Learn English or go to Jail? What do you all think?

[Bonnie]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/03/27/judge.sentence.ap/

I actually like this..

I believe if anyone wants to become a US citizen that they should know how to speak ENGLISH!

[Ky Kim]

AMEN!

[Bonnie]

I don't want anyone to think that I mean anything bad about different nationalities moving to the US..  My step Mother is from the Phillipines.
Some people complain about other races, etc.. the Mexicans here are very hard workers but I do believe they should know basic ENGLISH.

[Christy]

You are right Bonnie,because my mom works at a store and some came in there wanting cigaretts,and she said she had no clue what they were wanting,so she told them they have to point it out. She said she felt bad about doing that,but she said she didnt know what they wanted.

Christy

[Esther]

If they are here and don't speak the English language, then they shouldn't expect to be able to communicate with those of us who do. Now, if they are here just to visit, that's a different story. But if they expect to get whatever legal documents that lets them live here, then they'd better learn the language.

One thing that bugs me is when I'm shopping and two employees talk in another language right in front of me. I feel like they are saying, "Look at that fat old lady. Don't her clothes look stupid?" For all I know, that is what they are saying and it is just as rude as if they were really saying that.

On the other hand, it's just as rude for people who speak English to carry on a personal conversation while I stand there waiting. Sometimes even if I'm not waiting for them and they are talking, I want to find their boss and ask if they pay their people to stand around and talk. But I don't.

One time though, I did speak up. We were in Wendy's eating when a manager came out and began reprimanding two employees. They TALKED BACK!! So she got sharper with her speech and louder. I was done eating so told Pete I was leaving and walked over to them and said, "If I wanted to listen to people fight, I would have stayed home and listened to my kids." Then I left. I thought the manager was way out of line doing her discipline in front of customers or other employees. AND I thought the employees were out of line talking back to their boss.

[mascot]

I've always felt that people should learn the language of the country they call home.  I've had co-workers get mad at me and one actually told me that I needed to learn Spanish so that I could understand what she was telling me!!  Because I was so adamant about my feeling, the last time I went to Mexico with friends, I did my best to place all of our food and beverage orders in Spanish.  The waiter was patient and when I was done he said to me, in perfect English, "that was really good!  You had a couple of the verb tenses wrong, but overall you did very good!".  I said, "you mean you can speak English and I just made a fool of myself??"  He laughed, and told me that he appreciated that I made the effort.  I feel if I can make that kind of effort to spend a few hours in their country, can't they make a similar effort when they want to spend a lifetime in this country?   

[Jerry]

Not just English, but our history, and culture too.
Our culture is being diluted as well as our values.
Multi culturalisim is nonsense.  Celebrate your culture at home.  America has a culture too and it's the only one not promoted!  Madness!

[Bonnie]

Jerry when my step Mother got her citizenship she did have to go thru a test which included things like history, state capitals, former presidental things, etc...
My father is quite sharp when it comes to alot of things and there were things that he didn't know.
(if I recall they gave her many sheets on things that she could be tested on)

[Esther]

Bonnie, I think you are right. I remember a guy from our church married a gal from Germany and brought her back her when he was done in the army. She became a citizen and I remember all the stuff she was learning and it put me to shame. Most of the stuff I didn't know or I should say that once upon a time I knew it but had forgotten most of it.

[Ky Kim]

I would be very nice if everyone spoke English so we could understand each word they said.


The other thing that gripes me is:  Kids can't say the pledge, or pray at school it might offend someone.  But other countries can come in schools and where those things on thier heads.  They're expressing their beliefs, but Americans can't???  The Ten Commandments!

I love all people of all races, don't get me wrong.  I just think if your coming into US, you shouldn't be allowed to take things away from us like the pledge and such just because its against your beliefs.  Also, shouldn't have to be legal and pay taxes just like us.


In GOD We Trust, One Nation Under GOD!  Ifs its against their beliefs, thats their deal and they don't have to perticipate! The ones that do believe should have the right.



Kim

[karen J]

"My client is happy," Webby said. "I think it's going to help him."

It probably will.

I think it's a generational thing that has drastically changed over the years, because of politicians. Linguisticly, a family would emigrate to America. The parents would try and learn English and succeed. They would also require their children (second generation US) to learn English. These children would learn English, have their own children (third generation), and they would obviously learn English. By the time the third generation arrives into the world, those children grow up with a desire to learn their ancestral language. They may (or may not) learn their ancestral language through elective courses in middle school/high school. The result would be English speaking or Bilingual young adults.
Unfortunately, the United States government has inadvertently put into place a system that disinclines first generation immigrants to be motivated to learn English. It is far to easy to read the Spanish sign than it is to learn how to read the English sign. The US govt has effectively removed the motivation for learning English! All in the name of political correctness. It is not the fault of immigrants, it's the fault of our infallible government.

