Language choices in year 7

[Wobblypig]

DS has to select a preference for his language choices in year 7. They have to do Latin and then can chose 2 from French, Spanish, German and mandarin. He has done some French before.
DH thinks mandarin is obvious choice but they have to stick to this choice for 3 years and I think it’s a risk. It may be very hard and he may hate it. Spanish would obviously be easier with French and Latin studied before, whilst German sounds like a complete waste of time to me but DH says it’s good for business.
Anyone with experience of similar choices and specifically mandarin?

Thanks

Mandarin is difficult for those whose native language is based on letters as opposed to characters. It's also tonal. Therefore, progress is likely to be slower than in European languages. But they're not reasons not to choose it!

If it were me I'd choose Spanish and Mandarin. Together with English they are the world's most spoken languages.

From a career prospective, what is the world's most spoken language may not be anywhere as important as a) what language you are likely to come into contact with in a professional capacity b) what language you are likely to be able to learn to a level where it is of any use to you.

I'd vote for German: your dh is absolutely right about the business thing- we have a lot of trade with German speaking countries, also useful if he wants to go into sciences (or humanities research, for that matter), grammatically it is similar to Latin so the two would support one another, and it is much easier to go there or get hold of books to practise.

Why do you consider German a complete waste of time ?

German Universities are great and free, lots of great engineering and Science jobs there, the economy is doing really well etc. Plus, German is handy for skiing in Austria for example.

And, as Cory said, the cases learnt in Latin are a great help when learning them in German.

I actually did all these languages at school. Looking back, Latin is kind of relevant to my day job so we can discount that. Spanish (which was my own choice) I have only ever used for holidaying purposes. French I use now and then. And German (which was the one I only learnt because my parents insisted) I use all the time. If you go on to postgraduate/science/scholarship, it's invaluable: so much good stuff is written in German.

German is by far the most useful of the European languages. It's also far rarer to be a good speaker of German.

There are many Brits who speak decent Spanish or French. Few who speak decent German.

DD is studying Mandarin as one of her GCSE choices. It is the subject she finds the most difficult, even though she is a good language student. There is no getting around the need to learn a huge amount of mandarin characters by heart, repeatedly drawing them over and over again.

If your DS is willing put in the extra hours and commit to learning new characters each week and constant revising the characters he has already learned then go for it.

I’d go for Mandarin, get in there from a young age. I picked Russian at school when I was 13, as my dad reckoned I could pick up German any time, any place when I was older (he was right). It was good to get stuck into a tough (and useful) language early on.

I'm a bit baffled by you thinking German is a waste of time! Quite apart from the fact that learning a language is inherently good brain training, it's impossible to predict which language might turn out to be more useful to your child. Sadly the VAST majority surely never use their foreign language for anything much at all. So unless your dc has already got a career in China or Spain planned out, German is just as likely to be useful.

Actually I'd recommend German, because it's not as hard as Mandarin and does not easily cause confusion with French or Spanish. I'm an MFL teacher and constantly see kids getting confused between Spanish and French, sometimes to the point of answering entirely in the wrong language.

wobbly, is this for T? If so, then I think they only guarantee your first choice (although in practice I think most people got their second choice as well).

So make sure your first choice is the one your DS really really wants to do.

I would agree with some PPs: German is different enough to French or Spanish to hopefully not be too confusing. It’s quite tough for them learning 3 different languages at once.

DS1 immediately discounted mandarin as he knows that his handwriting is absolutely appalling, and he’d never be able to get to grips with Chinese characters...

Goodness didn’t think people would be quite so vociferous about German but I am convinced it is easier than Mandarin .The reason to be so dubious is that it seems to be spoken by such a very small number of people and even fewer people have German as their sole language. So, as someone pointed out, since you don’t know what your child will be when they grow up, then you should probably play a numbers game. Unless you just take learning languages as an endpoint in its own right and not be concerned about destination .

