Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Children should begin learning a foreign language as soon as they start school. Use specific reasons and examples to support your position.

This topic is a contentious one – some people agree with the opinion that without foreign language, students can excel in their field of interests, so there is no need to expertise these, whereas other section opines that with the help of foreign language, students can delve deep in the crux of their subjects and they are also exposed to the outer broader world. To enlighten more on these two opinions, let us see some examples all over the world.

To start with, let us look into the situation in my country, India. India is well-known all over the world due to its diversity in all aspects, starting from terrain to climate, culture & customs to languages used by its citizens, ethnicity to food-habits & life-styles, poor to rich, old to young. For a country of such diversity, it is very difficult to communicate with peoples from different states. Though Indian Government has announced Hindi as official language in our country, a vast section of people is even now against of it and they have no intention to learn Hindi only for ease of communication. So, in this situation, only a foreign language, especially English is used as a medium of communication. In our era of rat-race, to achieve dream jobs which will provide all sorts of extravagance, comforts, and students hardly hesitate to accept a job far away from his home town, may be in a state within the country or aboard. In this scenario, if a student is not comfortable in speaking, reading and writing in foreign language, he faces difficulties in attain his goal. So, in my opinion to avert this situation, the only way is to train the students in foreign language, especially English, since their childhood.

Moreover, we can’t deny that most of books in higher Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Statistics, Bio-Technology are easily available in English version. Sometimes, it is very difficult, may be impossible to translate these books into native languages, like Bengali, because of jargons used in topics. So, to pursue higher studies and to unravel the intricacies lying underneath the curtain, one has to master in English.

Now, some may argue that Japan and China are able to succeed to excel in all fields of aspects without being experts in foreign languages. Moreover, with the power of their mother-tongues they have become prominent as technologically advanced countries in the world.

In a nutshell, after pondering over above mentioned points, according to me, lessons on foreign language is necessary in the countries like India, where there are different kinds of languages. But, if there exists proper institution to translate all kinds of books written in foreign languages, into native language, then the decision on taking foreign language depends on the choice of student.