I speak a number of languages poorly. I’ve got enough Latin grammar to do quick-and-dirty translations, but my resulting constructions tend to get me odd looks from classicists, if not outright frowns. My French is good enough to talk to a Canadian or a (kind and forgiving) Frenchman, but you wouldn’t want me teaching your son. My Spanish is substantially less than adequate, and we don’t even want to talk about the modicum of Greek and Hebrew I learned in seminary.
So I found this little slideshow from John Fotheringham to be pretty good:
It served as a useful reminder of why I like learning languages, and why I find it to be so difficult. Why don’t our schools produce piles of bilingual kids? Partly because of how we teach languages, but partly because we don’t let them access the languages they want to be interested in…
