You know, almost the same thing happened to me once. Oddly enough though I always just took it as evidence that some drivers are arseholes.
People drive all over Europe not knowing the language of the country they’re driving in. I’ve still never heard of an accident happening because of it.
JRD:
Very good points. There is often some very ugly rhetoric by the supporters of “English only”. It’s one thing to say the gov’t needn’t bend over backwards to accomodate non-English speakers. It’s another thing altogether to rant about store clerks who don’t speak English very well.
But an important point about the 227 issue is that many supporters argue that the old system of bilinual education was hurting immigrant children by needlessly delaying they’re immersion in English. You might argue with that idea, but it is well established that learning to speak a foreign language (English in this case) fluently is much easier when done before the child reaches puberty. Delay it beyond that point, and fluency degrades rapidly.
Taking wmulax93’s question a step farther, I think it’s important that the country have a single, official language. E.g., the bi-lingual situation in Canada is an endless source of problems. For that reason, I think multi-lingual ballots, etc. are steps in the wrong direction. We should encourage immigrants to learn English; we certainly shouldn’t encourage them not to do so.
I’ve never had anything but contempt for such people; I live in a foreign country and try to speak the language that everyone else here does. I see no reason why a foreigner moving to the United States should do any differently. If they feel their national identity so strongly that they feel that speaking a different language is offensive then they are obviously not the kind of person who should be immigrating to the United States.
BTW, we (Americans) should keep in mind that expat yanks are famous for sheltering themselves in English speaking enclaves and not learning the language of the country they live in. Granted, an expat isn’t the same as an immigrant, since the expat’s posting is often temporary, but it’s still good to keep that thought in mind the next time you get irritated at someone not speaking English in the US.
I recall being in Norway awhile back and an expat fellow who had been there long enough to marry a Norwegian girl and to have kids was complaining that he had troube conversing with his son, who didn’t speak English very well. When I susggested that he might consider learning some Norwegian, I got a blank stare.
Speaking only for myself, I never get irritated when someone doesn’t speak English in the US. For all I know, they got off the plane yesterday and are here on vacation. I only get annoyed when people 1)get angry that I don’t speak their language (happens to me all the time-someone stops me on the street and asks me something in Spanish and gets annoyed when I don’t understand) or 2) believe that government agencies and/or private businesses should instantly be able to accomodate their lack of English in the way that the person prefers.
As someone else said, I too have nothing but contempt for such people. If there are some real, concrete reasons why you should not learn the language of the country you’re in, please share them with me. I’ve yet to locate a good one.
I spent two weeks vacationing in various parts of Italy and managed to pull together a basic vocabulary of vital questions and answers in Italian, both from my phrase book and from general experience. Within two weeks, I wasn’t consulting the book for much of it. I’m sure I butchered pronunciation, but I tried. With a minimum of effort I could make my needs understood. It really isn’t that difficult. My experience is most natives of a country care more for the fact that you’re working things out than the fact that you occassionally look like a putz doing so.
Let’s play a game.
Suppose that, for whatever reason, you decided to move to say, Mainland China. Not just to visit, not for a temporary job assignment, but in order to live out the rest of your days and possibly raise a family. Let’s also assume that you don’t know a lick of the Chinese language. Do you think it realistic to expect the local government, schools and merchants to all accomodate your lack of language skills? As others have said, the secret to success is assimilation, and the first step is learning the language.
Priam:
Well, I think a lot of people have “language anxiety”. Just like math anxiety, only about languages. They get intimidated, thinking it’s too hard. But, as I’m sure you found out, it is very difficult to experience what a country has to offer if you don’t at least try to speak the language.
Doreen:
I think your experience w/ Spanish speakers is unusual. I live in CA where a lot of people speak only Spanish and this has never happened to me. It’s hard to understand them getting upset at you becuase you don’t speak Spanish. Perhaps they are just frustrated at not being able to communicate and it just comes off that way.