When my hubby's family came over here from France, the French language was prohibited from being spoken. As a result, the second generation (my hubby) hasn't a clue about French and doesn't know a stitch of British English (if you can believe that!).

An interesting Linguistic fact is that the USA is the least "prestigious" nation when it comes to the number of languages spoken. Most other countries boast citizens that know several languages. The average Swiss person knows 7, the average Indian knows 12, and the average Chinaman knows at least that. There are languages spoken at home, other languages spoken in the "hood", still other languages spoken in the workplace, and even more languages spoken at universities.

I'm not trying to defend folks that refuse to speak English, I'm just pointing out that the rest of the world does not hold to the same ethic. I would absolutely learn (or die trying) the language of the country I called home (as Blind 'Too so aptly put it). I tried desperately to learn Danish before, during, and after my trip to Denmark.

Another telling tidbit. Two friends of mine recently traveled to France. One of them tried to speak the language and got treated very well, the other didn't care (wanted English) and was treated poorly. The one who was treated poorly was the one who called the French "snobs".

Keeping all that in mind, My full disclosure is that I studied Linguistics and Anthropology, and it is mostly "opinion". There is no hard and fast data!

[Jerry]

One of the reasons is that Mexico is so close, when my parents came here they knew it was to be American and never go back to Europe.
Also our Govt. is so accommodating that they make life easy for newcomers.
The ballot here is printed in many languages.  The schools are in shambles with over 60 languages being used.  just nuts!

[Joyce]

I agree with you Karen.
We are the only country that has anger issues over being multi-lingual. 
And as for it being a cultural issue...the American culture is that of being a melting pot.
So logically, we should be multilingual. 
(of course with English being a first language)

It has nothing to do with religion. 
Besides, this country was founded on religious freedom,
NOT the freedom to ram one particular religion down anyones throat, including Christianity.
http://sanfords.net/Pagan_Humor_and_Thoughts/faith_of_our_founding_fathers.htm

Separation of church and state is a healthy concept for all involved.
You want your kids to have religion in school?
Then send them to a catholic or other religious school. 

I have taught my daughter that if she doesn't want to say 'under God' at school,
then she doesn't have to say it, and she doesn't.
Or she can say 'Under Goddess' if she wants.

I agree that here in the USA English should be our first language. 
But I just don't have it in me to have such anger issues over being multi-lingual.
I just don't get the anger...

There would be no room for low pay immigrants in the US,
if Americans would just get out off their lazy asses and work like the immigrants do.
Way back a few generations, Americans understood they had to work their way up from the bottom of the heap.
Now the average American refuses to work for minimum...wants a cake job without earning it, without even going to college.
Then they sit back, living on unemployment if not welfare, bitch and moan on and on about the Mexicans stealing all their jobs.
Yeah right.

40-50 years ago when the Wineries and Vineyards starting taking hold here on the North Fork of LI,
Local teenagers and college students were the ones that were hired to tend to the vines.
Very little immigrants. Immigrants were mainly Polish and just a few Latinos were showing up.
Some black people too. But mainly, high schoolers off for the summer and college students.
And lots of moms that just needed a bit of a day job while their kids were in school.

Now it's nothing but Latinos. Cuz they work so hard for so little. And don't complain.
I have no problem with them...at all.
They are the backbone of the work force at my job too. 

[Jonna]

I also agree with Karen and Joyce.  It is amazing to me the amount of anger and hate that seems to come up about this - not here, I'm not talking about you guys or this discussion.  You have all been thoughtful and honest and open in how you feel, I respect that.   I read US papers, mainly the LA Times, and the comments there are incredible whenever the subject of language comes up.  I just don't see why it is such a loaded issue for so many Americans, but it sure is. 

I'm an ex-pat American who has chosen to live in Mexico.  My Spanish sucks and I work on it all the time, well, maybe it doesn't suck as I can read the newspapers and have normal conversations at the store and such.  I can even talk to friends about personal stuff and discuss issues but I search a lot for words, I have to describe things because I don't know what word to use, I miss the subtleties and the nuances of conversations among native speakers.  One of the things that always amazes me is how kind and encouraging people here in Mexico are as I struggle with their language.  I am ashamed when I remember myself and my friends in the US making jokes because we couldn't understand someone with an accent.  Learning a language as an adult is very, very hard.  Don't let anyone tell you it is easy or that you can pick it up in a couple weeks of study.  You can learn to say some things but I guarantee that the more you learn the more you will realize you don't know.

