"Free Stuff"

[Xavier_Onassis]

We have signs in Miami-Dade in English, Spanish and Creole. It works pretty well.
I am not advocating that signs should be in ten languages. There should be a more serious effort to have signs that are intelligible without words, as are used in Europe.

In France and most of Spain, the stop signs on major roads all say STOP. Not ARRET, not ALTO, but STOP, in English. And of course, they are red octagons. The Germans made signage universally German. They made everyone drive on the right. Then the American Army came and changed the signs to English. Stop signs in Russia use the English work for STOP spelled in the Cyrillic alphabet CTO and the letter that resembles Pi.

Making spoken information available to taxpayers in a language they understand is not difficult. How hard is it to "press One for English, Aprieta Dos para español and so forth?" If you press one for English, you will not even hear Spanish, and the cost is negligible. People who speak other languages pay taxes too.

[R.R.]

As someone who made a living teaching people how to speak Spanish, you are not the one to comment on an English only policy. You have a conflict of interest.

[Plane]

As someone who made a living teaching people how to speak Spanish, you are not the one to comment on an English only policy. You have a conflict of interest.

    Everyone has a direct intrest in communicating.

[Plane]

  "Linga Franca"


       Literally means French, for the latest Century or more it has actually been English.

        There was a time when the worlds most popular language for the conduct of business was indeed French , before that it was Latin.

        It is kind of an important historical accident.

       Winston Chirchill said that the importance of the fact that the US spoke English was great, he thought it was the unifying element that made the US and his beloved England a team.


         English is the most popular second  language to learn.When two strangers  meet anywhere on the planet they are more likely to speak English than any other language , even more than Chineese which more people speak as a first language. Pilots all learn English so that they can fly internationally, they must either learn English or the home language of every airport they ever plan to visit. When two Indians converse they are very likly to use English because there are so many dialects of Urdu and other languages within India that English is easyer.

       Most of all English is the language of Business with Americans, the US has the worlds biggest and most active economy everyone who wants to earn a dollar is wise to learn the dollars language.


       So we in America have gotten lazy about it , everyone elese in the world have been learning English and accomadateing us while we act as if the effort to learn Spanish or Chineese would be a waste and the suggestion that we should an insult.

        Well lets get clued in here, this does not make us seem like sophisticates.

         There was a time when Latin was the language of business , this was before Rome collapsed from sheer smugness . There was a time that all the western world spoke French.  I don't think that English language defends us from coming in second or third in the future no matter how we may insist on its primacy. Once we surpass Rome for sheer smuggness the decline is gonna be a matter of time.

[Xavier_Onassis]

As someone who made a living teaching people how to speak Spanish, you are not the one to comment on an English only policy. You have a conflict of interest.

===========================================
No one is paying me to teach anything now. When they did, an English-only law for domestic use would have no impact on my career whatever.

Anatole France said "To learn a language is to gain a soul."

The fact is that there are things that can be expressed in one language that cannot be effectively expressed in another. Every language has its own logical essence, which cannot effectively be transferred. That is why jokes are so difficult to translate. What is riotously funny in Russian is simply baffling in English. The reason so many famous comedians are Jewish is due to the fact that European Jews are multilingual. Words that cannot be expresed in Polish or German or Russian can be expressed in Yiddish.

Regarding languages, the same rule applies as to everything else: ALL knowledge is superior to all ignorance. It is ridiculous to argue that ignorance is any sort of virtue, whether it is ignorance of a language or anything else.

[Christians4LessGvt]

So we in America have gotten lazy about it , everyone elese in the world have been learning English and accomadateing us while we act as if the effort to learn Spanish or Chineese would be a waste and the suggestion that we should an insult.

They haven't been "accommodating us".
they weren't learning English because they are just nice folks
they learned English because it paid off in some way...directly or indirectly
if we are stupid maybe our kids/grandkids will be "forced" to learn Chinese
winners set the rules....
the world speaks English because the US "won" the last century
i wanna win the this century too....
we can if we want to and don't allow the Left to ruin this country

Well lets get clued in here, this does not make us seem like sophisticates.

Who cares?
I don't care if the French, North Koreans, or Sudanese think we are "less sophisticated".
Honestly I could care less.
If I go somewhere else....yeah I'd learn their language
But why should we change and/or cater to others coming here?
They are the ones coming here....they need to learn English.

[Plane]

  I wouldn't mind winning another century or two.

    How is being less well educated in language going to help this happen?


   

They haven't been "accommodating us".
they weren't learning English because they are just nice folks
they learned English because it paid off in some way...directly or indirectly...

   That is true , money is involved.

      Whould you really be a better wheeler dealer in English only , or would it occasionally be advantagious to be able to speak to a customer without a translator, or insisting on his speaking English?
     

[Amianthus]

      Whould you really be a better wheeler dealer in English only , or would it occasionally be advantagious to be able to speak to a customer without a translator, or insisting on his speaking English?

Also, being able to speak other languages and *implying* that you can only speak English can give you an advantage as well.

[Plane]

      Whould you really be a better wheeler dealer in English only , or would it occasionally be advantagious to be able to speak to a customer without a translator, or insisting on his speaking English?

Also, being able to speak other languages and *implying* that you can only speak English can give you an advantage as well.

   Admitting to being a US citizen implies one is monolingual.
    I think this is an accident of history and will develop into a more severe disadvantage if we allow it .

[Xavier_Onassis]

Admitting to being a US citizen implies one is monolingual.
    I think this is an accident of history and will develop into a more severe disadvantage if we allow it .

Both are essentially true statements.

Again, all knowledge is superior to all ignorance.

[Plane]

   John Paul Jones is said to have advised all naval officers to pick up languages, this is such odviously good advice that I wonder at how many Navy officers do not heed it.

[Xavier_Onassis]

The main reason more people do not learn other languages is that it takes rather a long time to achieve fluency, and involves a lot of boring memorization. John Paul Jones and others may have had a better talent for languages than others.

Linguistic ability is rather like having a mind for math or music. In fact, people who are bad at math and music usually find learning another language much more difficult than those who excel at math and music. The theory is that they draw on the same parts of the brain.

[Plane]

   Almost every young child has the talent of learning language, people who begin early experience little difficulty in learning multiple languages.

     This ability does seem to fade so that Adults struggle vainly to memorise a small vocabulary and exhibit a heavy accent for decades. People who have a real talent for language as adults are as unusual as are children without it.

     The key might just be more interesting instruction at younger ages and more interaction with foreign children.

[Xavier_Onassis]

We normally start teaching a foreign language in US schools in the sophomore year of high school, and it does not work well.

In the Netherlands, they begin much earlier, and they are far more successful. Of course, in most of the Netherlands, UK television is available, and all Dutch teachers, not just the language teachers, speak English, and many French and German as well.

We are slightly better at language instruction than the Australians. Everyone else that has a decent educational system has us beat.