Re: American Jingoism

On Sat, 16 Feb 2002, jogloran wrote:

> Wow, that's strange... most schools here in Australia have compulsory
> language learning in primary school (which is Kindergarten to 6th
> grade here),
Except that we say prep to grade six (kinder is pre-school). Personally, I
don't see the point in using incorrect terms to help Americans understand,
most here I'm sure would rather understand...

My primary school had Italian unless you were Arabic in which case you did
Arabic.

> and at my high school, you are made to do 1 term each of French,
> German, Japanese and Latin in Year 7, then in Year 8 you get to choose
> one of them. Year 9 onwards, it's on an elective basis (you can if you
> want).
At my old school (which was 7-10), you had to do a semester of Jap and
Italian and you got to choose one or the other for year eight. I don't
know what happened for years 9 and 10 because I'd left by then.

My current school (9-12) makes lotes (languages other than English)
compulsory at years 9 and 10 because, given it starts half-way through
secondary school, they don't know if anyone's learnt any lotes yet. You
get to choose the lang you want to do from the start, though.

My sister's school did a similar thing (at years 7 and 8; it's a year 7 to
12 school) although.

The fact that your school offered Latin is impressive, most schools don't
do that (I would've liked to have learnt Latin but as far as I can tell
the only way I could've done that is to pay billions of dollars to go to
Melbourne Grammar rather than next to nothing to go to Melbourne High
which is much better value for money (elitist state school)).

I don't know how valid these comparisons are, though. (State, Catholic and
Private schools all together and I have no idea what Imperative's school
is.)

</ramble>

Tristan

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