Schwarzenegger Advises Latinos to Avoid Spanish Media to Learn English

Gov Schwarzenegger told a group of Latino journalists Wednesday that if Latino students want to do better in school, they should shut themselves off from Spanish-language newspapers, TV and radio.

Schwarzenegger was speaking at the 25th annual National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention. In responding to a question about improving Latino academic performance, Schwarzenegger acknowledged that tutoring and after-school programs are important but said students needed to immerse themselves in English. Listen to the governor's remarks here.

The governor pointed to his own experience as an immigrant from Austria. "I know this sounds odd and this is politically not the correct thing to say and I'm going to get myself in trouble," Schwarzenegger said. "But I know that when I came to this country, I very rarely spoke German to anyone."

Schwarzenegger said that key to learning a new language quickly is immersion. "It's a drastic way of going about it, but it's the only way that I can think -- that you yourself can help, the school has to help and the parents have to help," the governor said.

http://www.news10.net/display_story.aspx?storyid=29089

Lord knows the country's overrun with them.

It really is the only way to learn the language.

It's when they start pushing English only laws that I get angry. He didn't mention that.

Listen to the language you want to learn. Read the news in it. Read everything you can in it. And speak it with native speakers every chance you get. It's so much easier if that is how you approach it.

It's not like he demanded that they learn English...maybe he intoned it.

I'm no fan of Arnie's, but honestly that's the way you learn a language.

The Rugrats in Spanish, now we're talking! Moives...yeah! The Godfather in Spanish? Turn it on.

I agree on the media part, but I think encouraging the new immigrants to learn the language is vital (using positive incentives and not negative FReeper ones: we gonna throw y'all out if yu dun't lern t' Speek the 'Murkan.)

It's good to be able to communicate with your neighbors (breaks down xenophobic barriers much faster) and a good policy is to learn the language of the country you move to. It's only polite. I've done it several times myself and it's not that difficult. Personally, restudying a bit of Spanish wouldn't hurt me, but I think expecting the new immigrants to learn English gradually (through a generation or two and not enforced by those inneffective and insensitive "English Only" laws) is not a bad thing at all.

Those costumes in their 1700s soap operas are excellent. When I worked in the Koreatown area of Los Angeles there were signs in their language all over the place. When I lived in Santa Monica there were all the Brits everywhere but you could never tell you were in the USA when you to their pubs because they all spoke funny and used other words so damn why didn't they have to blend in. :sarcasm: Actually I did understand them after a bit and those fish and chips were like...YUM!

We don't need to encourage immigrants. We need to encourage the ed system. :shrug:

area.

Also to make it a great subcareer and go public I would need to have to go back to Grad school and spend more money. Thanks to "no child left behind!"

:(

The most frustrating thing at work is when Spanish speakers hang up on me because I don't speak Spanish. I am more then happy to muck on through in broken English, but for some reason they just hang up.

I think part of it might be that there are many Hispanic areas now where you do not need to know any English at all to live comfortably, the only problem is when you have to go outside the community.

There should not e any lines for ESL classes. They should be available and free of charge. Immigrants who speak the language earn more and have better lives and that benefits our communities as a whole.

That's the way I learned Spanish. Lived in California all my life and in the central San Joaquin Valley for 32 years (heavily populated with Spanish speakers). I've listened to Spanish radio and television and spent a lot of time in Mexico. Immersion IS the best way to learn a language. How the HELL this can be interpreted as racism is beyond me.

publish stories the whore corporate media won't.

and I have to tell you--I wish I knew how to speak the language because their soap operas look sooo much better than ours.:)

but love the name, lol. :)

to me at least. Now the BBC as well as other international outlets. That's a real media.

are definitely better than others.

For example, Telemundo reported early in the war that a soldier from El Salvador was forced to eat a grenade and he died horribly. That report never made it to our rahwarrah English language stations.

And iirc, when we did an action here in San Francisco in March, Telemundo's was the only media truck there. :shrug:

There is absolutely no news at all from Latin America on MSM news
some Latin Stations give a complete rundown on the Western Hemisphere

done bi-lingually. It looks pretty good. :hi:

But I so far would prefer the World view of most truly International news networks. We don't really have that here.

Immersion is a good way to learn but English only laws are wrong.
Lee

Even if they do look at Univision in the evenings! They're still immersed, living here. Arnie is full of crapola as usual!

As if he had the choice, too. If there were German channels, he thinks by watching them from time to time he would not learn English, even living in the United States? Well, maybe he is that stupid. But most people aren't.

