Quote Originally Posted by xf4wso View Post
how would you try to encourage students today to study these languages? Many Americans seem to be a bit on the lazy side when it comes to languages where the grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and/or script are noticeably different from English.
I think one obstacle is that many Americans go through much of their youth, often their entire youth, without any serious exposure to a second language. In much of the world that's quite unusual... my 16 year old daughter speaks 4 languages fluently and sees nothing at all unusual or remarkable about that.

I've never seen any scientific studies on the matter and I'm certainly no linguist, but my own observations convince me that people who grow up with multiple languages, or at least have early exposure to multiple languages, find it easier to pick up languages for the rest of their lives. If you get to age 20 with only one language, you're pretty much screwed. It seems like if you get to a certain age with only one way of saying things your brain just locks down on that and has a very difficult time accommodating other ways of saying things. Not to say it's impossible, but the effort involved is far greater than it is for people who have experienced that flexibility from an early age.

My memories of French, German, and Latin are very rudimentary, but I think that having once been at least functional in all 3 made it much easier to pick up Cebuano and Tagalog.

If someone with actual expertise in the matter comes along and tells me I'm full of it I'll gladly concede the point... just how it looks to a rank amateur, albeit a multilingual one.