I took three years of German in high school but I really only remember how to say hello and goodbye, some pronouns, some colors, numbers, and a few nouns.
I barely got through the classes. The only reason everybody in the classes didn't fail is because our teacher gave out stack loads of extremely simple extra credit.
Now on to college. Foreign language is why I am going to graduate with a BS in Rhetoric and Composition instead of a BA in Creative Writing like I wanted to. I think it is a dire problem with the Liberal Arts departments of colleges and universities. They don't understand that at the college age, people's brains don't have the ease to learn and mold another language into their brains. It isn't even easy at the high school level.
What makes me angry is that two years (four semesters) of a foreign language is required for all BA degrees. Last semester I took a class called "The Writer At Work". Apparently at my university, they have it set up that a composition professor teaches the class in the fall and a creative writing professor teaches it in the spring. Well, my professor asked everybody what their majors were and a good deal of us said that we were Rhetoric and Composition majors. He wasn't too happy because he thought he would have all Creative Writing majors. Then we made him even more unhappy when he found that all of us Rhetoric and Comp people were writing creative short stories and poems instead of non-fiction composition pieces.
He then asked why this was and why we weren't Creative Writing majors instead. He asked each one of us, I think the number was 7, why. We all answered that we decided on Rhetoric and Comp because we didn't feel it was necessary that we were required to take four semesters of a foreign language to get a Creative Writing degree that we wanted. The consensus was that we took Rhetoric Comp because it would remove that requirement and we would be able to get out of college a semester sooner as well as save thousands of dollars that would have been wasted on foreign language classes that we would never use because we felt that we would never go to a Non-English speaking country. Then he gave use the pompous bull crap liberal professor answer that, "I am not happy about this, your advisers are not doing their jobs and telling you the right things. You should take a foreign language so you can be cultured."
Seriously, I get a cultural overload as it is living in the US. Besides I think it is insane to make foreign languages a requirement for all BA's, especially Creative Writing. I want someday to be a published author of novels, short stories and poems. Learning a foreign language will not further that goal, since I write in English and will be publishing in the US. People have purposed the question that, what if I become a famous writer and have book appearances in a foreign language speaking country? Well the answer to that is simple, that is what language interpreters are for. If I am a famous enough writer to get invitations to other countries, than I have enough money to hire an interpreter, though since it would probably be an event sponsored by the people that publish my work, they would probably provide and interpreter for me.
I believe that the only degrees that should require a foreign language are ones that are linguistically based.
On another note, I am a strong supporter of making English the official language of the US. If you truly want to be a citizen of this country and live here, learn English and speak it.