But I do see his point. My parents spoke only French until they were adults, when they picked up some English and through the years spoke only English. When I wzs a kid, they wouldn't speak French to us because they wanted us to speak English without an accent. Alot of my friends did have accents, and it set them back. That's just the way it was. Unfortunately, I'm not fluent in French, but that's the tradeoff.

:eyes:

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that showed plainly that there are way more people signing up for ESL classes than there are slots for them? :shrug:

putting words into my mouth, twisting my statements to fit his narrow view... plain and simple.

:)

How ya doing?

Good to see you keeping the kids in line. ;)

:hi:

an "enclave" as you put they can. If 70% of state X were to speak German, everything in state X would be posted in German, you think it shouldn't be? You think they should be told what to speak?

reading and writing by the time I was five. It was great prep for a career in English which involved reading Latin and French, too. It was also great prep for a minor in Anthropology because it was obvious to me by age five that, gasp, cultures differ!

:rofl:

lol

:hi:

There's NO F*CKING WAY that rat bastard won these past elections fair and square.

:smoke:

:shrug:

http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/sov/2006_general/gov.xls

I'm not trying to 'jack the thread or start a flame fest here, but could someone please explain how the result could have been fudged to the extent that Arnold Schwarzenegger got nearly 1.5 million more votes than did Phil Angelides? In spite of the known problems with election systems and procedural irregularities I just can't see how fraud could have been carried out on that massive of a scale; and have our legislature and judiciary not do something about it.

The truth is painful sometimes. Remember, we did elect Ronald Reagan as our governor and also helped carry him to the Presidency twice.

Don't underestimate the diversity or unpredictability of California voters. Most of our counties are rural and lean strongly Republican. The only big counties that Phil carried were Alameda by a lot and Los Angeles not by much.

:)

First in Contra Costa County(03)then in San Mateo County (06).

In 2003, Davis got about the same percentage as he had in his 2002 reelection. 45% in 2003 v. 47% in 2002. Of course, the recall vote was sort of stacked against him in that he needed 50% to vote against the recall at a time when he was unjustifiably, but undisputably unpopular.

There is no way that he could have won because none of your friends voted for him? :eyes:

It is drastic. It also works.

(Costa Rica and Switzerland, respectively). They learned their respective languages by immersion and came home fluent. Likewise with my sister in Sweden in the 70s.

When I went to France for 11 days by myself in 2001 I forced myself to immerse. It made my brain hurt, since I had never formally studied French, but only read tourist phrasebooks and listened to some incomprehensible CDs. But, by gosh, after 10 days I found I was starting to find it less of a struggle.

Nuff said.

Too bad our brains can't stay that age. :)

/oops

heritage is a good thing. Not something to be thrown in the garbage just because of what country you chose to live in.

A person who chooses not to learn it will have negative life consequences.

I support their right to choose to be left behind.

:shrug:

:shrug:

The Hispanic adults that I know who aren't fluent in English don't want to offend by misspeaking -- it would be majorly impolite. That limits their practice, right?

And, we just don't have enough ESL classes for the folks who have leftover energy from their jobs and family to study.

It's just sad to me that this whole "they refuse to learn English" thingy gets tossed around because I have very good friends who would do just about anything to learn the language. :(

It comes naturally to some. A few have a really hard time with it.

and for some reason, I could not get French. I passed and all but, it was so hard for me. I could read it but the pronunciation made no sense to me at all. If you plunked me down in Paris, I'd starve to death if I wasn't stoned to death first. lol

I learned it well enough in high school plus a few trips to Mexico.

putting up with meatball "dialogos" when I could have been making inroads on that French thing.

Go figure.

speaking it with a Spanish accent Ha!

At least, we TRIED. :silly:

If you want I can take you to a few places in LA where you can get by without learning English. There are places where Chinese or Spanish are enough to get by. I think all he's saying is people that choose to stay in the small havens where they can get by without learning English are not helping themselves. It's not refusing to learn English as simply there are places where you can get by without it and people often will end up their because they are comfortable in that environment. He's stating the obvious that people that end up in those comfort zones end up at a disadvantage to those who do force themselves to learn English.

that refuses to learn English. There are a lot of people who work long hours and who have family responsibilities that eat their time. And there are clearly very limited resources for learning English.

Do we have whole neighborhoods speaking the dreaded Spanish language? Or an Asian dialect? Sure. Three of my moms's siblings are very well off and it ain't because they learned English. It's because they had business acumen and they worked their butts off. So, no, not doing business in English doesn't necessarily hold you back. It never has in the whole history of this country.

This whole "they won't learn English" meme is RW bullshit.

I believe that is what Ahnold was referring to.

As for missing out on alternative POVs by not taking in Spanish language media, people can always start doing that when they have a handle on English.

And we only hoped he used both hands then, too.