There are a lot of American and Canadian English speaking ex-pats who live in Mexico and never bother to learn the language.  I am amazed by the number of people who have lived here for years and still can't order a pizza on the phone or return an item to a store or pay their electric bill by themselves.  Why is that?  Because they live in insular communities of English speakers and they are able to function fairly well without using any Spanish.  They may talk to the maid or the gardener at a limited level but even then many have someone that handles that for them, or they ask friends.  You'd be amazed how often I'm asked to translate for people to straighten things out with their household help.  They choose not to learn the language or the culture and that is their right but I think they lose much of the fullness of life and a lot of the interesting things about it.  On the other hand, there are the vacationers who come here and demand that everyone speak English and take US dollars and they get irate if they aren't understood.  They embarrass me because I cannot believe that there are so many of my countrymen that think the whole world revolves around them and does it in English. 

What happens with the adult Spanish speaker who lives in the US?  They are able to function and live in an insular community, just like some of the ex-pats here, and outside of talking to the phone company or getting the cable fixed, they can function in Spanish without having to learn English. They hire someone or use a friend to handle the things they can't communicate enough to do.  I also think they are missing a lot but that it is their right to do that.  It's very true that in the waves of immigrants who have come to the US, the first generation does not learn to speak English or learns to speak it only in a very limited way.   The 2nd generation generally speaks both languages and by the 3rd generation the original language is lost.  It's a shame, it is not the way immigrants handle it in other parts of the world but it is how it has always been done in the US.  There are a lot of us that wish we could speak the language of our immigrant ancestors, Italian, Gaelic, French, Spanish.   Don't you wish you could speak at least one of those languages? 

The US is one of the most mono-lingual countries in the world.*  I think only Japan is equal to us in the percentage of people who can only speak one language.  It is a very limiting way to live because language is a door to understanding and to how we see the world.  The more doors we can look through the more understanding we have and the better our vision.   What may be surprising to many of you is that Spanish is probably not the only language that the Mexican immigrants speak.  There are thousands of languages spoken today in Mexico and many of them have hundreds of thousands of people who speak them as their first language.  Spanish is the 2nd language for almost half of the population of Mexico.   Those who grow up speaking a language besides Spanish are mostly indigenous and mostly rural and mostly poor.  This is the largest source of people who go north to work in the US so many of these people also speak an indigenous language and they learned Spanish in school or as a teenager.  As someone who has spent a lot of money on teachers and classes I'm amazed that so many of them learn to speak English with no instruction and no training.  It's really not easy, and it gets harder the older you get.

I have no problem with requiring that someone who wants to become a citizen has to have a basic knowledge of English and of US history, laws and culture.  I think that is the current requirement.  I think it is close minded to think that anyone who lives in the US should speak English or go to jail, that's beyond ridiculous.  People should have the right to be stupid, to miss out on most of what is going on around them, to ignore the benefits of where they live... shoot, I know people who do all of that in the US and they do it in English!  It's great to encourage everyone to learn English, it will make their lives easier and richer and it will make the lives of everyone else easier as well.  But, at the same time, I think that all US kids should be required to learn at least one other language to graduate from school.  I think language instruction should begin in kindergarten and continue throughout their schooling.  It's that important, it's as important as learning to read or write or do math.  We must stop being so insular in the US or we will become a 2nd rate player on the world's stage and in these times, you can no longer live in the isolated way our forefathers could.  We have to be a part of this world, it is too interconnected.  I want our kids and the coming generations of Americans to be prepared to deal on the world stage with all the tools and skills that we can give them, and language is one of the biggest skills required.

*the most common jokes about Americans revolve around our lack of language skills.  here's one of the common jokes, I've heard this one in several languages.

What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages?   Trilingual
What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages?   Bilingual
What do you call someone who speaks 1 language?   American

[Desertponder]

I feel that English should be our language. Its fine if people want to use other languages but the common language for everyone should be English.
I also feel that people who immigrate here should learn to speak English.

With computer technology what it is today I'm sure that duplicate paperwork, Spanish & English versions, has been reduced but I can tell you
that even just 10 years ago the costs for medical paperwork was staggering. EVERYTHING, every form, every brochure, etc. that a hospital
used had to be produced in both an English and Spanish version. It was just insane!
People in the medical fields are increasingly being pushed or even required to be bi-lingual. Personally, I don't appreciate that because
I really have no desire to learn Spanish. My dept. has not pushed the issue on any of us learning Spanish. We only have one EMT that does speak Spanish.
We rarely have a situation where that is a problem though. Usually, there are children in the family that speak good English and can
tell us what's going on.
I would expect to have to learn the native language of another country that I moved to. I feel that people coming to the US should learn English.