Personally I’d go for French and Spanish, or French and German. Spanish is valuable particularly bevause of its use in Latin America and Caribbean with the former being a particularly important place for business. Also I know companies expanding into Spain now. It is very commonly taught around the world and is valuable for its literature, history and travel opportunities. Many people never use any language they learn at school outside of travel tbh, and Spanish opens up an entire continent (barring Brazil) + Central American countries and Mexico. These places are incredibly varied and exciting to visit, and many have regions where people speak relatively poor English, so it’s particularly useful to learn. I didn’t learn Spanish at school but grew up with a mum who spoke a language which is is mostly intelligible with Spanish (I am nowhere near fluent and only know basic conversation) but that has helped me. If they ever want to work in the US it is the most valuable second language there. He will have an easier time with his French and Latin background - and his Spanish can help him in French and Latin too.

French is really valuable for anything in Europe, in the UK it’s usually seen as the default second language to learn. It opens up a lot of West and North Africa, parts of the Middle East, bits of the Caribbean, parts of Canada, etc. It is therefore great for travel, but also for business, research, meeting new people etc. There are important francophone universities he could benefit from, as well as their research, if he wanted to in the future. He has already learnt a little and making sure that doesn’t go to waste and building off it would be great.

With that said, German is definitely an important language for business - probably the second language for European business etc, plus its good for travel, universities, research, literature and culture etc. Not to mention, if your DS learns a Latin based language now, and later decides he wants to learn say Spanish for work or travel, he would find it easier to start as an adult. Learning German now won’t stop him learning a Romance language in the future after all, and he’ll probably find it easier to start learning one of them than German.

Despite mentioning stuff like business, most people who study a language at yr7 are not going to take it up to A-Level which is probably the minimum for when it is useful for career opportunity, if they stop aged GCSE they’ll likely forget almost all of it or it will be at a level which it isn’t too difficult to work up to with more concentrated study as an adult (I’m learning a language now and that’s my experience for now, but maybe I just had poor language teaching in school). While it’s inportsnt to consider the future and set the stage for taking a language further if they want to, they’ll probably be using this language for travel, and a dedicated pupil might want an exchange trip and to consume online content not set as homework. Mandarin is going to see little use because getting to a level of being able to read basic information in Mandarin is very hard! Unless you’re travelling to China regularly, they’ll not use it for travel. In comparison, French and Spanish will likely be the easiest in terms of going on any holiday in the future as it’s often just as cheap to fly to Spain as it is to stay in the U.K., and easy to take weekend trips to France and Spain, there’s also opportunity for visiting Belgium, Switzerland etc. German is also useful for travel to Germany, Austria and Switzerland of course too. Unless your son learns to speak mandarin extremely well, the time is unlikely to pay off, especially if he’s only going up to GCSE (which is quite a low level language wise), whereas German, Spanish and French can have that use quite easily. Id go for Spanish and French just due to ease of learning them together, and having the widest opportunity for travel and the expanding markets in Africa and Latin America, plus the widespread and diverse content/media, countries to use it in etc.

My daughter is doing Latin French and Chinese but is really funding Chinese tough going. Latin she loves but it combines a lot of history and is taught in such an engaging way. Personally if she had a choice I would have suggest she drop Chinese and do Spanish or German. I think learning 3 languages is tough, when one of those is mandarin it's even harder

Thank you that’s helpful. Showed DS some mandarin on YouTube hoping that he would think it too hard only to find out it’s completely piqued his interest.

My ds started mandarin last year in yr7 now yr8 has the worst handwriting ever but according to his teacher has the neatest writing of the characters in his class. My son also loves the ‘puzzle/code’ element of learning the characters which helped him learn them quickly. He is doing really well and enjoys it much more than French which he did through primary school and only seemed to be able to say bleu when he left.

You do know that German is the most widely spoken first language in Europe, right OP?

Not English or Spanish but German.

Best language for English speakers to learn given its similarity to English in the first place.

Most important post Brexit language to learn.

It's s huge and rare advantage to have a qualification in German as a native English speaker, so your DC would be set up well for a levels, uni and beyond with it, even if they didn't want to have s job which directly uses it.

Sadly some people still seem to have funny ideas about German, Germans and Germany which quite frankly don't belong in modern polite society.

"The reason to be so dubious is that it seems to be spoken by such a very small number of people and even fewer people have German as their sole language. So, as someone pointed out, since you don’t know what your child will be when they grow up, then you should probably play a numbers game."

