Languages taught in USA highschools?

[Mr Rayon]

Which languages are predominantely taught in US highchools?

 

In Australia, both in elementary and highschool, Chinese, Japanese, Indoesian, Italian, French are most commonly taught.

 

In USA schools is it just Spanish and French which are prioritised?

[Marat]

If you want an academic career, learning German early and well is vital. If you want to be a travel agent, learn Spanish. Unfortunately, although German was the main language taught at American high schools until the reaction against all things German shifted the concentration to French in the First World War, German is rapidly disappearing from the high school curriculum, as have Latin and Greek. The loss of the latter two is also a pity, since learning them is vital for building a good English vocabulary, helpful for studying medicine, and excellent for developing a sound understanding of grammar. Also, they help open the mind to deeper critical thinking by exposing students to conceptual structures and concerns different from those of most modern languages. There is no single modern word in any language I know that is equivalent to the Ancient Greek 'nous,' for example, with all its resonances.

[John Cuthber]

"The loss of the latter two is also a pity, since learning them is vital for building a good English vocabulary"

 

I just wonder; do you think that most English people have a poor vocabulary, or do you think we all learn Latin and Greek?

 

Speaking of English vocabulary, the word "nous" is part of it and it still has all the technical meanings it ever had (as well as the every-day one that is pretty much the same as its every-day meaning was in ancient Greece)

[Marat]

It depends on how you define 'English vocabulary.' 'Nous' may, like 'point d'appui,' 'metier,' and 'gnosis,' be part of English in the sense that they are foreign-language borrowings used in high-fallutin' speech, but are they really English? German presents the same puzzle, since in principle it is always ready to adopt any foreign language term as its own, after inventing a gender and plural for it and changing a possible 'y' at the end to an 'ie.' Latin responded the same way to Greek, changing the spelling a bit but borrowing a lot of the much more sophisticated vocabulary.

 

I guess my essential concern would be, does the potential sophistication of your thinking depend on the learned linguistic structures and vocabulary you have stored in your head? For example, Icelandic has a word meaning 'an object which is the same right-side out and inside-out,' but if we had grown up with this term incorporated into the basic structure of our thinking would we be more sophisticated geometers, or have less trouble learning Reimannian geometry and its associated approach to physics? Or does growing up with German as your linguistic orientation to the world give you a capacity to hold more ideas together in juxtaposition when you are thinking about them, given German's capacity to make long sentences because it grammar permits easier cross-references between modifiers and nouns within a sentence?