[Esther]

Guess I didn't comment on the jail part. That doesn't make sense to me. Why give them free room and board just because they don't speak our language. If anything, if they refuse to speak the language of our country, it's simple enough, they won't be able to communicate so will either have to have somebody do their shopping and communicating for them or they can just go back where they are understood.

I have no problem with people knowing more than one language if that is what they want to do but this country shouldn't have to change it's language or become multilingual to service the people who refuse to understand the language of the country they chose to make their home.

It will never happen, but if I were going to live in another country, it would be assumed I would have to learn whatever language was spoken there.

[Mikey]

The likely reason Europeans speak several languages is because they are in Europe.....lots of countries near each other and many with their own language, e.g. French, Italian, German, Spanish etc. and they obviously needed to speak multiple languages.  Not so here.  Britain dominated the scene for many years as America does so now and thus English has become the International language.  We really don't need to learn a 2nd language.....unless it's just for bragging rights....

In our hemisphere we probably should speak Spanish as well as English due that being the language of many of our southern Americans.  I recently was heavily into learning Spanish from a computer program but I got burned out.  I need to knuckle down and get back into it. 

The LA school system has a VERY large number of children of illegals and because the parents are allowed to opt out of English emersion those kids are not doing well and are dragging their fellow students down.  A recent LA Times article in part reads "Despite progress, California schools remain mired near the bottom of the latest national assessment of students' writing ability, largely because the state has so many immigrants who learn English as a second language." http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-writing4apr04,1,867332.story

Just 45% of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District completed all four years of high school successfully, compared with the national graduation average of 70%.  Pretty sad......

[Jonna]

I absolutely think that our public schools should be taught mainly in English, it is an immersion program and it is better for the immigrant kids as well.  Perhaps it would be good to have an after school class for those with limited English skills to give them a better handle on it, but really when you are young you pick up language a lot easier.  I think that everyone growing up in the USA should get the same basic skills and understanding about our country, and that includes a lot of things that some people would like to see ignored, things like science, real science not psuedo religion, history and government or what we used to call Civics.  We'd have a lot better citizens if we were all given the same information as kids, if we all learned about our forefathers, why our country was founded and what the basic beliefs were of our founders. 

I also think that all of our kids should spend a part of their school day using and learning a 2nd language.  It doesn't need to be a European language, in fact it makes a lot of sense for many kids to be learning an asian language. That's where the markets are now.  I worry that our future generations will be left behind and left out of the world's business because they don't have the drive or the skills to understand and perform on an international stage.  For another thing, we overprotect our kids these days and they don't have the edge that most kids (including most of us old fogeys) develop when they are growing up.  Learning another language is not for bragging rights, it gives you insight and understanding.  It opens your eyes to how things are perceived elsewhere, you don't have to change how you think but you will at least understand that the whole world doesn't think in the same way.   

[MikeW]

Mikey - watch some of the Spanish language TV channels - I find I pick up more watching a 30 minute show than four hours of studying irregular verbs of the third declension.

I grew up in a bilingual country - South Africa. English and Afrikaans. Unlike Canada, where the different languages were in different provinces, we were all jumbled up, so one ended up speaking the other language before you even realized you could - so simple as a kid.

Only later, did I realize I was completely fluent in a language that wasn't spoken very widely. Afrikaans developed from 17th century Old High Dutch, but is still a bit of a battle to be understood in today's Holland. Sigh.

Anyway, besides English and Afrikaans, we were required to study a third language in high school - French, German or Latin. I went with the useful choice of Latin (very useful in crosswords!), and continued it into university, seven years all told. If they ever invent time travel, and you want a guide to the Roman Empire - I am your man!

Cheers, Groete, Vale

Mike

[Oceanbum]

A few years ago there was a 4 year old girl that drowned at an apartment complex in Columbus. She was riding her bike and rode it into a pond on the property. Her father found her and pulled her from the pond. He called 911 for help. He spoke Spanish only and the 911 operator spoke English. He attempted to make her understand what was going on with this little girl but the 911 operator didn't understand. She attempted to get an interpreter on the line and tried to tell the man to stay there, she had an ambulance on the way. The man couldn't understand her and didn't know that they were sending help. So he put the girl in his car and tried to take her the hospital for help. But by the time he got there it was too late. Every time I hear people talking about this subject I think of this tragedy and think how that little girl might have been saved if her father had only learned the language of the country he was living in. It did prompt changes in the Columbus 911 system. But it was still too late for this little girl.  :'(