Is America losing Español?: Column (employment, nationalist, KKK, crime)
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I will not adapt to cater to illegal aliens or arrogant Hispanics who want to be pandered to in Spanish when they know how to speak English just so I can make a buck. There's principal involved here. Apparently you put money above principal.
Principle.
And I put a buck above your principles because I don't agree with your principle of whining about discrimination because I lack a skill.
And a few people may have said something along those lines, but not everyone is saying that. I wouldn't mandate English, mainly because I generally don't like the use of government force where none is needed.
But you can't deny being fluent in English is of great practical utility here. Again, my family could have decided to reject English and stay with Danish, and that would have been going against the grain -- just like we could have decided to eschew daylight and live a nocturnal existence, but being diurnal and focusing on using English helped produce better outcomes. We could have tried to "keep the Danish alive" but other than some potential cognitive benefits knowing Danish today would be of little to no consequence in my life.
So it just makes sense to concentrate on becoming extremely fluent in English and being awake during the day. It has benefited me tremendously as a third-gen, whereas not knowing Danish has had little measurable effect on my overall well-being or my ability to contribute positively to my reality.
That said, I don't think the language learning I've done has necessarily been wasted, from an intellectual standpoint. The ways I've stretched my neurons have made me what I am today, although any given area of knowledge and skill might have little measurable impact on my existence.
I absolutely agree. I don't want English to be required, and I do think that common sense dictates that learning it makes sense.
Where this issue tends to bother me is when people are OFFENDED that there's a menu or a sign in another language or that they need to press "1" for English or "2" for Spanish.
Is it REALLY that much of a chore?
Good grief.
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If I am competing for a job as, oh... a window washer and they require that people be able to walk in stilts, are they discriminating against me if I cannot walk in stilts? I mean, after all, not all window washing jobs require one to walk in stilts, but some of them do.
I can't disagree with that, overall. In the tech world as in many fields, people are required to learn new things, and some of those could be quite challenging (much as learning Spanish at age 45 could be).
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Originally Posted by RedZin
Not EVERY job requires people to speak Spanish...
I would say the vast majority of job roles in the US do not.
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Originally Posted by RedZin
...this sort of stuff bothers me because my kids would have grown up bilingual if my ex had taught them his language like I asked him to.
It's a tough language to pick up and learn after you're much over the age of 5 or 6.
Understood. But from a practical standpoint, unless they plan to spend a significant amount of time there (wherever that is), and some of the aforementioned possible cognitive benefits, is there really anything they're missing out on?
I guess I'm not really one to revere some other language or customs just because my ancestors lived that way. If you go back far enough, my ancestors communicated in grunts and bellows.
Who says that is what the US is? We do not have a national language.
And we DO have a really large percentage of native Spanish speakers.
Oh ya don't say? I forgot the Constitution and all the state papers needed to be translated from the original pig Latin, elcaration-Day fo dependence-INay . What sort of fools do you take us to be? BTW my Croat relatives spoke Italian and Croatian and insisted on speaking English.They didn't start babbling their language and then start whining for handouts. However Hispanics by all means should impoverish themselves if they so please. Its their national pride to be lumpen proles , not speaking the dominant language of the country. Maybe I should move to Brazil and speak Finnish and then whine about not being understood and then go on welfare.
French has long been spoken by some in northern New England (especially northern Maine but in VT and NH as well to some degree). Very few of those French speakers are unable to use English as well. I understand New Mexico has had something similar, on a larger scale probably, with Spanish. It's pretty obvious opportunities are limited for non-English speakers. I'd be against forcing people to not speak another language but I do think learning English needs to be mandatory in schools (as it always has been here), for obvious economic reasons as well as to have a common language so we don't become balkanized. Our country is divided enough as it is without adding the mess of people not even being able to effectively communicate with each other.
I'm giving you the side eye here because that is NOT what I said at all.
I think that Latinx people should learn some English. I never said they should not.
I just said that they should keep their Spanish skills strong and teach Spanish to their kids.
Big difference.
And, we should not give them a hard time if they're struggling with English when they move here.
They tend to know more than one language a LOT more often than white people (or black people, for that matter) born in the US do.
Ah, let's be fair. That is what you intimated.
Nobody said anything about giving anyone a hard time. Trying to cast those who disagree with you as bigots is a smear tactic.
As for them teaching their kids Spanish- their choice. But as it is with every immigrant group in any society or country, the home language will be lost by the third generation.
That is the order of things. It is not a conspiracy or some other ignoble measure. It is simply human nature.
One more time: All those Chinese and Swedish immigrants who came here in the 19th century? Their descendants today do not speak Chinese or Swedish.
So English speaking Americans should learn Spanish to accommodate the next slew and the next slew, etc.? How about we stop letting in so many Spanish speakers and start diversifying our immigrant numbers? They'll assimilate a lot faster rather than colonizing which is what is happening now.
No.
What JGM is saying is that as a business owner, he'll go the extra mile to get the Spanish speaking folks to spend money at his business. He'll adapt and cater to them so they return and send their friends over to his business.
There is NOTHING more American than the statement "business is business".
You don't have to do anything you don't want to do, but JGM will do what it takes to make a buck.
Nobody said anything about giving anyone a hard time. Trying to cast those who disagree with you as bigots is a smear tactic.
As for them teaching their kids Spanish- their choice. But as it is with every immigrant group in any society or country, the home language will be lost by the third generation.
That is the order of things. It is not a conspiracy or some other ignoble measure. It is simply human nature.
One more time: All those Chinese and Swedish immigrants who came here in the 19th century? Their descendants today do not speak Chinese or Swedish.
Why the hell would Hispanics be any different?
Because they're still immigrating here in larger numbers than Chinese or Swedish immigrants We've already covered this
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