Virginia Alvarado wrote an article in 2009 for indypressny.org entitled Lost in translationarents who don't speak English struggle struggle to participate in children's education. This article illustrates the problems I referenced. If you need evidence of non-English speaking people not making ends meet and straining the resources of county hospital districts for routine care, ask any doctor who has had any involvement with emergency medicine. They'll tell you. It's a problem and it is growing. It is difficult to make decisions regarding obtaining health care and participating in education when you don't speak the predominant language and cannot obtain an understanding of the systems that are in place. Perhaps the enclaves can have members who also speak English serve as a liaison. Of course nobody should be forced to learn a new language. However, the costs of those individual decisions should not be passed onto society.
I agree with those posters that immigrants should learn English for their own good. Given how diverse our society is there are several places where you can get by not speaking English but there is no doubt that lack of English will hold back advancement in our society. As far as blaming immigrants I am sure there are probably a very small percentage of immigrants who choose not to learn English but the vast majority of immigrants do want to learn. Learning a language though as an adult while also trying to work, and raise a family isn't an easy thing. I highly doubt that many people here have learned a new language as an adult to the point of being able to converse in it. At the same time too consider that many Americans and other English speaking tourists and ex pats frequently don't bother to learn the language of countries they visit or work in. I know people who have lived in Hong Kong for years who never learn Cantonese or Mandarin, and people who have lived and worked in Indonesia for years without learning Bahasa.
Yeah the Germans were particularly notorious for sticking to their native language rather than learning English. They published hundreds of newspapers in German and even set up their own German-language schools. This went on until Word War I, when people began looking on them as traitors and they were pressured into speaking English.
So it was a problem in some way, and it ended up being resolved by...learning English. Thus, the argument that the forefathers did it and it was not a problem is...invalid.
The Germans were notably successful immigrants at the time they were shamed into switching to English. They were known as excellent farmers, established entire towns such as New Braunfels, and obviously had the resources as a community to publish their own newspapers and run their own schools. Thus, you don't know what your talking about. That said, I think it better for immigrants and their adopted countries when they learn the native language. The fewer barriers between people the better. However, this generation of immigrants is no different from any other wave that has come to the U.S. The first generation adults typically picks up rudimentary English. Their young children and children born in the country become fluent. The real problem has always been xenophobia, not lack of language skills.
Immigrants should learn English. But, telling them in their faces that this is America, speak English, IMM, has nothing to do withing expressing concerns about their well-being in most of instances. Don't you think saying this out loud to someone is very rude to say the least, and usually the speaker has no bussiness of telling it. The expression of it, in many cases, IMO, is an outburst of hatred, arrogance, or both. The citizenship English test is all that is required. If you don't like it, that's your problem.
I am very familiar with the history of German immigration to the USA in general and with New Braunfels in particular, so I know exactly what I am talking about.
This. Also there are many immigrants who can speak English but choose not to do so around their family, friends, local community and stores and restaurants of their native culture. That doesn't mean they don't want to succeed in this culture just that it is more comfortable to speak in your native language at times.
Cool. I'm going to tell my wife that when we speak Portuguese I'm strengthening my gray matter. She'll probably retort that we need to practice her English more, as she has gray matter of her own to think about, and is in the U.S.A. and doesn't want to be the target of the bumper-sticker people from the first post....
You're annoying. Get it. The reason why German immigrants were successful is not because they spoke a different language. They were successful because they worked hard and were on average rather well-educated, relatively speaking. Therefore, the argument "the forefathers didn't speak English, but were successful anyway" is totally flawed. First of all, they did speak English - but chose to speak German among themselves. That is very different from not learning the language at all. Strike one. Secondly, back then, English was not as established as the "official" language as it is now (yeah, whether it is called "official" or not, it is the de facto national language of the USA - now). Therefore, you and your buddy (or second account) Major are comparing apples and oranges. Strike two. Thirdly, I know that there is a study by Salmons that claims that German immigrants didn't learn English. Well, the fact that at least 15 % of all Americans are German-Americans at least to some extent, but all of them speak English refutes that study. He is claiming that they didn't learn English for several generations. I believe that this study is ideologically driven (and widely quoted on the well-known leftist websites) and flawed methodologically. Basically, the study is a lie. Strike three. I agree with you. As this thread shows, "BetterThanI" provided an example of arrogance by a native speaker towards a non-native speaker - when the native speaker had no business being arrogant, as he misread what was said.
No one made this argument. Straw man. Strike one. Everyone know Rocketman95 is my other account. Strike dos. Embarrassing logic and attack on inconvenient data. Strike drei.
Has anyone seen BetterThanI? Has he shamefully and quietly retreated from this thread or is he man enough to come back and just say that he misread what I wrote?