The numbers game only makes sense if you are actually going to come in contact with these people. There is no reason to believe we will still not trade heavily with Europe after Brexit. And even people who don't have German as their mother tongue use it to publish knowledge and communicate on work-related topics. I grew up in a country with a small language. Every Brit I meet assumes that we spoke English all the time and that that was all that mattered to us. I point out that while I wrote my PhD thesis in English because I had an English boyfriend, my brother wrote his in German and two of my friends wrote theirs in French.

Yes, there are an awful lot of people in China and Latin America, but most of them are not trading or otherwise in contact with the UK.

You might as well put them in a hat and pick on. Each has its positives and negatives. It is impossible to predict your son's future needs.

Personally, I would think about them in combination.

If your son is academically able I'd certainly go for mandarin as I think the usefulness of that will be huge in the future. Together with spanish, as it is simpler language (at least to gcse level) to balance out the difficulty of mandarin. (Actually mandarin's grammar is like english, but easier - so it not as super hard as expected.)

Otherwise, german and french or german and spanish would be good because french and spanish are fairly similar, so doing one gives an insight into the other. For me, having learnt french, it was not so hard to pick up a little spanish or figure things out. And german is useful. It is highly underrated as a holiday destination for one thing!

If you doubt your son is that interested in languages or not so able, then french and spanish. These two languages are similar enough that what is learnt in one will help the study of the other, especially with latin.

A German here. I work for a German company and we pay a premium for language skills and also pay for extra tuition for some employees as German is vital for us. But we also have a huge amount of customers with representatives or small subsidiaries here in the UK and most of their head quarter in Germany has not a lot of decent English speaking staff.

Saying that, all language skills are good to have, there is still the opinion here that everybody speaks English anyway. If you master Latin German will be easier as well.

DD will do French and Spanish, mainly because she is already bi lingual and I think more German at school is a waste of time. I actually think Spanish is better than French due to the vast Central/Southern American market.

Yes, there are an awful lot of people in China and Latin America, but most of them are not trading or otherwise in contact with the UK.

That's now. OP's DS is age 10/11. In 20 years time who knows but likely to be more I would suggest.

German would be my last choice. I'm a scientist living in Switzerland. I've never once needed German in my professional career and neither do I need it for daily life as I have French and English.

It's not a useful language for business as anyone you come into contact with will likely speak far better English than you speak German. It's not useful for international travel either (except in Germany and Austria obviously).

It is not one of the official languages of the UN or international diplomacy, whereas Spanish, French and Mandarin are.

I say this as someone who has lived in 6 different countries around the world and spent half my adult life abroad (I'm British).
I'd go for any combination of the others but not German.

Also to add, my DH (who is French), learned German at school ahead of English and Spanish. He said it was a poor decision as he's never used it but conversely needed to go to nightschool for both English and Spanish in order to advance professionally (he's an agronomist - crop scientist)

The truth of the matter is, that unless you do languages for a degree, you probably won’t use them for work. Even then, not that many grads do. It’s a route to another career. It proves you have a brain. So do what he likes best. He may end up in China or Germany, France or a Spanish speaking country. The chances are he won’t. Also 300 million Chinese people are learning English. The need for the Brits to speak Mandarin is over stated. Just do it for fun.

If the Spanish and French are going to be taught at the same pace and stage, imo that can be confusing (and I say that as a language graduate and one-time languages teacher). Many people do it though and presumably cope fairy well! But, for my money, I'd choose whichever language you DS wants as his first choice and if that's French or Spanish, probably not the other as his second choice.

If you're a capable linguist and are fluent in French (and to a lesser extent have a grounding in Latin) then it's not hugely difficult to pick up Spanish and Italian later on in life. It would be very, very difficult to pick up Mandarin without plenty of time and tuition.

On the flip-side, learning Mandarin at school is also time-consuming and the level you'll get to at 16/18 is going to be a long way short of the level you'd get to in German. On the flip-flip side, Mandarin is a different type of intellectual challenge that your child might enjoy.

Business-wise globally it's clearly Mandarin > Spanish > German, and even in strictly Euuropean business terms you're not going to find many Germans who speak neither English or French.