Reflections on my high school education in the field of foreign language

In this series, I take a look back at my education as a high school student, and from a college perspective, how everything turned out. It may be a little late for this year’s seniors, but hopefully high school students at all levels can gleam some helpful advice about their class choices over their four years in high school.

The first discipline we’ll be covering is the realm of Foreign Language, a conveniently short first piece given my general lack of experience, and a subject that I and everyone else hated in middle school when they sprung it upon us as the inaugural Spanish class in 7^th grade. Why do we have to do this? This isn’t even useful for anything!, sentiments that are still somewhat echoed today.

I was a weakly bilingual student from the start. I grew up speaking the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, and although I could use it conversationally, I never comprehensively learned all the nuances of grammar or the entire extent of vocabulary, nor did I ever learn to read or write. I went on to take extremely basic Spanish in 7^th and 8^th grade in middle school, then took two years of Spanish at the high school level in my freshman and sophomore years where I did well on paper but really didn’t learn much. In the summer between my junior and senior years, I took a 5-week trip to Italy, and although I had little formal training (about a week), by the end of my stay I had learned enough Italian to carry out the daily functions of life. As an engineering student, I don’t have too much of a need for foreign language, and so far in my two semesters I haven’t taken any foreign language courses at the college level.

With that context in mind, what follows is a completely personal reflection on my high school education in the field of foreign language from the perspective of college.

Foreign language is a tough field to describe for me, not only because I honestly don’t have that much experience with it, but because unlike math or sciences or social sciences or even English, foreign language isn’t strictly regulated or standardized. There are no big state tests measuring school’s performance or statewide standard curricula, and so the methods used and materials taught in foreign language classes are often highly variable between schools and even teachers. My 2 years in high school Spanish was very much focused on basic literacy and the technical aspects of language than actual fluency. We never really spoke it conversationally in class (not like other classes where English isn’t used at all), and the course was dedicated to recognizing the grammar structure and memorizing vocabulary and conjugations. At the end of two years I could stumble through a text and get the gist of it, and could speak and listen with large latencies while I translated everything said and heard into English first, which I would say was typical for most students after two years (and most students I knew after three years as well, although I don’t have firsthand experience with third-year foreign language). Today, two years after that, I haven’t retained a single bit of Spanish.

In contrast, the 5 week trip and 10 day crash course I had in Italian was just the opposite – I spent a small amount of time getting the basics of conjugation and memorizing common survival vocabulary, but from then on there wasn’t any formal instruction – I learned Italian conversationally in class, or by actually using it in day-to-day activities. At the end of 5 weeks, I could carry on and understand conversations well (given the 5 weeks) and certainly better than I ever did with two years of Spanish, couldn’t read very well, and probably had grammar and syntax problems with everything I said, although the meaning was all there.

So what lessons did I learn? In my two years taking Spanish, after initially learning basic conjugation and grammar rules, I didn’t do much but continuously scrape together more vocabulary. This helped with reading, as I gradually understood more and more words, but I never approached the ability to carry a conversation, nor did I ever come close to fluency where I could interpret directly within Spanish itself, rather than translating everything into English first. Part of the problem was that this was all my high school foreign language classes ever aspired to – there was never any attempt to impose a Spanish-only environment that would force students to utilize the language, and I personally didn’t have any other environments or outlets through which I could practice and utilize Spanish on a regular basis. All skills eventually deteriorate without use, and not having an environment or being in a field of study that utilized foreign language, I had pretty much lost all that I had learned after I stopped with classes – the fact that I only ever learned conscious translational skills, like memorizing vocabulary, rather than secondhand-like conversational fluency skills only accelerated this.

On the other hand, taking a foreign language at all laid a very good groundwork for picking up languages in general, and especially similar languages. Though by the summer of my junior year I had forgotten most of the Spanish I had learned, concepts like conjugation or basic grammar in Italian, another Romantic language, came very easily, and remnants of the vast stores of vocabulary I had memorized came in handy with many of the similar Italian words. All the extra vocabulary I picked up in my second year probably didn’t help, but the first year introduced the perspective of language from a technical sense; without foreign language you’d never think about the English language in terms of something like conjugation, for example – it does happen, but we conjugate all of our verbs instinctively, by habit (we have so much exposure to our own language that we just memorize and know things) or experience (this suffix “sounds right” for this verb form), and the conscious, technical skill of English conjugation was lost way back in the 2^nd grade. This is needed because learning any foreign language needs a technical understanding of the language system as a foundation, since no one studying a language has the time to get the fourteen childhood years of fully-immersed language experience we use as the foundation for our native languages.

