Thursday, February 22, 2018

I speak three or four languages

While promoting my new book, I've repeatedly argued that foreign language requirements in U.S. schools are absurd and should be abolished.  For two distinct reasons.
All of my languages english.

This is Bryan claiming we never use foreign languages.  Sorry, we use them all the time, everytime we speak. When we are unsure of a meaning, we look in a dictionary and it tell us the meaning derived from the foreign language we speak.

Imagine if we took Bryan literally, and some student looked up a derivation of a word.  The student would be lost, have no clue what Latin was, old Spanish, or Greek letters or conjugation. So, when the dictionary says a word comes from some verb conjugation, we have little idea was verb conjugation means. Conjugation in common english is very non standard and hardly taught.

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