Same guy that wanted to euthanize dogs after 24 hours and cut back on handicapped services.

He's scum.

:shrug:

But that doesn't make him wrong about everything.

lol

Ask me about my German DNA. Or, ask Zookeeper.

:rofl:

The rest a mish-mash of English and Irish.

The German DNA isn't as bad as the inherited cultural uptightness.

and my San Salvador side. Part of me needs order and the other part just doesn't want to make waves.

lol

:rofl:

:yourock:

:rofl:

languages are accommodated for that. Maybe if there were 5,000 Spanish speakers in the US your point would be right. :rofl:

Yet it does the rest of us no damage.

Most immigrants know two languages. Most Americans know only one. Who is likely to get "left behind" in the international economy?

My point is that not knowing English in the USA is a handicap.

a pleasure to speak,

as a toddler -- on the tube, probably. It sounded like metal being ground and cold metal, at that.

And so I grew up and devoted many years to learning to love English. lol

It is spelled the way it sounds.

Even the freepers wouldn't make spelling mistakes!

Why is it intrinsically good to maintain a culture but inherently bad to assimilate into a new one?

Why is assimilating the same as throwing one's heritage into the garbage?

Seems like a binary thought process to me.
GAC

maintaining their culture and heritage?

As far as the throwing it in the garbage, I guess the ones who do think it's ok for people to maintain a culture different from theirs it's ok if it's kept in their own house where it's not seen or heard by them?

situation. One can keep a culture AND learn another one.

...assimilate into the native culture. If you don't want to assimilate then go back to where you came from.

And, why haven't we all adopted Native American practices?

Holy cow.

I just stated my opinion. :eyes:

"If you want to immigrate to another country you have a responsibility to assimilate into the native culture. If you don't want to assimilate then go back to where you came from."

They should also convert to Christianity. If they don't like that, they can get the hell out of America.

:rofl:

The very reason the English speak English and that the Angles and Saxons overcame the Celts. Didn't they have a duty to learn Celtic? The English should not be speaking English, they should have, when the migrated, learned Gaelic or Welsh or whatever applied to the territory they went to.

And don't you have a duty to learn Lakota? We came here and we had a duty to assimilate. We should be speaking Cheyenne. We don't even try. We're worse than the people Arnie imagines.

You can keep your culture and heritage and speak more than one language. Many people in my family have done so successfully.

I figured that would happen.
GAC

you think they should not and do not see good in that. You feel they should become and behave similar to the dominate majority where they chose to live. I understand you and others feel for them to do so "is just better for them." We are just different kinds of human beings.

I just think one's culture and heritage is more important and should be preserved.

I never said i didn't believe in it. That's simply an incorrect assumption on your part. I just asked a question as to why one was inherently good and the other inherently bad. You still haven't answered that.

In other words, your "goodness" is strictly subjective, and that's what i thought.

I'm first generation american. My family hasn't forgotten that they came here from Italy. There's no lost culture, but my dad didn't have a trace of an italian accent when he was an adult. But, he was bilingual his whole life.

So, you see, you assumed too much.
GAC

:evilgrin:

Nation-states are an obstacle to corporate power over the world and thus the corporatists have a vested interest in destroying national cultures by pushing Postmodernist "Multiculturalist" rhetoric.

It sounds like you're parroting memes you've scavenged from right wing blogs. Please, give us more details.

How has "multiculturalism" harmed you, personally?

(By the way--who was "Odin"?)

Remember how the USA wanted the Native Americans to "assimilate"? or die? It should've been the English who had to assimilate, not take over and mow anyone down who didn't agree to their bloody lifestyle.

to be assimilated into?

That's like saying someone should assimilate to "European" culture. Which one, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Finnish?

BTW, I just did research on the Iroquois and, trust me, they had their own bloody lifestyle. They wiped out settlers and other tribes, alike.

History is more complex than rhetoric.

Some English who were captured did not always want to go back to their settlements, especially if they were children. Run around play all day, go swimming, ride horses...vs. go to school, go to church, work, wear stiff clothes.

playing, swimming and riding horses. I'm sure they had to work to live and had their own structure, rituals and schedules (as in "time to hunt, time to gather, time to cook, time to worship") to keep.

And the idea that the Pilgrims were a bunch of stiffs wearing dark clothes, has been debunked.

My original point was that you can't lump all Native people and cultures together. The Huron were different from the Zuni. The Lakota were different from the Mayans, just like Italians are different than Finns.

On edit: By "assimilate" are you saying the English should have abandoned technology?

with toy bows and watch over the horses. Sigh, same ole same ole...women did all the work.

I doubt that the adult women had much time to sit and think deep thoughts.

