@dailydogma comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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dailydogma 10hr ago

extremely exaggerated idea of how easy it is to become multilingual.

I think it takes hundreds of hours, but those hours are themselves easy, unlike math. Such that, young children can complete those hours, whereas they often can't grasp algebra at all, so algebra hours have to wait. The thing about the Muslim countries I refer to is that they don't learn as much about Martin Luther King Jr., the American Revolution, or the reproductive cycle of flowering plants in elementary school while trying to get up to 400 hours of French study. There is a trade off but imo a foreign language is a skill and knowing factoids about history, American or Algerian, is not.

Context

erwgv3g34 dailydogma 9hr ago

I think it takes hundreds of hours, but those hours are themselves easy, unlike math. Such that, young children can complete those hours, whereas they often can't grasp algebra at all, so algebra hours have to wait.

Then why is it that so many students who spend hundreds of hours studying a foreign language in school come out the other end not knowing how to speak them?

Most kids have the capacity to learn a language really easily, because humans are designed to learn to talk. They don't have the capacity to learn two. At best, the second language overwrites the first language and they forget their native tongue (as happens to very young immigrants) or they completely forget the second language once they are no longer required to study it (as happens to millions of American students who take French or Spanish in high school). At worst, they end up speaking a shitty creole of both languages (e.g. Spanglish).

From "The Myth of 'They Weren't Ever Taught…'" by Education Realist:

All teachers working in low-ability populations go through a discovery process.

Stage One: I will describe this stage for algebra I teachers, but plug in reading, geometry, writing, science, any subject you choose, with the relevant details. This stage begins when teachers realize that easily half the class adds the numerators and denominators when adding fractions, doesn’t see the difference between 3-5 and 5-3, counts on fingers to add 8 and 6, and looks blank when asked what 7 times 3 is.

Ah, they think. The kids weren’t ever taught fractions and basic math facts! What the hell are these other teachers doing, then, taking a salary for showing the kids movies and playing Math Bingo? Insanity on the public penny. But hey, helping these kids, teaching them properly, is the reason they became teachers in the first place. So they push their schedule back, what, two weeks? Three? And go through fraction operations, reciprocals, negative numbers, the meaning of subtraction, a few properties of equality, and just wallow in the glories of basic arithmetic. Some use manipulatives, others use drills and games to increase engagement, but whatever the method, they’re basking in the glow of knowledge that they are Closing the Gap, that their kids are finally getting the attention that privileged suburban students get by virtue of their summer enrichment and more expensive teachers.

At first, it seems to work. The kids beam and say, “You explain it so much better than my last teacher did!” and the quizzes seem to show real progress. Phew! Now it’s possible to get on to teaching algebra, rather than the material the kids just hadn’t been taught.

But then, a few weeks later, the kids go back to ignoring the difference between 3-5 and 5-3. Furthermore, despite hours of explanation and practice, half the class seems to do no better than toss a coin to make the call on positive or negative slopes. Many students who demonstrated mastery of distributing multiplication over addition are now making a complete hash of the process in multi-step equations. And many students are still counting on their fingers.

It’s as if they weren’t taught at all.

But teachers are resilient. They redouble their efforts. They spend additional time on “warm-up” questions, they “activate prior knowledge” to reteach even the simple subjects that have apparently been forgotten, and they pull down all the kaleidoscopic, mathy posters and psychology-boosting epigrams they’d hung up in their optimistic naivete and paper the walls with colorful images formulas and algorithms.

They see progress in the areas they review—until they realize that the kids now have lost knowledge in the areas that weren’t being taught for the first time or in review, much as if the new activity caused them to overwrite the original files with the new information.

At some point, all teachers realize they are playing Whack-a-Mole in reverse, that the moles are never all up. Any new learning seems to overwrite or at best confuse the old learning, like an insufficient hard drive.

That’s when they get it: the kids were taught. They just forgot it all, just as they’re going to forget what they were taught this year.

From "Language is Culture" by Spandrell:

Mr. Lee held the popular idea that language was a zero-sum game? No, Mr. Lee understood the commonsensical idea that your brain has limited storage capacity. Like anything else. Your brain is made of atoms. It is not made of magic. It is not made of godly dust. It is a material thing. It is, in a sense, a container of information, and information takes space. It obviously does in computers; pray tell, NYT, why the brain should have infinite capacity? It doesn't make sense.

Now I don't know if LKY thought of it in these terms. I think that, as a language learner, he went by experience. I guess the more time he spent practicing Mandarin, or Hokkien, or Malay, the worse his English prose got. And that's exactly how it works. Happens to me all the time, and happens to anyone who uses 2 or more languages regularly. The more different the languages, the less commons structures they share, the more acute the problem. Again, there is no reason why it should not be so. Information takes space. It isn't hard.

