<p>keymom, I think most of us feel the same way you do. We want to communicate. </p>
<p>We also want to be fair to LEGAL citizens and have the resources to provide medical care to the deserving population. The illegals are a drain on that pipeline. </p>
<p>The sad part is that we as a country tolerate this… sorry not just tolerate, but encourage it.</p>
<p>I was at the town hall meeting today in Dayton with my d. While I have not seen yesterday’s video, today Barack quite clearly promoted the importance of studying foreign language----ANY LANGUAGE. It was just that simple.</p>
<p>About 1,000 people (earlier this year I attended an event at another venue for Obama with 15,000 in attendance!) were present and the excitement was palpable.</p>
<p>Frankly, I think the media is bored with McCain and is being taunted into trying to make issues where none exist.</p>
<p>“Frankly, I think the media is bored with McCain and is being taunted into trying to make issues where none exist”</p>
<p>Au contraire, the media is obsessed with Obama and will make sure that he is our next POTUS.</p>
<p>These anti-Obama ‘issues’ have not been gaining much traction. The public knows that illegal immigration is not the biggest problem facing the country today.</p>
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Obama and McCain do not differ on immigration positions, they simply do not have agreement with the American populace.</p>
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<p>Well, G, I think there is much we agree on. However, I take exception with one thing: you have a hypothesis and call a counter to that pseudoscience. I don’t really have a strong hypothesis and consider what I have experienced in life – e.g., some people who maintain strong accents throughout their lives – as evidence that indicates a certain body of evidence that refutes your hypothesis. Of course, at the end of the day science will rule the day. But just because your hypothesis is plausible doesn’t make it any more right than my experience. I’d say we need to let the scientists who do controlled, systematic experiments prove one or another of us right and leave it at that.</p>
<p>I mean counter to what you say are plenty of adults I know: they learn the language that is native to them quite well as infants but for whatever reason they can’t learn new languages as readily as adults. You could say that we underestimate the difficulty of learning the first language to begin with, but nearly every person (with a miniscule percentage of exceptions) learns their first language whereas there is a much greater percentage of people who fail to learn a second language. The burden of proof, I would say, is much heavier to prove your hypothesis than is the burden of proof in support of mine. You may wish it weren’t so, but that is not science.</p>
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<p>Ha! The media will make sure that he is our next POTUS? What a complete joke!</p>
<p>Obama is under scrutiny now – presumably because he is the top dog – of the kind that McCain could never countenance and still have a shot being POTUS. McCain’s chief economic advisor said the country is in a mental recession, not in a state of real hardship. McCain says Social Security is a disgrace. McCain is floating a balanced budget plan that assumes we have already won the Iraq War – and he says he doesn’t care if we are there (in Iraq) for 100 years. The media focuses on none of this.</p>
<p>Cough!</p>
<p>I don’t understand why Obama doesn’t run to be leader of some left-leaning European country. He would be much happier there. </p>
<p>America isn’t the only country with immigration problems. Ask some citizens of the U.K. how they are enjoying the immigrant >= citizen mentality that has swept through their country. Sharia law is now entering the public dialogue. </p>
<p>Then read up on how socialized health care has worked for them. If there is one nation America is most similar to in terms of culture/heritage/law, it is the UK. </p>
<p>This is not the change I want. in my opinion, America is not in need of fundamental change. The elites in this country and elsewhere constantly hint that Americans are dumb, and languages are usually one of the things they point to first. I ask you, where are the great technological advances coming from? Mostly American firms. Where do the best and brightest students go to receive an education? France? Italty? or America? </p>
<p>There is a reason foreign languages are thought of as nice, but not all that important. Unlike Europe, America’s geography does not require us to be fluent in 2 or 3 languages. If you work in Italy, there is a good chance you are going to someday need to do business with german or french or english firms. hence the need.
it’s not economically useful in the US in the same degree. i am fluent in spanish, live in a part of the nation with a lot of immigrants, and well, it’s a cool skill to have, but so are many things that can be taught in 4 years. </p>
<p>BedHead…what is the definition of an economic recession? Are we currently in one?</p>
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<p>You are in a small majority, azure_blue, and you’ve already been on these boards saying that Obama said things he didn’t actually say and we both know it.</p>
<p>According to McKinsey, Americans pay much more for their health care, get poorer quality care, and have far fewer citizens covered.</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
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<p>oops. than any of the OECD – i.e. peer – countries.</p>
<p>“uh wrong Barry… they don’t want to learn English.”</p>
<p>This is the piece of rhetoric that I think just isn’t true. The existence of Telemundo is not evidence that Spanish-speaking immigrants don’t want to learn English. They do, and they definitely want their children to learn English. Why wouldn’t they? They’re not stupid.</p>
<p>“This is the piece of rhetoric that I think just isn’t true. The existence of Telemundo is not evidence that Spanish-speaking immigrants don’t want to learn English. They do, and they definitely want their children to learn English. Why wouldn’t they? They’re not stupid.”</p>
<p>The evidence is seen in hospital ER’s as keymom described, where they can’t even speak enough English to explain what their symptoms are. The evidence is in the bilingual signs in stores for mens and ladies restrooms (not hard to learn two words of English to prevent opening the wrong door…). </p>
<p>The real problem is they are being enabled by a populace that supports a candidate who believes the problem will be solved by teaching our children Spanish.</p>
<p>In my 28 years in nursing, the number of patients who can’t even get across minimal information is exploding. We call them REALLY Spanish speaking only as opposed to some English/mostly Spanish. I believe(and it is only my theory) that the great increase in Spanish signs, bilingual clerks, written info in Spanish on products, has made it much less necessary to learn English and I wonder if those studies about second generation immigrants learning English will change in the next ten years.
