[b said:
Quote[/b] ] If they offered a list of languages to learn maybe I would or wouldn't go with Spanish
Yeah, it's ugly- I had a choice of either French or Spanish- and the French teacher at my school is... Not good. There are classes at the local community college, but you can't take them as a freshman or sophomore and they're feeding us "You should have at least 3 years of a foreign language to get in to a college, 4 is better," so where does that leave me? I have no interest in learning Spanish and that makes it HARD. My spiel is I learn best when I'm interested. It's not like I am resisting it or something, and I'm really trying, but I'd find it much more useful to learn the grammar of my native language (German- I understand most everything but my writing is abysmal).
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]My brother in law knows of a mexican who has lived here 19 years who can't speak English. It's evident he doesn't want to.
See, this is SUCH a pain in the butt. If you don't want to learn English while in the US
don't get angry at me when I don't speak your language. I'm not saying that your friend does that but I've seen it painfully often. I understand that there are some people who
cannot learn it, but if you have time (and money at that) to bring yourself in to a Palace Arts and get angry with the employees for not speaking Spanish, then you have time to go to classes some time. English is the first language for only ONE of my family members- my youngest brother. When my family moved to California from Germany we all learned the language. There's no reason not to, it's not like we're "assimilationists" we still have our heritage and culture, we never gave up any of that, and German is still spoken between us.
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]A basic grasp of English should be required for citizenship.
A basic grasp
is a requirement. My mother applied for citizenship and when she finally get her appointment they did make her do some basic things to prove that she could write english and she was talking to them in English. You can't really do anything about noncitizens, though. I'm learning their language, so how about them learning the national language?? Otherwise all that results are tight-knit areas of people who can't speak the language who then more often than not pursue complaining that they're "opressed". The thing is, there's ethnic bunching up like that only partially due to economic matters (in my area), it's primarily lack of willingness. I have pleanty of Mexican friends around here who speak Enlgish, and their parents too, they're first generation immigrants themselves.