The corporatists would like nothing better then destroy the nation-state and cement thier power via so-called "multi-culturalist" rhetoric.

If enough people have come from a certain place, some of that culture gets into the American culture. How many Mexican and Chinese restaurants are there in the U.S.? St. Patrick's Day parades?

Migrations constantly occur and affect all cultures and in the long run, no language is safe from extinction.

Even if Spanish did become a majority language here, so what? It's not as if the American way cannot be carried out in any other language.

So Spanish is a major second language in this country; so what? Many countries have more than one language. It helps us deal with people abroad, too, that we have so many people who can speak Spanish, Chinese, everything under the sun.

The fear some people here have of other languages is almost hilarious. Especially when people speak English all over the world, too.

message.

"Don't know more, it's too dangerous!"

And, above and beyond the racist/nationalist/xenophobic aspects of the issue, it concerns me more that people are actively being persuaded NOT to learn. :shrug:

I would never ask someone to trash their cultural heritage, not to mention being bi or tri lingual is an incredible asset in making a living.

It is very very impractical to not learn the language of your adopted country.

civics, and history.

:rofl:

My cousins in Latin American can thrash me in geography, math and world history. Damn them!

perhaps we should teach foreigh lanaguages that way in our schools too

no

Actually he wants them to stop watching the Spanish media since they still have ... news

Shocking, I know

Who is he listening to ~ :puke:

He looked awful too, his face was all strange looking and his hair was stiff as a wire brush. I can recall if you wanted to go on to college you had to learn a foreign language in school. What better way then to watch a Spanish language station or pick up La Opinion. Mind you, this is just an example. So when he turned to the woman and told her that in his condesending way I just felt my blood start to boil. And of course he didn't speak German, because frankly Santa Monica has more of a British community anyway. He reminds me of those BIA people who yanked kids out of their homes and send them to the Indian Schools where they were beaten if they dared to speak their language or follow their beliefs. He's a vile rat.

/I cannot spell in any language. lol

I'm trying to re-learn Spanish, and here in NYC, there's obviously a billion Spanish publications for sale. I need to pick up a copy today and see if I can understand the contents.

that if I turn the teevee on to a Spanish language station, the aural input works faster than trying to read print. :hi:

Although on some shows, particularly telenovelas, I find that they speak a bit too fast for me, and I can only pick out a few words, whereas a printed publication allows me to go at my own pace.

Maybe I should start with the Spanish news broadcasts, since they seem to go at a slower pace.

:hi:

rev up. It's funny that way but there really does seem to be a time lag involved. :)

Salud

:toast:

Dinero

:toast:

y Amor!

:toast:

in a London pub asked me if I knew what time it was. (Or, I think that's what he wanted.)

I told him I was sorry, I didn't speak English, I was an American.

lol

The No. 1 language in the world (highest number of native speakers) is Mandarin Chinese.

The No. 2 language is Spanish.

The No. 3 language is English.

So there are more speakers of Spanish than English out there.

lol
:hi:

If you want to be successful in this country, it helps to learn english.

People should have the freedom to choose what they want to do, but I think it's a good idea for immigrants to immerse themselves in English so they can have better opportunities in this country.

when in the real world, they have very, very limited opportunities to do that.

and have a family, "immersion" is pretty much beyond your reach.

I know not everyone can take the time to learn English, but every little bit helps.

I was lucky. My family had the resources to help me learn English. To help me through college and so on.

Most people aren't as lucky as I've been and they're just trying to survive. Every little bit does help but some of us aren't in the position to struggle for that little bit. And, it is a struggle.

Imagine going to a parent-teacher meeting and not understanding the teacher and being too polite to ask for clarification even though you adore your child and you desperately want to do right.

Imagine taking your child to the doctor and not being able to understand fully his recommendation.

Imagine having a neighbor get in your face about something and not understanding what they are upset about when thousands of years of culture have taught you that keeping the peace among neighbors is one of the highest priorities.

Imagine being burglarized or assaulted and not being able to communicate to law enforcement well enough to get help.

Imagine being arrested for something you never did and not being able to communicate with the public defender well enough to get a fair hearing. (I translated for many of these people here in San Francisco County.)

That's what it's like.

We call them Los Hermanos. Really nice guys, fun to play pool with. They've all been in the country more than 20 years.

Two of them speak English very well. One of them is a techie, the other a retail manager. The other two are janitors. Of those two one speaks English weakly, the other can barely understand any of it.

In the case of that family there is a clear correlation between English language ability and affluence.

Of my mom's sibs, all are affluent and she's the only one that went back to college and grad school here.

I don't know what to make of that, it's just how it is.

despite our refusal to learn the language.