For myself, I didn’t gain very much at all after my first year with a foreign language – without an environment that was truly dedicated to teaching fluency in a language (in my opinion a foreign language-only environment is needed to teach this), continually harping on the grammatical and vocabulary aspects of a language couldn’t take me very far in any usable foreign language skills. (I’m certainly not a universal case, however, and keep in mind that as a math & sciences type of student, I never had much intent to learn a foreign language in the first place).

For myself at least, my 5 weeks in Italy validated my belief that the only way to truly learn a foreign language was to fully immerse myself in a completely non-English environment. Out of the necessities of daily life I had to utilize Italian, and through repetition more than anything learned the words and grammar and conjugations, much like the way we all learn to speak in our native languages. In this way, Italian came to me much more second nature than Spanish ever did even after two years of study. On the other hand, my proficiency in Italian never progressed beyond a basic level of comprehension and conversation, due to only having five weeks but more importantly not having any technical understanding of the language as a foundation to organize everything I learned. Through everyday experience, I absorbed a ton of language, but all I could ever really do was replicate.

(I’m formulating my thoughts as I type this out) … so perhaps the only way to ever really learn a language is to have both a technical understanding for a foundation, and the experience of real-world immersion into the language, preferably the former first in order to make sense of everything absorbed in the latter. For anyone serious about learning a language, it doesn’t make sense to half-ass it and only do one: by only studying the language and memorizing vocabulary you’re never able to develop any usable, practical language skills, but on the other hand by simply placing yourself in that environment and learning through experience without ever attempting to organize and make sense of the language, you’re never able to move beyond the point of simply replicating what you’ve already experienced. It’s nearly impossible to approach fluency through solely pursuing one method, and without actual fluency, memorizing all the vocabulary or knowing all the survival terms by instinct alone aren’t really of any practical use.

[Awkward segue]

As this post is intended for the college blog, what are my perspectives about high school from college education? What mattered? What would I do over again? As an engineering major, my field of study and probable eventual line of work doesn’t cross the need for foreign language much, if at all (mathematics is our native Esperanto, har har!), and for the College of Engineering here at Berkeley at least, foreign language isn’t a requirement at all. Was all my foreign language education for naught? For an engineering major, probably, although don’t discount the instances in actual, non-academic or -professional life where the foundation of foreign language may be useful. For many other majors however, foreign language is often one of many breadth requirements, and even though you won’t get credit for classes you take in high school, from my experience, just having taken courses in any foreign language at all will help in picking up any other language.

Perhaps the biggest students most students will come to this blog about however, is how many years of foreign language to take, and perhaps more specifically, should I take 3 years or 2 years?

For my college applications (most notably the UC system), most college admissions required two (2) years of foreign language, and three (3) as “recommended”. As an eventual engineering student, my actual need for foreign language in my field of study was essentially none, although if I were to do it over again I’d probably take one year as, personally, the subject was a good exposure to have. I stopped taking foreign language after two years, not really because I wasn’t interested but simply because I wasn’t learning anything useful, and couldn’t see how I could have, from my school’s particular class environments – I didn’t see a need in continuing to waste time while not gaining any appreciable language skills, and ideally this should really be the criterion on which you decide whether or not to take another year of foreign language, or any class for that matter.

At this point, I come into disagreement with a lot of people, which will probably be apparent if I ever find other writers to offer their perspectives (and so I simply inform you of this contrasting viewpoint in the meantime). For myself, I was doing well enough in other aspects and wasn’t applying to a major related to foreign language, and so my decision to take just two years rather than the “recommended” three probably didn’t matter that much, and I would tend to say that students doing engineering or science (i.e. not anywhere near fuzzy majors) would do just fine taking the minimum two years, advice which probably has the consensus of others also.

For fuzzy majors on the other hand, the issue is a bit trickier – I don’t know of any students who took “only” two years and got rejected, although the information I have is rather limited, and I can’t begin to speculate on the reason why admissions boards reject or accept individual applications. From a logical standpoint, I would think that a third-year is a non-issue: nothing most students take in high school (the exception being the rare AP foreign language class) will be considered college-level, and thus almost every student who would need to take foreign language at the college level would end up retaking everything again starting at the most basic and fundamental level, regardless of having a second or third year of study. The college requirements, in addition, are minimum requirements – like “minimum test scores” that are generally extremely low, they aren’t in anyway a guideline for “what you need to get in”, but are rather requirements – (speculation) admissions boards simply check to make sure students have at least met these requirements, and then go on to other decidedly more important and telling factors of your college application. And in this case, unless your intended major actually has something to do with foreign language, an entire year of class is much better spent on a course actually relevant to your field of study.