FWiedner wrote,
I'm sorry, but telling your child that they shouldn't learn a second language because you don't like the people who speak it is putting your child into a pidgeonhole of terrible disadvantage.
Dont know if your refering to my post but if you are I just want you to understand that I want my kid to learn a second language, I just want him to decide what it will be.
In a perfect world I guess we could acomodate all languages but its not a perfect world & the language spoken in the USA for 229 or so years has been English. Not my decision & as I said earlier if it had been any other language that woulda been fine too. As bad as our Gov't is now I can only think it would be alot messier if we accomadated local languages the way I think your saying. Theres alot of things that need to be understood by EVERYONE so a uniform language is needed. What would a stop sign in Japanese look like? Or Korean? Spanish I think I could live with a spanish stop sign but everyone cant.
Also like to mention that I dont have anything against Spanish speaking people. :grin:
I was referring to your post, but my intention was not to start anything or to be critical. I was just using your post as a jumping off place to make my point that even though we might not like the particular people or culture, it is in our best interest to learn a language in order, in many cases, to ensure our survival when presented with that circumstance.
Your child can learn any language that you or he like or prefer, but good grief, wake up to the fact that Spanish is becoming a survival language in the USA. Don't harm yourself or your child by refusing to acknowledge that fact.
Laws used to be written in plain English. They're not any more, they are written in a legalese mumbo jumbo. Personally, when I think of things like McCain-Feingold, or the Patriot Act, or the naziesque intrusions of the DHS, I believe that it would be of great benefit to all Americans to have a disorganized and totally incompetent government. There are some things a goverment does that should
never be efficient.
I'd also like to point out what I feel is your mistaken impression that English has been the language spoken in the USA for 229 years. English is
one of the languages spoken here. It may have been, for a time, the predominant recognized language. But as had been pointed out, there were languages spoken on this soil long before the first Englishman jumped off of the Mayflower, and those languages were not English. There are many languages
still spoken in this land, some of them are native and Spanish, when compared to English, is one of them. In my opinion, the English only craze relects the fear of those who may be too lazy to learn something new or who are too bigoted to respect the rights and heritage of their fellow Americans. That comment is not directed at anyone on the forum, it's just my thought on the subject.
Oh yeah, a
red octogon. :wink:
:-)