"Those that have the power to hurt and will do none ."

:rofl:

knowing more?

lol

Or whatever their native language is.

What a non-issue. So people want to take a break when it comes to entertainment - so what? And some of us can learn a little more Spanish by having that media around.

That's all it is. Please, can we try not to buy into that?

to hear something you can understand and relax. But stay away from any Spanish News, listen to MSM per Arnold

Lurn the nate-ive language or I vill bench pruss you into ohb-liv-eeon.

I am not a fan of Arnold, but if I was to go to another country and not make an effort to learn the country's language and only watched English or American t.v., then I would be hamstringing myself and limitin my opportunities.

My friends family is Italian. Her parents emigrated to America over 45 years ago to Brooklyn in a heavily Italian dominated area. They still don't speak English well enough to communicate and are still dependent upon the small Italian enclave.

It is not a moral judgement, it is common sense to have some assimilation for very practical purposes.

want to learn English and are constrained by the resources available to them.

This has nothing to do with not wanting to learn English. You have to have time and money to study anything.

/ack

He is not blaming immigrants for not wanting to speak english. He just thinks that it would be helpful if more folks forced themselves to have to use English, then they will learn much faster on top of the instruction through the schools.

Immigrants want to learn english, but they also prefer to read and watch programs in their own language for obvious reasons. Just wanting to learn a language is not good enough, you have to put effort into it. Even then some people still have a hard time learning the language.

This is coming from someone who never did their spanish homework, and barely passed the classes, even though I really wanted to learn the language.

And what a struggle every single day is.

to learn their adopted country's language? Arnold's point was if they do have the time, the time spent should not be on their own cultures tv programming, but watching, at the very least English speaking programs. Why the consistent excuse making?

I am asking for a simple balance, that is very reasonable.

My too many posts to this thread have tried to convey how much immigrants want to learn the English language and how few opportunities they have to do that. And how they are blamed because it is so easy to blame the powerless.

you are so steeped in the victim mentality that you do immigrants such a grave disservice. I work in a tremendous multicultural school with over 85 different languages and dialects spoken in our school district and my experience is the exact opposite of your perspective.

Stop looking at them as victims. There are PLENTY of opportunities for people to learn the language.

objectively, there are far more people that want to learn English than there are ESL classes to accommodate them.

Long before there were ESL classes, people learned the language. In this day and age, there really is no excuse for the vast amount of the population of immigrants not to, at the very least, make the attempt. I will concede that there is a small percentage who can't for one reason or the other, but they are very few.

I work with the community services and for as long as I can remember, the ESL classes are not inudated with people. They are free and often offer plenty of other resources and opportunity.

I am not saying that their lives are easy... far from it. But on this issue I have to disagree. I also think we need to get past this idea that America "owes" anything to anybody. I think it is wonderful that services are offered but draw the line when people insist that immigrants, especially undocumented ones, have a "right" to anything.

English? I don't understand it. My grandmother is the only member of my family that never spoke English although she could read it but she was elderly when she came here. The rest of the family speaks English and Spanish. Some of us have advanced degrees, and we're teachers, journalists, writers and translators.

:shrug:

lol

Ergo, a yinzer is someone who speaks the Pittsburgh pidgin language.

lol

I helped out a friend who teaches 5th grade in Hispanic neighborhood - It was chaos....I read their papers and was shocked at how poor their English skills were. It's not helping those kids, nor the English speaking kids in the class to learn in a chaotic situation.

When I grew up in west side of town during the 60's, all the Hispanic kids could speak perfect English, even if their parents were still speaking primarily Spanish. But back then, there were no Spanish radio/TV.

with my grandmother. And you know what? I still got into Berkeley's English PhD program BECAUSE I was bilingual.

There's thousands of elementary schools that would benefit from such a shining example. You should consider teaching.

do this. They do. My mother, who spoke no English, when my father brought her here, listened to English radio and later TV when it came along. She also went to the movies to learn and of course she had to speak English with relatives whom we were living with. Still she enjoyed being able to catch up with news and entertainment in her own language when she was tired of English all the time. Later when she was able to speak some English, she went to night school. She wasn't unusual. Most immigrants want and try to learn, so I think Arnie is out in left field here. He's inferring that hispanics aren't willing like Europeans to do this. It is harder when everyone around you speaks Spanish, but brown people are not as welcome in white social settings like Arnold probably was when he first came here.

He obviously has NO CLUE how hard life is when you don't speak or understand English in this state.

No one really likes him. I thought for sure that the nurses and firemen would have voted him out of office the last election. It makes me think more and more that our election system is really compromised. I hope our new SOS can get our election system fixed before the next elections.

