Apparently BO made some comments yesterday about people in the US needing to learn a second language. I think it quite a controversial comment, especially considering so many US children can’t learn one language never mind a second.
I don’t know why the Globe missed this one. Thoughts?
According to BO… “Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English, because they will learn English, you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish,” he said. “We should have every child speaking more than one language.”
BTW, ” …they will learn English…” HA, not at my Dunkin Donuts they won’t!
For comic effect, he added, “It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is ‘Merci beaucoup.'”
I think BO was referring to people from the US “visiting” other countries. What are we going to do, learn 12 languages when you go tour Europe? Plenty of foreigners visiting the US have an English vocab of “hello”, “Thank you” … so ‘Merci beaucoup.’ is not unusual. Unless they plan on staying here, then they learn “Welfare”, “Social Services”, “in-state tuition”…
Didn’t a multi-monetary system prove to be better than individual currencies?
So, what is BO’s second language? I don’t know if we should elect a President who can’t speak another language.
I think speaking a second language is actually a great thing and should be encouraged whenever it can. I took Spanish and French for years, however it did nothing for me. The point he misses is we should not reduce the emphasis that this country’s language is English and anyone living here should have to speak it. Nobody should be hired by any company unless they can speak English.
I don’t think it is embarrassing, in fact I think it is a tribute to this country’s enormous economic success that people all around the world learn to speak English if they want to be successful.
Some people even point to a decaying of a common language being a cause of a nation’s (or Empire’s) demise. Is there any proof or examples of countries with multiple languages being successful because it their multi-lingual asset. The only ones I can think of are countries who also have English since this has been chosen as the universal language of many professions. Is life or business in countries like India any better because they have 1652 languages? I bet they would love to have 1 unified language amongst their population.
probably a good idea for anybody who wants to compete in it. At least that’s what they tell me. Too bad those “Rosetta Stone” CD sets are still like $200 a pop.
I’m sorry if you find comments about learning a second language controversial, but we isolate ourselves and limit our job prospects if we don’t. This is another area where we lag behind the rest of the industrialized world. Our European friends learn multiple languages, but we struggle just to learn two. I’ve thought for a long time that every US high school graduate should be fluent in English and one other modern language regardless of whether English or the other language is their first one. You would think being a melting pot the United States would lead the world in multi-lingualism. I can’t understand how learning French and Spanish did nothing for you. Even Latin, the closest thing I have to a second language, is helpful despite being not regularly spoken.
It seems unlikely to me that learning French or Spanish will make one’s English worse. On the contrary. English speakers often mess up on subject-verb agreement and past participles. Learning another language focuses the mind on those issues in a way that one’s native language doesn’t.
I think the best way to learn the nitty-gritty of English grammar is learning foreign languages. The reason that I can identify demonstrative pronouns, direct and indirect objects, objects of prepositions, future perfect and past progressive tenses, etc in English is because I had to approach foreign language at a basic level well after I mastered my mother toungue of English.
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p>Learning foreign languages can improve English vocabulary, grammar, and writing. They’re often decried as useless in current high school and college curriculum because the students are often forced to take foreign language class to satisfy a requirement at an age in which learning another language doesn’t interest them.
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p>As for JohnD’s question about which foreign languages Obama speaks, he claims to be passable in Indonesian and speaks a a little Spanish.
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p>http://thehill.com/q/q-what-la…
Obama is completely right about this. Thanks for highlighting this important issue.
The expression of embarassment that we don’t speak enough French is a theme to which I hope he does not return.
French: hints of elitism
Spanish: anti-immigration conservatives will say we’re undermining our Anglo-Saxon culture
Arabic: though increasingly useful, resonates too much with the Obama-is-a-Muslim smear
Maybe Welsh.
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p>Again, let us hope that this chord remains unstruck going forward.
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p>He needs to be careful with the lecturing, though.
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p>Yesterday, there was the lecture to “urban youth” that made Jesse Jackson want to unman Obama. Because of the identity of the group being lectured, and because it was Jesse Jackson cussing him out about it, that incident probably helped in the general electorate more than it hurt. But…
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p>The learn more French lecture is more dangerous because it is directed so broadly, and there is likely to be less “He said it!” reaction among the electorate than there is “Who the f does he think he is?” reaction. In other words, a much larger proportion of people who react like Jesse.
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p>This sort of stuff betrays a little bit of hahvahdism familiar to anyone who has ever dealt with a smug Harvard person.
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p>A few weeks ago, I noted that the flip flop charge (and the windsurfing ad) worked well against Kerry because it tended to fit with what people already knew (or thought they knew) about Kerry (on a number of levels), and that worrying about Obama as flip flopper was fighting the last war. Then we wondered what might be the thing about Obama that will be similar, and didn’t really have an answer.
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p>I’m beginning to think this might be the thing, as there are now a few of these little incidents piling up. The “clinging” speech, and now this. He needs to make sure he doesn’t sound like Professor Obama. I don’t think the orange juice thing has the juice to resonate any more, but there may be others that will.
These are probably occupational hazards. Kerry spends a lot of time thinking about the institutional meanings of his votes and what legislation is viable and what is not viable. The result had been a style overburdened with tactical calculation, avoidance of sharp contrast, and excessive care with competing considerations. I suspect a long-term legislator could easily end up sounding like Kerry in 2004.
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p>A great professor will believe in the transformational power of knowledge, will revel in knowledge, and will want everyone to acquire and apply it. To those not caught up in that enthusiasm, professorial effusions can be off-putting.
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p>Me? I’m caught up in such enthusiasm so it’s harder for me to feel it as smug. (“Learn French and you can Flaubert, Proust, and Baudelaire!”)
To those who could really, really use it.
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p>I don’t care to have a President that wants us all to learn French so that he is not embarassed (though it would be nice if he knows a smattering of French himself, see link, supra.
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p>As far as I am concerned, he has exactly two things that he needs to do for four years: Don’t f–k things up worse than than they already are, and improve things marginally if possible. If he can only do the first one, it would be an improvement.