motions, put the appropriate checks into the appropriate checkboxes, and be done with it.

On the other hand, Israel had somewhat different problem, when accepting huge mass immigration who mostly did not speak any Hebrew at all. The ulpan system that was created to handle this, I think, largely served its purpose adequately. While you wouldn't be exactly native-level Hebrew speaker after finishing the ulpan, if you studied diligently and aren't especially incapable of learning languages, it would grant you a working knowledge sufficient for day to day function, and then immersion and personal effort could take you the rest of the way. Of course, the incentive here is more pronounced too.

I've found as well that the only people that actually successfully learn a language either consume large amounts of media in the target language, or are immigrants/expats who end up immersed in their new country's language and have very strong economic incentives to learn.

Out of the people I met online while teaching myself Japanese and Chinese, the only people who made it to a reasonable level of fluency were the people who spent a large amount of time reading/playing/watching books/shows/games in the target language, and the people from the poorer South-East Asian countries moving to Japan and China for work who really needed to know the language to a decent level.

Realistically there's just not enough motivation from either side in American high school to teach and learn a language well when everyone knows its going to be pointless. English education in China and Japan is similarly shambolic.

Every single immigrant I know who achieved fluency in English did so using TV (or immersion). They all started with shows in English audio with their language subtitles then as they got better at English swap to English subtitles and finally no subtitles.

It's sad that we pay teachers to do something that's less effective than sticking a TV in the front of the class room for an hour.

I'd like to add a third theory: properly doing immersion is more expensive than single-instructor blackboard teaching. I'm not sure you can do it properly with the same resources you'd have for some other class. From personal experience taking Spanish, "you can only speak Spanish until the bell" doesn't help that much if only a few native speakers are in the room, leads to "immersive" conversation between two students are barely speaking the language.

Although maybe there is a space for "fun" language learning media to exist --- I know a at least a few people who learned Japanese to read manga and watch anime.

ETA: LLMs probably introduce ways to do authentic immersion better/cheaper, but also can automate translation in ways that abrogate language learning requirements.

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.

Yes, except that it's not the pop culture. That's just a bonus. The need is much more basal than that.

In the Netherlands for example, you will need English for any kind of higher education, even when the classes themselves aren't in English, the textbooks and articles will certainly be. You will need English for any office job. Advertisements, shop signs and other public texts are written in English more often than not. Computer software is usually in English. The Internet is, obviously, mostly in English.

There are two languages in common use, and you need to know them both; not knowing English is almost as bad as being illiterate. That means everyone is constantly getting a lot of practice, also outside of school. It means the benefits of having good English are very obvious, and the friction of not having it is bad enough that it'll motivate you to practice more if you need to.

In fact this may be a good way to describe it to an English speaker. It is quite like literacy. You don't acquire it naturally at home, you need to be taught it. But then, society presents you with a lot of text, even if you do not seek it out. Society expects you to be able to read information in that format, if you are to participate to any degree. You are always reading and often writing. Perhaps not capital-B Books all the time, like the literature teachers who complain that "kids don't read anymore" would like you to, but Internet forums, manuals, street signs, official forms, labels in the supermarket, text messages, someone's blog, your co-worker's E-mails, and so on. You get all that practice in, and as a result most people end up fairly decent readers.

Imagine if you had no use for reading, and you never actually used that skill outside of a specific "reading" class in school a couple of times a week. You would never get anywhere near decent at it, and you would forget it as soon as you're out of school. I have an actual real-world example of this exact thing happening, the Laotian literacy campaign of the 1980s.

An intensive adult literacy campaign was initiated in 1983-84, which mobilized educated persons living in villages and urban neighborhoods to bring basic reading and writing skills to over 750,000 adults. Largely as a result of this campaign, those able to read and write had increased to an estimated 44 percent. According to the United Nations (UN), by 1985 those able to read and write were estimated at 92 percent of men and 76 percent of women of the fifteen to forty-five age-group. Because few reading materials are available, especially in the rural areas, many newly literate adults lose much of their proficiency after a few years.

You can, obviously, go into what is essentially a pre-modern village and teach the peasants to read, certainly to the point where the guy from the UN will be willing to count them as literate. But they're still pre-modern peasants whose lives haven't otherwise changed. They've never needed to read anything, they still don't, and they have no access to reading materials, save perhaps a few government pamphlets about literacy. They have no real reason to seek out any more reading material, nor any real way to do so. How could they even know what exists? So they just forget it again and when you go back to the village after a couple of years, they'll all be illiterate again. (I bet nowadays, all those villagers have cellphones and thus retain their literacy.)

And so it goes with language instruction at school. It's not that school does nothing at all: English is not my native language, I did have to be taught the basics. I remember not understanding the cartoons on the TV. You don't get there by osmosis unless it really is your native language. But once you do have that basis, it becomes self-reinforcing given all the societal exposure.