Remember, they killed our Dem SOS Kevin Shelley over what turned out to be nothing? Nothing.

And, fwiw, most people I talk to here have no understanding that our OpScan system is so easily hijacked. It's sobering, really.

up and start noticing CA politics, which I didn't follow that much before. Of course Arnold is the caca the Republicans frosted the cake with and tried to make us believe it was chocolate.

never ran against him, I saw one or two Angelides commercials out here in the desert/ while Groper ran for months, same as the useless Davis recall "fight like a tiger" He neve ran 1 ad out here. One Hispanic I know has to go, and its Art Torres. I'm still steaming

how to do the production end of publicity. We need George Clooney. If they have their movie stars, we need ours. He at least knows how to work the publicity angle of getting his face out there.

nothing wrong with this advice to help people learn another language.

what on earth is wrong with listening to something you can understand??? especially since there is a total blackout on news from LatinoAmerica on our English only stations?

To keep up with current events they obviously need to hear things in the language they understand the most. I also believe if someone is still struggling learning English or any language for the matter - being able to hear it while watching what is related to being said helps immensely.

If he is insisting they do not listen to ANY Spanish media then that's too much - I agree.

the basics quickly.

We send our kids to Concordia Language Villages every summer, which is a two week camp/language immersion program. My daughter was really bored in her first year of high school French after going to the French camp for three summers, because the pace was so much slower than the village experience.

This year, one is going for a four-week German session that will give him a year of high school credit. That only works because it's an immersion program....it requires them to learn quickly if they want to talk to anyone. (Or would like someone to pass them the salt at dinner.)

And it would probably take longer than two weeks.

Immersion learning demands 100% of your attention. Holding down a job & raising a family are distractions.

:party:

They offer Arabic, Chinese, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish and Spanish. The Spanish, German, French, Norwegian and Finnish villages have "authentic" architecture.

Two of my kids started with Italian, and one wanted to take Norwegian, but the opportunities for continued study are fewer than with French, German or Spanish. And those languages are the ones offered in school, so...

I wish I had had this opportunity when I was a kid.

(Hey, Expat...maybe we need a DU summer camp! :think: )

As for summer camp, I think this is it. :hi:

http://clvweb.cord.edu/prweb/adult/adult_weekends.asp

And Italian:

http://clvweb.cord.edu/prweb/adult/awknd_italian.asp

And you could drop by my Zoo and say, "Buon giorno."

:hi:

much more. :)

immersion and absorption

:hi:

have to learn English. I live in California I am African American and have had people approach me asking me quesitons in Spanish. I do happen to speak Spanish having lived and studied in Mexico so I am always happy to oblige, but frankly I'm not sure why so many would assume/expect me to speak Spanish, I don't look Hispanic, Dominican etc. Hate to say it sfexpat, but I think that many of the more recent immigrants are well aware that they can come here, earn a living (maybe not a great one) and never have to learn English I think there are many who really have no real intention to do it...let's face it, it't hard to learn another language, especially when you don't really have to. I think it takes a great deal of motivation to force one's self to do so, when you don't really "have to". Maybe Arnold wouldn't have learned Engish if there'd been dozens of German radio and television stations, and an entrenched community of thousands of German speakers etc. Blast away!

especially as an adult.

before you talk of them. In fact, until WWI, there were many German-language newspapers in the US. And there were "entrenched communities" of German speakers all over the US. When the US entered WWI, German speakers were threatened with imprisonment or deportation unless they stopped speaking the language. Many changed their names or the names of their business to avoid organized vandalism.

Some of those German speakers were my ancestors. As an honor to them, I earned a degree minor in German and am still fluent.


"Maybe Arnold wouldn't have learned Engish if there'd been dozens of German radio and television stations, and an entrenched community of thousands of German speakers etc."

Your second language is built on your first language. The best way to aquire a second language using news? You watch or read the news in your first language, then you listen to the same news in the second language. You learn far more than by listening to gobbledygook that you do not understand. I'm good at Spanish because I am good at English. You don't have to take away first language to aquire more languages. Arnold is an idiot!!!!!!!!!!!

lol

Schwarzenegger missed the waves of German speaking immigrants. The neighborhoods where businesses all spoke German have been filled with newer immigrants--the children & grandchildren of the German speakers learned English & fled to suburbia. What happened to all the German language newspapers? They went out of business. Gradually. (Well, the waves of xenophobia that swept the country during WWI helped.)

Schwarzenegger learned English working out in a gym, with a "patron." (No, he didn't have a real job.) And his first girlfriend here was an English teacher.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schwarzenegger

Language Immersion is great if you have a couple of weeks or months in which you can ignore everything else. Why not offer more ESL courses? Sure, encourage people to consume English language media. (At least, the shows that don't make Sabado Gigante look like Masterpiece Theater.) But don't demand they give up their telenovelas & futbol games!