Alas, it is true that academic linguists will not tell you this, even though they probably did in the 1950s. That is not because common sense has been "refuted". It is because since the 1960s academia has morphed into a worldwide racket of fraud and deceit. If you read this blog you already know that; economics is bogus, climate science is bogus, psychology is bogus; even more than half of medical papers are bogus. Well, surprise surprise, linguistics is also bogus. The language learning industry is huge. There's a lot of money in telling people that the brain is made of magic dust, that they can learn whatever they want whenever they want, as long as they give you money. 3 languages at the same time? Go for it! Kids are like sponges, they can learn anything. No, they can't.

Now of course, all human traits are distributed in a Gaussian curve. Some kids are pretty good, can learn 3 or 4 languages given some exposure. Some can't even speak 1 language properly by the time they enter primary school. Lee Kuan Yew, who was in charge of spending Singapore's money, realized he didn't have money to waste, and he took what was the most rational decision: let's focus on having everyone learn English, then let's make some half-assed effort at teaching a "mother tongue"; mostly for political reasons, so tribalists didn't complain. Some kids will learn the mother tongue well; most won't. Not the government's problem. Lee Kuan Yew was CEO and what he wanted was an efficient workforce, so English it was. And English he got. Well, kind of.

Japanese researchers, fortunately isolated from their American comrades because of their ineptitude at learning English, have long found that Brazilian immigrants in Japan often end up not bilingual, but "halflingual". They end up speaking shitty Portuguese and even shittier Japanese. Because Japanese is hard, they don't speak it at home, and whatever they speak at home tends to have very low vocabulary levels. So they end up sounding retarded even if they really aren't.

You know who else sounds retarded? Singaporeans. OK, sorry, that's overly harsh. I apologize to my Singaporean readers, I love you all. But I had to say it. With all due respect, Singaporeans in general don't speak proper English. They speak Singlish, which is a pidgin English with a fair amount of Chinese grammar and vocabulary baked in, and a pretty weird (and what sounds to me a pretty big Indian influence) pronunciation. As you may remember, even Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, by every account a 150 IQ genius, speaks what can only be described as pretty goofy English. Again, it's not their fault, it's just the unintended consequence of public language policy.

How did this happen? By forcing diglossia (widespread bilingualism) on Singapore. After independence most people spoke some either Chinese dialect at home, Malay or Tamil. The schools taught English, what is a foreign language to everyone. So yes, they learned, the minimum required to pass the exams, and went on with their daily lives. Given that kids spent almost more time at school than at home, eventually the exposure of English was greater than their respective languages. Let's say a random Singaporean teen was exposed to 65% English and 35% Hokkien during their formative years. So, surprise surprise, he ended up speaking a language which is 65% English and 35% Hokkien, and so did most everyone else, with all languages and dialects getting some of their stuff in this hodgepodge lingua franca that evolved into Singlish. And once that got widespread it became almost impossible to change.

And from "The Numbers Speak: Foreign Language Requirements Are a Waste of Time and Money" by Bryan Caplan:

The average high school graduate spends two years studying a foreign language. (Digest of Education Statistics, Table 157) What effect do these years of study have on Americans’ actual ability to speak foreign languages?

I started by looking at the Census, but it asks only about “languages spoken in the home.” Gallup has a survey finding that one-in-four Americans can speak a foreign language, but it offers no further details that would allow us to measure degree of fluency or the effect of foreign language instruction. After nosing around for better data, I turned to the General Social Survey. As usual, I was not disappointed.

...

The results showed an even smaller effect of foreign language instruction on foreign language fluency than I expected.

25.7% of respondents speak a language other than English. Within this sample, 41.5% claim to speak the other language “very well.” Within this sub-sub-sample, just 7.0% say they learned to speak this foreign language in school. If you multiply out these three percentages, you get 0.7%. The marginal product of two years of pain and suffering per high school graduate: less than one student in a hundred acquires fluency. (And that’s self-assessed fluency, which people almost surely exaggerate).

If you lower the bar from “very well” to “well” the picture remains grim: merely 2.5% of GSS respondents claimed to reach this level of foreign language competence in school.

Fans of foreign languages will probably just respond, “That’s why we have to pour more resources into foreign languages.” I say it would be far better to give fans of foreign languages a free economics lesson. Here goes:

1. Lots of stuff that sounds good isn’t worth doing. “Learning a foreign language” sounds noble, but so does “climbing Mount Everest.” The wise calmly weigh costs and benefits instead of being carried away by words. Any honest scale will tell you that the costs of foreign language instruction dwarf the benefits. Think about it: Even ignoring teachers’ salaries, we’re currently burning two years of class time per graduate. The payoff? Making less than one student in a hundred fluent.

