Alongside Death
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The Whining and Bitching Thread
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skeptik
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What the hell do you mean by "mediocre Spanish," counting to ten, hello, goodbye, and a few curse words? Bro, I live in a predominantly Hispanic city and not a single damn non-white person here knows Spanish. It's highly improbable that the majority of young people today have a workable grasp on the Spanish language. I mean, first of all, blacks are incapable of understanding more than one language, Asians are assholes who refuse to speak even English, let alone Spanish, and there are a hell of a lot of white people who would rather die than know a Spanish word. You're wrong. But don't feel bad. Frankly, more people should know Spanish. But that doesn't make it true. Sure, as time goes on, I would imagine that what you said will be true, but it's not now.
Alongside Death
On The Descent To Hell
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It's a shame if Obama said so. America will lost it's identity if Spanish will become a next official language, everything is connected with political correctness which is a perfect medicine for everything.
skeptik
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Alongside Death
On The Descent To Hell
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Beign politicaly correct forces people to make dumb decisions. It is dumb IMO that to live peacfully it is required to be politicaly correct.
It's true that the US is a melting pot; we use English right now but a significant number of people in the US were not born in English-speaking nations and if you go back one or two generations even fewer come from an English-speaking nation. Thus, while English is the most international language and should be used, there's no reason for this except that it is so widely spoken; English has no claim to a long cultural tradition in the US; it's only been here a couple hundred years...the same amount of time as Spanish, tbqfh.
That said, I find Spanish grating upon the ears and would not like to learn it, but I'm not gonna fight it.
The USA is one of very few countries that isn't widely bilingual. . . so I don't see how learning spanish would be a bad thing.
Xorv
Drug the Priest
Dak
mentat
This however, I wouldn't say grating. If I had to learn a second language it would be German or Russian. Something that sounded metal/manly. Not this faggoty spanish or french bullshit.
I live in a border town right now so I am around plenty of spanish and I hate hearing it. I took a semester of Spanish in college and passed with a B. That was 8 years ago and I don't even know the little bit I knew then, because it's a language that makes me go "blegh".
BlackMetalWhiteGuy
Manly Man!
WTF is this shit about Spanish becoming another offical language? Even English isn't our official language, and like Feathers & Flames said, the US doesn't have one.
Personally, I grew up in a community with virtually no non-white people, where over 95% of the high school senior class graduates every year, and I've never met anyone there who didn't speak fluent English. Additionally, very few people spoke any other languages, except for the few privileged students who were lucky enough to go on expensive vacations every year. Now that I'm in college however, there are Hispanic and black people who speak Spanish around campus and in my dorm, but the majority of them are bilingual at the expense of having really shitty English.
Believe it or not, while most Americans can't speak a foreign language with enough proficiency to converse with a native of said other language, I think you'd be horrified by the number of monolingual English speaking Americans who can't speak English well enough to articulate their thoughts to an educated English speaker from another country. Consequently, I find the lack of a quality English education in the majority of high schools to be a far more immediate problem than an overly relaxed foreign language policy.
By comparison, most Asians take a more "scholarly" approach to learning English and even when they do make mistakes, they're still consistent with the grammatical rules of their native language. Additionally, most Chinese people speak a local dialect with their friends and family, but are also fluent in speaking and writing standardized Mandarin because it is used in all schools and governmental bodies across China. In Hong Kong, many residents are trilingual in Cantonese (local), Mandarin (standardized), and English (formerly imposed by the British) and actually speak better English than many Americans.
Unfortunately, I have an unspecified language learning disability which is really fucking me over in my never-ending quest to earn a bachelor's degree. If I fail French again (which I'm confident that I will), then I intend to take Chinese 101 and 102 over the summer. I understand that it's a more difficult language for an English speaker to learn, but I've never scored less than a B+ in a summer class, because there are so few distractions and there's really nothing else to do. Also, unlike French, I actually have incentive to learn Chinese because I
I sincerely hope not. While I would support a mandatory foreign language program in elementary and pre-schools, Spanish is an extremely impractical language for a lot of people. I definitely think foriegn language should be mandatory though and that Spanish should be an option, but I strongly object to mandatory Spanish.