:hide:

to learn any language. Stop talking to other members of your language community in your native language and instead use the language you are trying to master. Start watching television and movies in the language you are trying to learn. Start reading as much as you can in the language you are trying to learn. It's just common sense.

Just because he's Schwarzenegger doesn't make him wrong.

trying to learn means you are immersed. Try living in Mexico for a few months and see if you don't start picking up some key words and phrases. What Arnie was inferring is that they don't want to. That's plain wrong and painting with a very broad brush. A lot of people think that immigrants don't know English. Actually do know a lot of English. They are shy about speaking it fearing they will be misunderstood to people who are hostile to them to begin with so they prefer to speak to people in their own language especially when it comes to seeking, medical, professional or legal help so that there is no mistake as to what they mean. Imagine if you had a child that got sick in a foreign country. Wouldn't you prefer talking to someone in English who could translate for you even if you had rudimentary knowledge of the language? This point is very well brought up in the move "Babel". Rent it sometimes.

example -- there are parts of east los angeles where you are not at all immersed and it is the person speaking english who has to get by with sign language or a bit of spanish or an asian language -- i've seen it for myself

you are not magically "immersed" in english speaking culture just because you crossed a border, many people who cross the border join relatives or a small community and they DO have to look for ways to immerse themselves or they will be trapped forever

many older people do re-locate to mexico and find themselves in ex-pat enclaves such as that popular lake area (i'm blocking on the name but you might know where it is) where they never have to learn a word of spanish, it's the same song second verse

you are never automatically immersed in a language just by crossing a border, that's nice to think so because it makes it sound so easy, but reality is that people tend to surround themselves w. their own family or their own kind, you have to STRETCH out of your comfort zone to learn something new as an adult

Americans or Latinos. Go into Korea town sometimes and you will see what I mean. Also, people in their own enclaves do speak their own languages. It doesn't mean that they don't know English or can't speak it enough to get by in day to day conversations. In California for instance, Spanish was the language mostly spoken since the days California was part of Spain and subsequently Mexico. Anglo-Americans started coming in and speaking their own language, English. So as far as European languages are concerned Spanish is the language orginally spoken in those places you speak of. Also, most ex-pat Americans I have known over the years, having been one myself at time, do speak enough of the local tongue to get by. They, like the immigrants here, don't if they don't have to.

Also, I had a small bookkeeping service before I retired. Some of my clients were in East. LA and next door in Monterey park. These were business people both Mexican and Asian who did business in their own languages, but in the case of the Asians were able to speak enough English and undertand even more to deal with me. Just say some uncomplimentary things to them in English sometimes and you will discover how much they do know.

I've had because my ethnicity is ambiguous -- I can "pass" in both cultures. So, I've overheard some very funny things in both languages that the speaker didn't believe I understood. :evilgrin:

Stories, I have stories. It's especially funny when people start talking about beaners around me.

You can easily get by in the Bronx without knowing a single word of English. There's almost no onus at all (and, remember, this is not a discussion of whether there should be) on learning English.

Yesterday, I found that at a Dunkin' Donuts near Morningside, that an employee understood "two" but not "a couple". English is a fairly unique case in that you can "get by" while having almost non-existent skills. I would hazard a guess that fewer than 400 words is about all it takes to get by in English.

With 400 words, you will never work anywhere other than Dunkin' Donuts.

lol

not only by Freepers' poor skills with a language they would inflict on the entire world, but also by their incredibly deficient knowledge of American history and American politics. It's like they keep themselves willfully ignorant. I just don't get it.

Conservative Republicanism doesn't have to be utterly retarded. Lord knows that Lincoln was a good sort. I just don't understand how it could have gone so far astray.

Then again, we've gone astray too. Not quite as badly, but the quality of political debate even among the most committed candidates still isn't all that profound.

It's distressing, I agree, how our political discourse has been so degraded. Where a candidate's net worth is baldly touted over their ideas. (Although, I may be committing the Golden Age Error but, I remember a world without hate radio and straight news without happy talk.)

party. It sunk into conservatism in later decades. So that's not a good example.

We don't get Lincoln. I'm cool with that. We still get FDR.

Thom Hartmann? Or, intellectuals like Gore Vidal? Or, more importantly my college history professor who held degrees from some very prestigious universities. Please cite whom you believe that says it's spin.

Everyone and I mean everyone holds degrees from very prestigious universities, and I'd have to see your college history professor's credentials and transcripts to judge her or his abilities. But to claim that Lincoln was anything other than a Republican is idiocy. To claim likewise that Lincoln's adoption by our party is anything other than spin beggars belief.