At one point I knew enough French to say 'where is the bathroom?', and I could recite the conjugation tables. There may well be French books worth reading, but I never got to that point. I could struggle my way through a newspaper article at one point. But why would I want to read a French newspaper that badly? I needed the high school diploma, not the French. My French is now just as nonexistent as the literacy of one of those Laotian villagers.

I have to agree with your best-fit model. It's not schooling, but exposure and necessity. Primarily in regards to the internet, if my own experience generalizes as well as I think

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.

The top 10 or 20 percent get very good, but the average student never gets to the point where all that reading pays off because they resist the earlier drudgery and therefore can’t understand the readings.

Math and science are the first subjects to be dropped from the French program because students tell their parents that their crappy marks are because it’s all in French (untrue since most words are the same: triangle, fraction, oxygen, mitochondria, energy, every word that ends in -ation, etc).

It’s so bad that, at a meeting of the hardest-core French teachers in my province, I learned that I was the only making grade 12 students read; everyone else had them “read along” with the teacher, which means “zone out with the book open.” This was because, after 12 years, even the teachers didn’t expect the kids to understand literary French. Note that we’re talking stuff like Camus, which is stylistically similar to Hemingway- not linguistically taxing. You might chalk this up to the education system’s usual ineptitude, but if immersion works then the French-rich environment should be inculcating French despite whatever the teacher is doing. It works like that until about grade 6, at which point students are celebrated if the hit A2 proficiency. You would expect an adult to hit A2 after 300 hours of study, which is 60 five-hour days. There are nearly 1200 days total in grades 1 to 6. The children do not even learn the language like children. Immersion doesn’t work.

I learned that I was the only making grade 12 students read; everyone else had them “read along”

That's deranged...

Shout my name when the angry mobs come for the teachers, I'll try to tell everyone you were one of the good ones.

You might chalk this up to the education system’s usual ineptitude, but if immersion works then the French-rich environment should be inculcating French despite whatever the teacher is doing.

What? No....

The children do not even learn the language like children. Immersion doesn’t work.

Well, depending on what you mean by the former, I might agree. Children don't learn just by passively absorbing things spoken in their environment. They figure it out because it lets them get what they want from their parents, interact with their peers, etc. Every such activity is an exercise, that's how they get better at it. Later, when they go to school, they're forced to exercise even more, by reading, writing, and interacting with the teacher and each other.

When you tell me there's an "French immersion school", I assume this is a school that forces all the school activities to be done in French (minus, maybe, student interactions). An "immersion school" that doesn't make you do that defeats the purpose!

And if you're wondering what's the difference between what I consider immersion, and just studying a language, it's that you don't try to teach people by taking the language apart, feeding them it's rules, and hoping they'll be able to reconstruct it from that, you force them to do stuff using thr language, correct any mistakes they make, and otherwise make them figure it out on their own.

The immersion schools/classes force everything to happen in French. Students resist it, so it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty much what you’re picturing, minus English class and a day off now and then for the science fair or pride parade. End result: 60 hours of study in 6 years.

And it’s not just one bad school or province. It is a national issue in Canada. Every year there is a teapot tempest about how ineffective this is, but we keep doing it (the political reasons are long-dead by now).

The immersion schools/classes force everything to happen in French. Students resist it, so it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty much what you’re picturing

I'm definitely not picturing students being able to "read along" with the teacher. I can believe this is a national issue, I just don't think it's an issue with the methodology as much as it is a simple case of low standards.

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?

Betsy Balcombe was able to befriend Napoleon because she was the only member of the family to speak fluent French, so she acted as his unofficial interpreter while he stayed with the family before relocating to Longwood House.

As the daughter of a successful English merchant during the regency period whose parents presumably had designs to marry her up the status ladder, it is likely her education focused heavily on French, since it was seen as the language of high culture.

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.

gog is correct in the sense that's how they formally define "immersion" as a learning method. When a student enters the study environment (such as, the classroom), everyone will engage only in the target language, native speakers present or no. You are forced to join the conversation and other activities, feeling immense social pressure to get out any words, hopefully with some fluency lest you look like a dim-witted idiot. Actually travelling to foreign countries used to be even better, because not only you'd come across as dim and rude, you couldn't achieve anything. (And yes, today you have to artificially limit yourself to use your own brainpower instead of using translator tools nor give the natives another free lesson to practice their English.)

That's fair enough, I think I went too far by restricting it to natives. But check his other comment, apparently these schools put hardly any pressure on the students at all, no wonder they don't work!

More comments

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 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. But if I'm doing the same thing in twenty years and everyone is saying "him and I" by that point, then I'm going to tell them to write that instead.