There is also a feeling of entitlement to language services which wasn’t there before, I believe leading to lack of incentive to learn English.
One of the midwives described an interaction where she asked the patient (who had been in the US ten years) why she didn’t learn English. The patient said “I don’t need to”</p>
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<p>Well, not really. 
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<p>There is one hypothesis that I criticise because there is lacking evidence for a “locking in” mechanism. Linguists do however know that L2 acquisition is more difficult than L1 acquisition, and Chomsky has theorised that a “child acquisition module” (of which so far there are experiments, e.g. the Wug Test, to try to get at its nature, but not so much as what it does physiologically in the brain) is normally “deactivated” before puberty ends. </p>
<p>I’m quite suspicious about any argument involving neurons with no clear link between the mechanisms of pruning and the mechanisms of language, even learning. So far we cannot conclusively know what neuron-pruning does, but looking at past evidence it doesn’t seem that pruning is meant to remove functional neurons. (Of course, we still have no clear idea what function is, but we can make broad conclusions from looking at broad effects on the patient, e.g. removing a malfunctioning hemisphere responsible for giving the patient epilepsy and observing that the patient still has the same personality and intelligence after surgery, only sans epilepsy.)</p>
<p>What I did was offer an alternative hypothesis that took into account previous evidence. However, it was not meant to be rigourous – just an idea of what may actually be involved. </p>
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<p>I’m not disputing the difficulty of L2 acquisition.</p>
<p>Whether this means “impossibility” or “locking-in” is quite another thing.</p>
<p>Consider a child who is dyslexic. It may be difficult for him to learn to read, or read itself, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. (Just take my world history teacher who was a locally-reputed litigator for 20 years, who fought his dyslexia to get into law school.) And there are many therapeutic techniques to improve reading despite dyslexia, just as there are special techniques to assist in effective L2 acquisition despite the fact that it is more difficult. </p>
<p>The “common-sense” conclusion to draw about someone who is dyslexic, as it was in the early 20th century, was that “the child is simply stupid.” </p>
<p>Of course it was later when we found that the issue was not as straightforward as people previously thought.</p>
<p>All very interesting galoisien, but what does any of this have to do with the OP?</p>
<p>There are lots of people coming to this country who don’t speak English, and who currently need to communicate in Spanish. Some of them will never learn to speak English really well. However, their children all learn to speak English well:</p>
<p>[Pew</a> Hispanic Center Report: English Usage Among Hispanics in the United States](<a href=“English Usage Among Hispanics in the United States | Pew Research Center”>English Usage Among Hispanics in the United States | Pew Research Center)</p>
<p>This is no different from previous waves of immigrants. Well-educated immigrants learn English themselves, while the children of less-educated immigrants learn English.</p>
<p>All Americans should, IMO, learn at least one other foreign language. In a global economy, a individual’s career opportunities increase with a working knowledge of another language. I studied Latin for five years and found it to be an invaluable tool throughout college and in every day vocabulary. Both children have taken 3-4 years of Spanish and two of Latin-I envy their ability to communicate with people of Hispanic heritage.</p>
<p>That said, until our educational system can produce students who think, write and speak effectively in English, we have MAJOR work to do. My husband is a partner in a large law firm and says it is amazing to him to read briefs, legal letters, etc. drafted by 1st and 2nd year associates ( recently graduated from law school) whose writing lacks basic subject/verb agreement. </p>
<p>I have saved three notes written by teachers ( regarding our children) where the grammar was absolutely atrocious. IMO, we still have a lot of “crawling to do”, so to speak, before we are able to effectively communicate in English. If there are simultaneous methodologies to improve English grammar and writing in tandem with many of the modern and classical ( Spanish) languages, then we need to implement this approach ASAP.</p>
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<p>What the facts about linguistic acquisition say and what they do not.</p>
<p>Dear Bedhead, </p>
<p>What “things” have I said we both know not to be true? </p>
<p>The Mckinsey study did say we pay more, but not that we get poorer quality.
The answer is not more bureaucracy, really. </p>
<p>I’m still waiting on that economic recesion answer…</p>