Perhaps you should read some history, in particular the history of how our party recovered from that whole "copperhead" debacle. Start with Weber's book Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North. (Oxford, 2006). Then read Lind's What Lincoln Believed. (Doubleday, 2005).

between hermosa and belleza but they mean the same thing. However, you would probably learn one word first and stick with it. Please be more understanding.

we can laugh at his accent all we like but his english is better than my german by a long shot, good enough for him to become a star in english language films and then a politician in an english speaking country

so i think maybe we can agree that he does know something about how to become successful in a country where you start out not speaking the language

i wonder how many languages the poster speaks and how successful he is in a highly competitive career in a foreign country where he has to speak a second language

in movies where he speaks maybe a total of 7 words.

And there is no reason to avoid Spanish media. You don't have to lose your first language or abandon your culture to learn English.

Not to mention, El Grope just pissed off media types that he'll someday wish he hadn't.

the man is an immigrant after all.

:wtf:

When he emigrated, he immersed himself and learned English properly. There's nothing with that.

berating him for misspeaking and alienating a whole constituency, his command of the English language is debatable as is his political acumen.

I think that the situation is complicated by the presence of an entire segment of the Latino population who are recent immigrants but who lack the economic resources (either money or time) to assimilate--even though they deeply desire better English skills and a deeper knowledge of the ins and outs of American cultural norms and expectations.

In that one he had an English accent. :rofl: Arnie was around awhile before he became fluent in English. By fluent I mean he can converse quickly not well.

As he grew up in Sacramento to Spanish speaking parents, they were told by the Catholic School that for the sake of his education they should only speak English in the house.

I recall that Ramirez' conclusion was that when his parents did as they were told in his best interest that:

1) it worked (obviously, Ramirez is successful and as an author no less!)
2) he's ambivalent that he lost some connection to his parents because they no longer spoke in Spanish, which was the language they knew

This IS A HARD issue. Anyone who says they know it all and has the best answer is simply wrong. There are trade-offs in all answers.

My gut reaction to Schwarzenegger's comments was that:

1) apart from the stereotype, he was right
2) he certainly knows a thing or two about having to succeed in the USA and having to learn English as part of trying to succeed in the USA --so his point is not made out of ignorance, by no means.

However, she would have learned anyway. Since my Spanish back then was as fluent as my English, how do you explain that considering I went to English or American schools and we spoke English at home? Yet, any Spanish speaking person who spoke with me had no idea I wasn't 100% Latina nor did any English speaking person know I wasn't 100% Anglo-American. However, my mother never mastered the intricacies of our crazy grammar, since she was an adult when she learned, and neither has Arnold. People in glass houses shouldn't throw rocks. I must say her spelling was far better than the average freeper's is though. I doubt if Arnold's is. Germans always try to spell English like German.

her accent so she never spoke it -- one of the curses of being very musical and having a great ear.

It's funny, too, because she was also a writer and helped me fall in love with language. The first organized game I played was the vocabulary quiz in her Spanish language Readers' Digest. I'd get one or two of 20 right. She'd be upset if her score wasn't perfect. So, the dreaded Spanish language was my passport to a career in letters and English ones, at that. Go figure. :)

had us speak mainly Spanish at home so we wouldn't lose it. It was a lot of work for them to stay on us, come to think of it.

They were right. We didn't lose our Spanish and now the language is being passed to at least some of my nieces and nephews. Several of us have made a living translating and by and large, my cousins are extremely successful professionals.

He came to this country in '48, and since he worked from 11 am to midnight or later, TV was never an option for him (plus, he' not a TV kind of guy anyway). He married a native English speaker, and spoke only English at home because it was all Italian on the job. We never had Italian in the home, and it was a real loss.

three generations of us that could talk to our grandmother and learn and enjoy our history, we really appreciate the effort our parents, aunts and uncles made to help us preserve our culture -- especially when they were all struggling with a new language and a very different way of living here in California. My mom and her sibs are a very tough bunch. :)

It's a very precious thing, the life of a family. And I guess, at bottom, that's why El Grope's pontificating is so offensive. No, I will not turn away from my family and their language. No, I will not stop learning about my people. No, it's not a good idea to cut yourself off from where you came from.

I have a strong suspicion that a good many of our problems as a society stem from the fact that too many of us have been cut off from where we came from and so, have lost the habit of community, of solidarity, of extending ourselves to others and being able to rely on each other. :shrug:

edit: clarity

:rofl:

My apologies to the author. :)

It works.

Who escaped the Nazis. She learned to speak English by watching American television.
He might be right in saying that is a good way to learn.