Languages

[Teacosy]

"You can be good at languages and science, but if you are a natural scientist like my DS, you probably won't enjoy or have a passion for the languages".


Unfortunately, I cannot claim to be both a good scientist and linguist Zorro, but I sincerely hope lots of posters will come along to disprove your theory!

[yoyo123]

just read an article which says that mathematicians have a high rate of understanding languages..pattern recognition..would seem that way with my daughter who , although is 'an historian' excelled at maths and physics and
" just loves languages" to quote her..
must admit that when I did my PGCE ( I'm a geek - science and maths) fellow students said it 'wasn;t fair' because I found writing poems so easy as well .....it was just patterns

[mystery]

Interesting reply Kesteven, and echoes my thoughts. Also you've made me feel better about not sending my children to the Saturday Mandarin school. The incidental exposure element is so true. And unless this continues it's so easy to learn a language and then forget it again.

[magwich2]

We are also back to the tedium of having to ensure that DCs get the maximum number of A* grades as well. There are just enough chinese and half-chinese children doing the subject to ensure that the grade boundaries are high.

[mystery]

There clearly aren't enough clergy children to make the RE grade boundaries high.

[scarlett]

My son will be learning Mandarin at his new school ( alongside Spanish...not in the same lesson though )

Is it a difficult language to learn ? He said he only chose it because he likes Non Verbal Reasoning.

[mystery]

Sounds like a logical reason!! Lots of Chinese children find it easy. I would love to learn it. Sorry that was not too helpful. I think it's a great choice if school offers it anyway. What has he turned down as a consequence?

[scarlett]

The other options were French, German and Italian. He could only choose one language and the other was allocated to him. I'm not too fussed about French because that's something you can learn at home really and DS2 has taught himself quite a lot ( can I have an ice cream , that sort of thing..) but Italian would have been nice as we do go to Italy a bit.I think he's chosen Mandarin because he thinks it's just shapes.Hope he knows it's verbal too !!!

[mystery]

It sounds fantastic to be able to do it at school. So no guilt for you either about not going to those Saturday Mandarin classes.

[dani*]

I speak 5, including English which is not my mother tongue.

Imho it is total madness to introduce 3 or 4 different languages in one go. Maybe it looks good on paper but in reality it is unlikely that most children will continue all these languages at higher level.

It is worth considering that a GCSE level is not enough to use a language effectively. So unless the child is determined to become a linguist, I'm not convinced that so many different languages are the best use of time. Perhaps it would be better to learn one or two properly rather than a little bit of everything.

A few years ago I decided to go on a Spanish course, unfortunately the only course on offer in my area was GCSE. I got so bored with it that I only showed up for half the lessons, and still managed to achieve an A*in the exam. Just a shame I still could not speak any Spanish at all at the end of the course, not a sausage!