Monday, November 5, 2007

Learning English

Here's an interesting comment

"...... 400 years ago, when the Mayflower landed at Provincetown Harbor, they were greeted by Tisquantum (Squanto), who greeted them in English. He also spoke Spanish."


Then I guess we natives should learn Spanish to welcome the current wave of immigrants?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What mean "we natives" keemosabe (quien no sabe)? How is everyone's Osage these days?

You might try spanish to welcome them, but is anybody actually trying to do that? You know, moving to Kansas is no real trip to DisneyLand for them either. Isolation just makes it worse for everybody.

If they were from Germany........

Anonymous said...

We have all been immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, at one time. I like to think that when we Irish-, German-, French-, Canadian-Americans came to this country, the Native Americans were kind to us and let us learn the language slowly. Put yourself in the immigrants' shoes and imagine how scary it is to be in this country and not know the language. It's going to happen....and there are scam artists and no-goods in every culture.

Anonymous said...

Native Americans are the ones with brown skin, bows and arrows and horses.

Anonymous said...

Learning English. Don't have to learn it if everything is recorded and printed in your native language and on top of that everyone is encouraged to learn the newcomers language and even employers post job openings wanting or even requiring it, especially our wonderful new big business Creekstone who likes non english speaking employees but we were told when they were coming in how many jobs would be created for us already living here. All I saw was a bunch of people moving here to go to work for them, then signs went up in Spanish everywhere and my grocery store suddenly decided it needed a whole new Spanish food section. Wow, really helped out all of us already living here. Remember after Vietnam, all the Cambodians, Laotians, Vietnamese people who moved here, they learned English and rather quickly I might add, and I didn't see anybody rushing around putting up signs in their languages or special food sections or interpertors or doing anything in their language at the schools. If you move here, you need to learn to talk and read English as quickly as possible because that is our language no matter who you are or where you came from. Don't mind helping with you with that, but do mind having everything switched over to another language. I should not have to choose one language over another at the bank machine, over the phone, etc. If thats how it is going to be, well then let me choose from several different languages as it would only be fair. I suggest to all the other people of different languages that are being ignored to file a discrimination suit because nothing is in German, French, Irish, Cuban, Indian, Etc and their children are not being selected in our shools for special treatment. My point here is not to be mean, just to point out that our country never catered to any other group of immigrants and we shouldn't be catering to one select group. Of course when a certain group of people supplies so much work force to the highest earners in the upper bracket of the good ol USA which in turn allows them to keep even more of their money, I guess it makes sense doesn't it?