As an English speaker since age 3 I found it both valuable and pleasurably to learn French and German, as the three languages are like the vertices of a common triangle, with so much shared history that speaking one provides insights into the other two.
The article points out another factor though: I am lucky (?) enough to use all three daily; in the US there is no reason for that to be the case. If you learn a language as a "foreign" language it will forever be foreign to you; if you learn another language as a living, thing that you must use you will internalize it. That's not a moral judgement; simply the way of the world. And in many countries one language suffices.
The history angle is indeed interesting. Neither English nor French is my mother tongue. I started learning English at the age of 3 and learnt French for almost a year at the of 18. It was quite interesting to see the influence French had on English. I later found that almost a third of English words have French origin. Further searching took me all the way back to Norman invasion of England and how the Norman royals were sort of disolved in the English culture. European history never disappoints you. :)
>As an English speaker since age 3 I found it both valuable and pleasurably to learn French and German, as the three languages are like the vertices of a common triangle
I don't know French, but had noticed and said somewhat the same (although regarding English and German only) in an HN thread about Berlin startups a while ago. (Someone said something about the difficulty or otherwise of learning German, and I replied to that.) I noticed while learning German that I could guess the meaning of many German words, because they were similar to English words I knew. Even very light knowledge of Latin (just casually picked up during a lot of reading of English) and some Sanskrit knowledge (studied it in school for a few years) helped, since all are from Indo-European language family tree.
It's even more interesting with exposure to neighboring languages. You observe more and more how they flow one into the other. Modern nationalities have introduced something of a step function feature to this, but not at all thoroughly.
Americans, for one, often wonder at how many languages a European may speak. And there's significant instruction and emphasis on this, I understand. (My own experience is with the U.S. education system.) But, too, there's simply the fact that over relatively small distances -- in our modern world -- language changes. And you grow up accommodating that.
> It's even more interesting with exposure to neighboring languages. You observe more and more how they flow one into the other. Modern nationalities have introduced something of a step function feature to this, but not at all thoroughly.
This is called a dialect continuum [1] for those curious.
shared history sure but if it were about relations then it's English, German, and one of the other germanic languages.
I learnt Latin in school third of the class did, Bavaria, you know...) and funny enough it was a good help to improve my English.
On usage, unlike 25 years ago when I would have needed more English, we can have access to radio and tv streams from around the world. Sitting in Helsinki and wanting to learn Portogese via Brazialian telenovelas? No problemo!
The article points out another factor though: I am lucky (?) enough to use all three daily; in the US there is no reason for that to be the case. If you learn a language as a "foreign" language it will forever be foreign to you; if you learn another language as a living, thing that you must use you will internalize it. That's not a moral judgement; simply the way of the world. And in many countries one language suffices.