My father did not learn English until he was 7. He spoke Slovenian.

My Mexican Grandfather learned English as an immigrant to this country in 1924 at the age of 18. He also mastered Italian as well.

My Italian Grandmother spoke mostly Italian, though born in West Virginia.

My Spanish is nowhere as good as my 6 and 8 year old Granddaughters, who will be multi-lingual as adults.

Jeannine Pirro is a racist slug who sees being bi or multi-lingual bad. Then slam the First Lady for being multi-lingual, Jeannine. But she won't.

doesn't learn to speak even a small amount of the language, well I wonder why that person bothered to go to the new country. In 60 years he clearly never actually interacted with non German speakers, and I find that both sad and distressing. Yeah, I know that there have always been rather insulated immigrant communities, and I don't expect someone who arrived as an adult to gain full fluency, but never learning anything of the new country's language?

It was in 1912.

He was a German living in Russia, they were called "Volga Russians," and they farmed the area on invitation from the Czar.

But in 1912, politically things were heating up, which culminated in the Bolshevik take-over, several years later.

But my Great-Grandpa (who I met many times, before he died in 1972,) was stubborn, to say the least.

And as long as he didn't *HAVE* to learn English, he didn't.

I see that nowadays with a few of the Hmong immigrants, I've met a couple who have been around here for decades now, and don't speak any English.

Myself, I know a couple Spanish words, (my niece is far better in Spanish than I am,) and I can speak a little German.

In NH, that meant "parlais Francais" (My bad spelling) "French Spoken Here" on grocery stores, drugstores, car lots, and gararges. The French language radio show on Sunday. The Polish Club is usually the best (quick drink in good company) in town. Don't miss the Greek Church dinner!
My man Emile` went to elementary school in French, wit` the nuns on "the west side" of Manchester. An excellent machinist, watching him, a French-speaking Swiss engineer, and my good-guy boss (with a dog-eared English/French dictionary) work out terms from Technical English to romantic French was hilarious! "Deburr" became "au bevior" ('to bevel&quot .

Ethnic Enclaves work the same everywhere, pretty much. People want to live where they know somebody like them. Cheapskate bosses like "dumb Frenchmen", because they are easy to exploit and underpay. If a life centers around an ethnic church, that's their center. And it's RUDE to speak English to Memere, when she "hears" West Side French more clearly.

7 children all who went to the same school I did but much earlier. (their children were my parents age at the time). The Mister spoke pretty good English, but she never mastered English.

Even with 7 English speaking children she never learned it. They came from Czechloslovakia (sp?) when younger. Don't disparage those who can't learn English. It's one of the harder ones to learn. They were very nice people and invited us to wait for the bus at their house. It was by the road and ours was a quarter mile back in the field.

Decades ago, many Spanish speakers, born and raised here, went their entire life without learning English. Whole villages were like that. They didn’t need it because their whole experience was in their small community. So it does happen.

There were Czech and German speaking communities in Texas.

Back in the days when the only means of communication was in-person or in writing, exposure and need-to-know was difficult to deal with. You're in a village, you never need to go elsewhere (or very seldom), transportation's a bear, your elected mayor speaks the dominant language and deals with the hierarchy above him, so just speaking the village language isn't a problem. Put together a local newspaper as an information interface and you're set. (As a perk, it restricts where your kids can move. Which is a real perk if you're Mennonite and tend to have your own little quasi-kibbutz set up as a village.)

That's true in the US. It was true for Hungarian villages in Slovakia, in Yugoslavia, and in Austria. Until the Hungarians compelled the use of Hungarian, it was true for Slovak in Hungary. It's how indigenous languages survive in the boonies in Central and South America, and how indigenous languages survived in S. China as Han Chinese took over.

The spread of easy communication and travel squashed that, and it's led to language death in all sorts of places.

I’m sure her parents didn’t speak English at home when she was growing up. What a hypocrite.

I am very aware of how immigrant communities can self segregate. Usually the American born children learn English pretty readily, but I still find it quite disturbing that someone would move to another country and stubbornly refuse to learn any of the language of their new home. I don't expect fluency in someone who came here as an adult, but basic communication should be achieved.

I honestly think that if you're not willing to make some minimal effort to assimilate, then don't be the least bit surprised if people don't think well of you.

Whenever I go somewhere that the local language isn't English, I at least learn how to say please and thank you in the local language. And that's just for a week or sometimes less somewhere. Decades and decades and don't bother to learn any of the language? Really?