To graduate a student is required to “learn” a foreign language, while in reality most students just scrape by attempting to speak French or Spanish. To at least be considered proficient in a language, studies suggest that students must practice that language for about four hours each day for a couple months. However, in high school we get about an hour and a half in class five days a week at most, and that’s if we were on task the whole period.

A student may possibly have some more time if they took the time to practice the language at home, which is unlikely. With this, it is impossible for high school students to learn a language for a semester in high school while they have a million other things to worry about in order to prepare to graduate and possibly go to college.

If a student was to take the same foreign language for all four years in high school that would only amount to about two “years” of learning a foreign language. Which turns out to be a much shorter period of time than you think with the ton of outside factors playing into our lives, and as a result no one is actually practicing the language for two years, everyday, for a couple hours.

Moving from a school with a year long schedule in the middle of my junior year, I’ve taken two full school years of French. Now moving here, classes are only a semester. Having experienced learning French for two years I can say that time period was already hard enough to  be able to learn a whole new language, as you start from scratch like a child, learning the alphabet to individual words then eventually into sentence structure and onto writing full paragraphs. However, now that precious learning time has been cut into one semester and learning a whole new language with three to four other classes is next to impossible.

Time, practice and determination are huge factors when learning a language, and at our age during this time of our lives we are terribly lacking all three with a million other aspects in our life. However, children do have the luxury of time that we high schoolers do not, as well as the ability to easily absorb language.

Children are able to learn a language easier as their minds are open to new language and they easily absorb information at a young age. While as we grow older we consciously push ourselves to learn making it harder to learn a language as you cannot force it to stick your mind like other subjects.

As we get older, we are taught in every subject to look into the material in depth, but when learning a language looking in depth will cause confusion, holding you back. Our egos and pride also hinder the process as we restrain ourselves from throwing ourselves into the language in the fear of looking/sounding like an idiot, thus holding ourselves back from being able to learn the language easily.

If a student was to take the AP exam they are required to be able to hold a smooth fluent conversation in the foreign language for a couple minutes. With the limited time of only a semester to learn the language a majority of students are unable to smoothly hold such a conversation or not confident with their limited amount of practice.

For those reasons, I strongly believe we should begin to learn foreign languages at a younger age, possibly elementary school as children are psychologically able to learn them easier and more proficiently compared to a busy high school student that is psychologically unable to absorb the information thrown at us for a semester at a time.

By learning when we are younger we will get to learn the basics of the language more easily to prepare us for the future foreign language courses we will take in high school. However, as of now with the current opportunities our learning is greatly limited due to the little time we have to learn the language in class and the even smaller amount with the various activities in most of our lives from jobs, sports, to even our other classes homework.

It would even lessen the workload for the teachers as they would have less content to teach, only needing to teach a quick refresh on the basics they would’ve learned at a younger age. They may not even need to do that if the children were learning the language from middle school going onto high school.

It only makes sense to move the curriculum to an age in which we can properly learn the material and have it stick. I am not opposed to having foreign language as a credit required for graduation, however, I do strongly believe that they should at least begin teaching the language basics at a younger age in order to prepare us properly for the language courses required in high school and actually be able to use the foreign language we “learned” for two years.