Should Spanish be Taught Younger?

By Makenyze O'Dell

Spanish is a hard language if you’re not born around people who speak that language. In high school, you have to take a native language in order to graduate. Students take Spanish because it has a lot of benefits. Knowing Spanish can help you if you go into the medical field or plan on traveling around the world. There are a lot of people that speak Spanish in the world, 6.3 percent of the world speaks it. 

When you’re younger going into kindergarten you’re also learning English. The brain is still developing until you are in your late 20s, but by then learning a different language is hard. Spanish is a whole different language that you are unfamiliar with. Spanish takes up so much time and can be stressful for students in high school because they already have so many classes to worry about. My good friend Amirra Bailey says, “I think we should learn Spanish at a younger age because it would be better so the brain could adapt to the language better and have a better understanding of the subject.”

  Schools should be making younger kids learn English and learn Spanish because having to take a native language later won’t be as hard. Knowing Spanish by the time they’re in high school would mean schools could take it out as something you need to take to graduate. You could take something you want to do for your future and not have to take Spanish classes for two years. They could fill those two options with something they want to do when they're older. For me, Spanish is hard with dyslexia. I struggled as a child with learning English, but having to learn Spanish for me to graduate is even harder because you have to learn so much in such a short amount of time. My father says, “If a child is taught Spanish starting in kindergarten, by the time they are a senior in high school they will have a better understanding of the Spanish language.” You only have two years to learn the Spanish language then you can take another year, so you don’t have to take it in college and be done. Learning English at a young age I grew up hearing it in class and had five years to learn it, if we put in five years to learn Spanish people would have such a better experience with Spanish. If I had five years with Spanish I wouldn’t be stressing over having to keep my grades up so I don’t have to retake it next year.

It’s proven that kids at a younger age are better learners in the article “When Younger Learners Can Be Better” they say, “very young children are prodigious learners, and they are especially good at learning about causes.” saying that at a younger age children learn a lot better. In another article called “Is Younger Always Better When It Comes To Learning A Foreign Language” they say kids at a younger age are better language learners because when we’re young we learn in a different way than we do when we’re older. I agree with this statement because when you’re older the teachers don’t go as in-depth as they do when you’re younger. 

In elementary school, the teachers broke it down very little so your young brain could understand, but in high school depending on your teacher might not walk you through everything to where you understand it. In my Spanish class, we learn one thing for two days and then take a quiz on it. Two days isn’t enough for a lot of people because we’re learning so much in such a short amount of time. Then everyone expects you to pass it with flying colors. A lot of my friends when they know their a Spanish quiz coming talk about how they are going to fail even when they have studied for it. If Spanish was taught at a younger age there would be more higher grades in Spanish when we get in high school because we would already have the basic understanding of the foreign language.