I'm sure that if you asked most Americans, they would say that more Americans should know English
Americans are mostly not bilingual because there's no cultural incentive to learn a second language, unless that second language is English. It's highly unlikely in most communities that you will ever meet someone who doesn't speak English, or at least have a nearby friend or family member who can translate, most Americans will never leave the country, and only a small minority will be required to learn a second language for their job... and unless they're trading coffee, bananas, or cocaine, that language probably isn't going to be Spanish.
Personally, I grew up in a community with virtually no non-white people, where over 95% of the high school senior class graduates every year, and I've never met anyone there who didn't speak fluent English. Additionally, very few people spoke any other languages, except for the few privileged students who were lucky enough to go on expensive vacations every year. Now that I'm in college however, there are Hispanic and black people who speak Spanish around campus and in my dorm, but the majority of them are bilingual at the expense of having really shitty English.
Believe it or not, while most Americans can't speak a foreign language with enough proficiency to converse with a native of said other language, I think you'd be horrified by the number of monolingual English speaking Americans who can't speak English well enough to articulate their thoughts to an educated English speaker from another country. Consequently, I find the lack of a quality English education in the majority of high schools to be a far more immediate problem than an overly relaxed foreign language policy.
I agree with you about the unequal tolerance of English mistakes between Asian and Hispanc people, but I think that in general, there's a significant difference in the types of mistakes that each of them make. This is what I was beginning to talk about above, and at the expense of sounding racist, most Hispanic English speakers actually speak an urbanized slang form of English that seems to be almost exclusively shared between themselves and black people. These variations of English are not only a non-standardized dialect of English, the vocabulary and grammar are inconsistant and vary widely between regions and individuals. As a result, this is viewed by most speakers of standardized English as a lower level speech type that distinguishes educated from uneducated people.
By comparison, most Asians take a more "scholarly" approach to learning English and even when they do make mistakes, they're still consistent with the grammatical rules of their native language. Additionally, most Chinese people speak a local dialect with their friends and family, but are also fluent in speaking and writing standardized Mandarin because it is used in all schools and governmental bodies across China. In Hong Kong, many residents are trilingual in Cantonese (local), Mandarin (standardized), and English (formerly imposed by the British) and actually speak better English than many Americans.
I'm biased against the European form of Spanish, because the mandatory lisp bugs the shit out of me. I used to know a Mexican exchange student though, and she had a really cute accent. I'm failing college French for the third time right now and absolutely hate having to learn the language, but it can be fun to speak it seductively. However, with my voice pretty much everything I say is already seductive anyway. My ex-girlfriend spoke Russian before she learned English and says that grammatically and phonetically it's very simple, although I cannot confirm this because I don't understand any of it. I failed German once also and couldn't understand anything. I can always memorize vocabulary and I can reproduce an accent like nobody's business, but I'm pretty much retarded at deciphering foreign grammar. I know English is a Germanic language and therefore should be more similar to German, but so far I've found French to be the easier of the two.
Unfortunately, I have an unspecified language learning disability which is really fucking me over in my never-ending quest to earn a bachelor's degree. If I fail French again (which I'm confident that I will), then I intend to take Chinese 101 and 102 over the summer. I understand that it's a more difficult language for an English speaker to learn, but I've never scored less than a B+ in a summer class, because there are so few distractions and there's really nothing else to do. Also, unlike French, I actually have incentive to learn Chinese because I
- have a lot of Chinese friends
- watch a lot of Chinese movies
- am actually interested in various aspects of Chinese culture
- am going to marry every Chinese woman
intothetrees
Jack Frober's girlfriend.
It's almost pointless to have French as a second language in Canada. Quebec isn't even included in "roll up the rim to win" and there's French translation on every rim. I've never met a fluent french-speaking person in Canada. Apparently 1/3 of Canada's population is made up of Asian people?. Why isn't Japanese or Chinese a second language? Haha, I think Spanish is hilarious! But I can't roll my r's, so it takes half the fun out of speaking Spanish. 
False Joe
Who cares.
America doesn't have an official language because you're a country created by immigrants from all over the shop in europe.
I want to punch patriotic americans.
I want to punch patriotic americans.