2. Doubling an input normally less than doubles output. The world usually has what economists call “diminishing returns“: you can improve outcomes by spending more money, but the more you spend, the less efficacious each dollar becomes. The fact that two full years of instruction have almost zero effect implies that massive spending increases would be required to noticeably raise foreign language fluency. Think about all the Canadian adults who don’t speak French after a decade of required study.

3. Foreign language fluency is more common in other countries for a reason. People around the world strive to learn English. Why? Because English fluency frequently helps them get good jobs, meet interesting people, and enjoy culture. Pretty obvious, right? To understand why Americans don’t learn foreign languages, simply reverse this reasoning. We don’t learn foreign languages because foreign languages rarely helps us get good jobs, meet interesting people, or enjoy culture. Americans start in an unusually abundant and diverse economic, social, and cultural pool, so we have little reason to stray. And if Americans do decide to sample other pools, we can literally travel the world without needing to learn a word of another language.

I may sound like a typical philistine economist. So let me confess that I personally got a lot of value out of my two years of college German. I’m an opera fan; knowing a bit of German enhances my experience. But this hardly means that most Americans would benefit from learning a foreign language. All romance aside, requiring Americans to learn foreign languages makes about as much sense as requiring them to hear operas. What inspires the few, torments the many. Elites who relish foreign languages and opera should show some tolerance for the rest of humanity instead of calling for government spending to correct a “problem” that’s only in our minds.

Shirayuki2 erwgv3g34 3hr ago · Edited 3hr ago

Because in monolingual countries with a large population, neither the student not the teacher cares enough to have the student come out with a strong grasp of the foreign language on the other end. In countries where getting good at English or another lingua franca is a practical necessity, you better believe a lot of students are coming out with functional language skills despite many of these students having a fraction of the investment rich Anglo countries do.

Most kids have the capacity to learn a language really easily, because humans are designed to learn to talk. They don't have the capacity to learn two

This doesn't make any sense. While obviously there are physical limits in the extreme, there is no evidence that language acquisition is bottlenecked by storage space of all things - if you have a GeForce 256 and a 100TB SSD obviously storage is not going to be the bottleneck in your system.

As Pigeon says bilingualism is very common globally - the fact that many children don't learn multiple languages comes from a lack of incentives rather than a lack of ability. Many people across South America, continental Europe, Africa, and ex-CJK Asia will at least be conversant in a global lingua franca and a native language out of necessity: e.g the Nordic countries and the Dutch are almost all perfectly bilingual English speakers.

And from "The Numbers Speak: Foreign Language Requirements Are a Waste of Time and Money" by Bryan Caplan

These are indictments against the requirement to learn languages in school, which I agree is useless for unmotivated students, but really this is a general argument against teaching anything in school above basic numeracy and literacy. I broadly agree with Caplan's Case Against Education thesis, but these posts do not support your bailey that secondary language acquisition is not possible or detrimental.

The motte here is that the opportunity costs of language learning are high, which I think is probably correct for English speakers even as a hobbyist polyglot myself, but in the long run everyone is dead anyways. There are much worse and unproductive things that most people do with their lives.

Pigeon coo coo erwgv3g34 8hr ago

I don’t think this is accurate. Most Swiss people use more than one language in daily life, something like 25% of India speaks 2+ languages, you have varying degrees of bilingualism for English and Tagalog in the Philippines, standard Thai and the various regional Thai languages (sometimes + a functional grasp on English), and so on. Even East Asian hubs like Tokyo and Seoul and Taipei will have a reasonable amount of people who are bilingual. And of course we have many examples of people here who are bilingual largely or at least in part due to education.

Surely the issue is that most American children don’t naturally find themselves in situations where they would need to speak a second language, and language perhaps rusts more quickly than other skills do.

(I am unsure about the value of formally educating children in a second language, but I want to nitpick a specific claim here.)

Amadan Letting the hate flow through me dailydogma 10hr ago

I think it takes hundreds of hours, but those hours are themselves easy, unlike math.

The ease with which children learn languages is exaggerated, but yes, it's easier to learn languages when you are young. It is not "easy." The "passive language-absorbing sponge" theory is not true.

The thing about the Muslim countries I refer to is that they don't learn as much about Martin Luther King Jr., the American Revolution, or the reproductive cycle of flowering plants in elementary school

I think you would be dismayed to learn what kids in Muslim countries do spend much of their school hours learning. And while I can guess what you think of Martin Luther King, Jr., I would be dismayed (am dismayed) at American students not being taught about the American Revolution or the reproductive cycle of flowering plants.

There is a trade off but imo a foreign language is a skill and knowing factoids about history, American or Algerian, is not.

Understanding history and being able to relate it to the world we live in is definitely a cognitive skill.

Kids should actually know something about the history of their country and the world. A population ignorant of history and science but which can speak a couple of languages is not a recipe for success.

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