Next time someone says"immigrants should be forced to learn English"...

http://www.qdb.us/49491

<xkcd> Guy in line: English should be the national language, these immigrants should have to learn English when they come here.
<xkcd> Girl in line: Yeah
<xkcd> Guy: When you go to live somewhere, you learn the language they speak there. English is the language of the land.
<xkcd> Sarah Mac: (from behind in line) Excuse me, but -- osio sarah dawado.
<xkcd> Guy: What the hell was that?
<xkcd> Sarah: Cherokee.

That was the best answer anyone could make! Thanks for sharing!

fucking classic

see nothing wrong with this.

about how people should learn another language are the types of people who only know one language.

There is nothing wrong with people coming here and learning english to further there lot, but I don't get offended when someone doesn't speak english very well.

having said in THEIR language and being able to understanding everything around them without having to learn another language.

"who's the immigrant, pilgrim?"

courtesy of one of my favorite stores, Northern Sun - Products for Progressives - http://www.northernsun.com

I showed it to one of my classmates (Dine/Navajo) and she loved it, she had never seen it before.

My husband bought that t-shirt in Colorado this summer and had a great time walking around the Maryland Ren Faire a few weeks ago wearing it. Every Wednesday morning he takes our 3 year old daughter to gymnastics class and comes home with stories about the "yuppie breeders" as he calls them. This Wednesday's story was a classic:

1st mother: Sue, how are you, how was the trip?

Sue: It was great. We left the kids with my sister and went to Paris and Venice.

1st mother: How did you like France?

Sue: It was awful - nobody spoke English. They were so rude - speaking French all the time (gosh - imagine that!. We liked Venice much better since everyone spoke English.

I told him that he should have told about us being at Walt Disney World the same week that Sue was in Paris and having a blast conversing with German tourists in German (me: poor German, but better than their English and we all wound up understanding each other and having a great time), a housekeeping staff member in Spanish (me again: moderately poor Spanish, but enough to let her know that the lamp over the bed needed a new bulb and that our daughter loved the towel animals the staff member had left) and a young lady from France in one of the EPCOT shops in French (my husband: rusty French from college, but she was delighted to have anyone speak to her in anything vaguely resembling French and we had a wonderful time).

They were speaking to each other--in Japanese.

He had to restrain himself from saying "You're in America--Speak Spanish!"

people should learn English..
(I don't think the crimes against the Native Americans can be used as an argument in this case)

but that is different than declaring our nation should be monolingual english. i am monolingual english raised in iowa. i now live in a border town... and have been lazy and am putting off learning spanish. i work in a bilingual workplace where people are speaking spanish half the time if not more. it does not bother me in the slightest because i know if there was something they wanted me to know, they'd speak in english.

it really annoys me all the monolingual english people around here that get offended with people speaking spanish or listening to spanish broadcasts. why are people so defensive? who cares? if you want to know what they are saying, learn spanish!


on edit: i have picked quite a bit up, but will need to take classes to get functional.

I get weary of people that have the attitude that not only English is the language of the US but that you should not speak anything else but English! I am Hispanic and I have even heard people comment on how offended they are to hear people having private conversations in a language that is not English. Excuse me? That is ubsurd. English is not our official language. I think it would be a good idea if it was, but people who are of the attitude that you must only speak English in the US annoy the hell out of me. I speak and write Spanish about 80% as good as I do English. Ain't no way I am going to pretend I don't know Spanish or not speak to my relatives or Spanish speaking friends in Spanish if I feel like it. The more we know the better. Instead of feeling that everyone should speak English only, people who only know English should look into learning another language. In other countries people speak more than one language and no one is offended.

Just because the U.S. has had English language hegemony since its inception does not mean it has to stay that way. we can TURN into a bilingual society. Quebec wasn't always a bilingual society... it was settled and administered by the French and then the British came.

THINGS CHANGE. GET OVER IT.

how's the state of democracy in america, alexis? (that is a rhetorical question, you don't have to answer that)

off to work. later.

eom

ancestors to learn the language. Provided of course they aren't of english speaking ancestry. ;)

I find just about everyone I know has at least one nationality I can pin em on.

When you go to France, are you expected to speak Gaullic?

How about Latin in Italy?

If we lived in the Cherokee Nation, this would be a good argument. But we don't. We live in the United States, and English _has_ always been the predominant language of the nation known as the United States, though not, admittedly, the land it sits on.

My mother was an immigrant and spoke a helluva lot better English than most Americans - of course she immigrated from England.

:rofl:

Just wondering.

Still puts me leagues ahead of your average Wasichu.

Sorry. Just how I feel.

If I were to move to Poland, the expectation would be for me to learn Polish and not demand everything be in English. That being said, I have no problem with stores having signs in their native language or private conversations in another language. The problem with trying to create a bilingual society means the government would actually have to fund education, which is their favorite thing to cut!

the house.

Immigrants have always spoken their native language in the first generation, and the second generation always spoke English like natives. It's a safe bet that 90% of the population, at a minimum, arrived here speaking some other language. Turn of the century NY had a dozen Yiddish newspapers, not to mention papers in Polish, Russian, German, Italian.

There is no need to legislate what is fact -- every immigrant, or their children, will learn English.

It's nothing to get worked up about.

my friend's mother is Portugese - here since the very early 60's. She knows very little English with no desire to ever learn.

And after 40 years here, she probably understands a lot better than she speaks, and if she had to she could get by. For that matter, she obviously does get by, wouldn't you say?

I still maintain that making English the official language just creates yet another target for bigotry. We don't need that.

Things settle themselves out on their own. Your friend's mother has adapted to being a non-english speaker. Others adapt by becoming english speakers. But there is no excuse for having a governmental imprimatur mandating speaking english. Democracy is about people making up their own minds.

having to learn it?

should be expected to understand English, I'm of two minds.

I've switched into Spanish or Russian or even French to make my life easier, because I didn't feel like making a point, felt sorry for the person, or was simply in a hurry.

At other times I've switched into a language that the poor twit didn't know just to make his--and his manager's--life harder.

When in another country, I don't assume that the people know English; nor do I think it reasonable for them to assume I know more than the standard national language. It's mildly irritating to learn enough of their language to pull off a simple exchange in a shop, only to have the clerk rant to her colleague about "snobby foreigner's putting on airs speaking in such formal (whatever)."

I assume the joke-teller was from the Carolinas.