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. None of this should be construed to imply that there aren't tremendous benefits to being fluent in SAE or the local standard dialect. If you've got an argument against this, let's hear it.

More comments

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.

I don't know what a dative case is, but I would say that most people don't even have a decent grasp of objects in sentences or infinitives (especially English speakers for the latter).

Shit, I’d say I’m unusually interested in linguistics, and I don’t think I understand formal grammar.

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.

Yes, but the Venn diagram of native English speakers who understand advanced grammar and native English speakers who generally speak (and less generally write) using such grammar properly is practically two separate circles. Maybe 10% of even extremely profficient English communicators could tell you what "present imperfect" means. I never learned any of it, because the teachers of my advanced placement english courses all assumed we already knew it/thought teaching it was boring and would rather have us read their favorite books instead. Luckily, I was never really tested on grammar in a way I couldn't just sort of intuit my way through. The academic instruction is clearly not the load-bearing component here.

Just like how literally none of us were explicitly taught proper adjective order, even though English definitely has one (it's a big brown dog, not a brown big dog, and I have no idea why), but we tend to get it right anyway based on subconscious vibes of what sounds right.

Well, this is the point. Native speakers intuitively understand the difference between "I eat," "I am eating" and "I have eaten" and when to use them, even if they couldn't name the tenses. But to learn (or teach) English, it's a big help to explicitly name them.

Likewise the "royal order" of adjectives, or OSASCAMP. Most native speakers can't list it, they just know "brown big dog" sounds unnatural. But you need to know it to teach it and while you can pick it up through immersion, it will be faster to study a chart that actually explains it

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)

I'll second this. Theoretically I learned english for my entire school time. In practice, I was pretty terrible at anything but the most basic texts, and completely hopeless at even understanding normal english speech. And let's not talk about having to speak myself.

A small breakthrough was going to the UK as a teen for two weeks, but there were too many other german students with me. The big breakthrough for understanding happened at university. Well, actually, in the evenings, because I watched so much english TV with subtitles that I noticed I could increasingly just forego the subtitles. Then the breakthrough for speaking it myself came when I went to work at a Max Planck Institute with >70% foreigners, so there was just no option but speaking the english.

School wasn't entirely useless, since I also watched a lot of subtitled Anime, yet didn't learn japanese nearly as well (though I do know quite a few words and stock phrases). You need some basic framework to make sense of everything to begin with. But its benefits top out pretty early.

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?

Schoolchildren in Germany certainly are. It's entirely mandatory...for the middle class. If you end up in the lower strata of the educational system, then no.

And even when it's expected, success isn't guaranteed. There are millions of Germans who "studied" French in school, and retained none of it.

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.

How much fluency do you really need to make your way as a short-term tourist though? It's not hard to familiarize yourself with the basic pleasantries and key phrases in a couple of weeks, and that's always been sufficient (with a bit of miming) to get me through as an American with no foreign language skills to speak of. 2 years of high school spanish and 22 years of living in Southern California lets me travel around much of Mexico without too much trouble, even without resorting to English, but no one would praise my public school Spanish education as particularly comprehensive or effective.

Or do you mean you're capable of muddying through actual conversations with locals beyond basic transactions, directions, etc.?

The latter. My wife does the former studying up on the flight to whatever country we're going. I'm sure having perfunctory prior knowledge helps but that isn't really what I'm talking about, but I guess it's a sliding scale.

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.

Yeah, me too, but all my friends are IT guys that moved to another country, so that lines up perfectly with what he said. Either way, it being a class thing throws a wrench into the "generally expected to" idea.

IMO it's a sensible expectation. Non-Europeans will rarely be in contact with lower-class Europeans. Middle- and Upper-Class euros do tend to learn more languages.

"Tend to", sure, but my experience of the middle class (I only had very rare and short brushes with the upper strata) is that they rarely can actually use a third language. They certainly study them, but push comes to shove, they wouldn't even be able to ask for directions.

I responded more the "almost none speak a third language", which I found to be false. In my experience, plenty of people do but it's by no means some universal thing and is mostly restricted to a subsection of the university educated.

I'd say the third language education generally doesn't teach people a third language, it provides a base for effective immersion based learning.

I don't get it. Even though I'm in the same situation as you - my friends tend to know 2 foreign languages - that's still "almost no one".

I'd say it's perhaps 15-20% of the population without foreign parents. I would define almost none as <5%, IE lizardman constant territory.

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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.

Exactly so.

People should also realize that immersion teaches the language and register that you immerse in. I've met Europeans who immersed by watching South Park and posting to imageboards as teenagers ... so they are fluent in Cartman and 4chan. Great for informal communication and memetics, not so great in white-collar professions.

Grammar, vocabulary and essay writing can be useful tool learning the other registers at scale.

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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