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A blog by someone who doesn't like or understand blogs.
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Sunday, August 04, 2002
FOREIGN LANGUAGES.
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Language is effortless to learn before you're 6, not that hard to learn before you're 13, and extremely difficult to learn after you're 13. I think that's a really big, important idea, and one of the half dozen or so major, big, important ideas that I personally don't think society pays near enough attention to. The dumbest guy in Mexico can speak Spanish, but I had to struggle so hard with it in high school, even though I'm a pretty bright guy. If someone would have just talked to me in Spanish when I was 4 or 5, it wouldn't have even been work to know it now, and I'd speak it today better than I ever could, even if I devoted the rest of my life to the study of the Spanish language. But instead, in America, we start teaching foreign languages when students turn about 14 or 15-- the worst possible time! I'm going to make it a point to make sure my kids (when I have kids) learn at least two foreign languages when they are very young.
Then again, language learning may be obsolete by then. Here's my idea. Here are four things we already have: 1) pretty good speech recognition software, 2) pretty good translation software, 3) pretty good text-to-speech software, and 4) pretty good hand-held computers. Hey, are you thinking what I'm thinking? We ought to have a hand-held computer that uses speech recognition in one language to make text, runs the text through the translations software, and then uses the text-to-speech software to say the result, in order to provide unlimited real-time two-way translation between any two languages in the world, for under two hundred bucks. Can you imagine holding up one of these things on the street in Bangkok or Tokyo or Paris, and being able to say anything you wanted to in English, and have them hear you in Thai or Japanese or French, and reply in their own language, which you would hear as English? Now THAT would change everything. And we already have the technology. Someone just has to put the pieces together.
link to this item: http://www.creamy.com/blog/2002/08/foreign-languages.html
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