In short: By the time a person is 18, they must effectively be able to communicate and understand conversationally in 2 languages and casually use them in daily life..., if not become completely fluent...

Other than that, any language goes (whether it is a locally-known one, or a popular one worldwide),

The only thing I hope to gain from this, is to rid the world of /Monolingual Betas/

Seriously though, has this been a policy before? Because I haven't heard of such one...

I think this can especially be used for citizenship...

Edit: I don't necessarily have any other presupposed requirements besides bilingualism, though we may have certain notions of such in this main goal

Edit II: In furthering this venture, I have realized that my liberalism may slightly poisoned my lens....

And for clarification...

Minimum dual language system:

Main national language + other language (likely another related language, but foreign ones are fine)

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[–] arabiclearner@hexbear.net 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ok but if we're using the US system to teach languages then no one is actually going to learn a language. People take "four years of Spanish" in high school and even claim that they "know Spanish' yet they probably couldn't even understand simple conversations or watch some super slow kid's show like Dora the Explorer. I mean think about it, they engage with the language like at most 5 hours a week during class and maybe 5 hours more for homework (which I highly doubt). That's nothing in the grand scheme of things when learning another lanuguage. You need hundreds, if not thousands of hours engaging with the language to become fluent.

[–] VILenin@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem with high school language classes is that the only thing they actually teach is memorization. They know how to read “the apple is red” but switch the words around and they’re totally lost.

Whole classes are basically just the teacher writing “gusta = like” on the board. You didn’t learn Spanish, you learned a less efficient version of machine translation.

[–] Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago

The only solution I'd suppose is that we learn another language like you did learn English as a baby,

(eg. natural exposure to its sound, word order, and vocab context & tutoring by its native speakers)

(Copied and pasted a bit for clarity and explanation)

[–] charly4994@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In high school all our language classes were basically electives, something I was able to get out of for some reason I don't remember anymore, but I had come from a different district where second languages didn't start until high school so in 8th grade being shoved into a 2nd year Spanish class was a joke. Got placed in remedial Spanish and booted from the advanced classes as a result, absolutely failed learning Spanish. Hated the Spanish language as a result because I just couldn't learn it. In like 10th grade I started teaching myself Japanese and combined it with just memorizing a bunch of vocabulary, learning the rules of the language, and a shitload of exposure to listening. Intentionally found kids shows in Japanese to watch just so I'd have more exposure to easier parts. Did pretty well and was at conversational level in 2 years. Now as an adult I don't have the time to keep trying to learn and the time I can dedicate to exposure is a lot lower, but a single year in Japan probably tripled my proficiency from conversational in my last year of high school. Accent was comparatively milder compared to my peers too. I also feel like I don't have to take the step of translating it in my head to understand and when I do put time in I just use Japanese tools rather than English tools.