VIDEO: Dog that can read teaches kids how to read

cbs12.com ^ | Sunday, May 18 2014,

[BerryDingle]

That dog is more qualified than Al Sharpton now.

[GJones2]

> “I’m sensitive about Greek because my grandfather declared me ‘illiterate’ at age 10 because I could read Latin, Hebrew, French and Spanish (and of course, English), but not Greek.” <

I used to teach foreign languages, and liked learning them myself (most of the time). I don’t think it’s a good idea for children to spend much time learning multiple languages, though. So they learn Latin, Hebrew, French, Spanish, English — and Greek too? That’s impressive, but by the time young children reach adulthood, people in the developed world will have electronic devices that not only translate but probably interpret too.

Free online translators already do a decent job of conveying the gist of written texts (with some egregious errors, yes, but being able to understand the gist most of the time — not just of texts in the languages you mentioned, but in nearly every major language — is an extraordinary accomplishment, and just the first step).

[GJones2]

Another objection to learning many languages is that it’s not efficient to learn many words for the same thing. The time spent learning how to say ‘cat’, for instance, in five languages could be more profitably spent learning something about real cats. Admittedly the correspondences among words in different languages aren’t one-to-one, and you do gain other perspectives by seeing how other languages express ideas. I don’t think the benefit is proportional to the time spent, though. One foreign language helps give perspective on one’s own, but there’s a law of diminishing returns.

If children enjoy learning many languages, then fine. Considering the technological advances that are likely imminent, though, I don’t see the practical value.

[JRandomFreeper]

I'll skip French with my grandkids. It's a pretty useless language. I would rather have been taught Arabic.

My grandkids live in a bilingual household, so they don't get a choice about learning English or Cambodian.

I'm not going to teach them Greek. Just the alphabet. That's enough, since it's important technically in engineering and the sciences.

Next year they'll probably learn the Cyrillic alphabet so they can sound out words if they need to. Everything in Russian more sophisticated than pulling turnips comes from some other language anyway...

/johnny

[Lizavetta]

Teach them the Jewish Alphabet and to read and write Cantonese, if you want to prepare them for the real world future.

Add Mandarin, Arabic and Farsi to that list. The Middle East and China aren't going away.

[JRandomFreeper]

There is nothing to equal the automatic knowledge that the greek letter Delta, and knowing that it means change so that Δv automatically means change in velocity, or that λ means wavelength, or that Ω stands for Ohms.

/johnny

[mdmathis6]

Kind of reminds me of the joke about a Dog owner trying to convince a talent agent his dog could speak...You know whats on a house...”Roof”, Who chased Red riding hood? “woof”...what’s on a tree? “bark!”. The talent agent laughs sneeringly and says “any dog could make those sounds and tries to throw them out!”...until the dog turns around and says to his owner and the agent...”I could smell that the other woman he has been with was the secretary out in the waiting room, shall we tell his wife or can we persuade him to write us a contract?”

[JRandomFreeper]

They already know the word for cat in at least 3 languages (English, Cambodian, Spanish) without them having to be 'taught'. They just picked it up. Their minds are very plastic at this point, and absorb information like a sponge.

I mean for them to have useful information, not how to put a condom on a queer banana.

Besides, without a television in the house, we have to keep our minds occupied.

/johnny