The worst part of the whole process was learning grammar, but even thats not absolutely vital. If you have the vocabulary and keep things simple, most of the time what you say remains understandable.
If someone walked into a US bakery and said “bread for me please give”, you’d think it somewhat odd but you’d know what they wanted roughly. Types of bread could easily be sorted out from there, as well as quantity. I think the key a lot of people forget is language comes down to communicating ideas. You can communicate smoothly or not, complex ideas or simple, but if you’re communicating at all then you are using the language effectively. Pretty is something you pick up as you go along.
Then your professor is either flat out a liar, or he’s stupid, possibly even just lazy. You see, San Francisco’s main language is English. San Francisco’s Chinatown’s main language is English. San Francisco’s Japantown’s main language is English. Business is conducted constantly there in English. Other communities “near San Francisco” and their main language follow:
[ul]Daly City - English
San Jose - English
etc…etc…[/ul]
I suggest the next time your professor utters such an inane comment, you take the initiative and prove yourself a proud SDMB Doper by saying to him: “Cite?”
John Mace, I actually saw this as a 1st amendment issue, and here is why: Under the first amendment, the government can make no law prohibiting free speech. Under Prop 227 (under my admittedly misinformed idea of it) a federally funded entity (a public school) is forcing people to speak in a different manner than is normal to them. This may be a stretch, but I see it as a violation in the same manner that a judge can no longer post the Ten Commandments in the courtroom.
Tristan and december, I’ll never convince either of you that you may be wrong, but here goes anyways. While it may seem silly that immigrants don’t learn English, they have no responsibility to do so. Some of these people will rarely leave their (language of choice)-speaking communities, and have little use for English. Others feel it is insulting to their culture and heritage to be forced to learn English. There are many examples of Americans going to oreign countries and getting angry when people don’t speak English. No I don’t have a cite, just stories I’ve heard. **
[/QUOTE]
Drat! Please remove from my posting above everything from “John Mace” to the end of it. I forgot to erase the rest of the stuff in my quote & response.
This discussion is always so frustrating on several levels, mostly because of the way history gets changed to support personal feelings.
Among the impressions that one would get by reading this thread:
– Earlier immigrants all assimilated as quickly as possible with no help while today’s immigrants don’t do the same thing.
In reality, earlier immigrants were often accused of the same stubborn refusal to assimilate or learn the language. My German ancestors arrived around 1850, but continued to speak German in the home until around 1900. At the same time, the bulk of the immigrant population did not just go out and learn the language on their own. Substantial investment was made by most of the large cities to provide both English instruction for the immigrants and their children and to provide public documents in the languages of the larger immigrant populations. (When the House passed an English Only bill in the 1990s, (purportedly to same the government printing costs) it turned out that in the prior five years, the U.S. had printed 265 documents in foreign languages–out of more than 400,000 documents.) *
– Today’s immigrants don’t want to be bothered learning the language (the way my ancestors did) and they fight attempts to help them, such as Prop 227.
In reality, over 90% of all immigrants, today, become functional in English within a few years of their arrival–and one of the largest supporting groups of Prop 227 was the Hispanic community who felt that the bi-lingual program as it existed was holding back their children from learning English well enough to succeed. (And the same claim that the “new” immigrants are not learning English the way the “old” immigrants did was also made in 1911–although no evidence was produced to support it, then, either.) Claims that “they no longer have to speak English to be naturalized” also have the counterpoint that the rule requiring English for naturalization was only imposed in 1906.
There are, indeed, groups who have spoken out in favor of becoming a(n officially) multi-lingual nation. However, they are a fairly small minority of people, and treating their calls as though they were representative of the majority of immigrants is not valid.
The fact is that we have a nation in which English is the de facto language of commerce and law. Calls for either English as “the” official language or calls to recognize other languages officially are both counterproductive.
Seems like store clerks with poor English skills are the brunt of a lot of people’s anger. I just want to shake these people sometimes and say “If your white-bread teenage son wasn’t such a spoiled lazy-assed punk, he’d be working in that store to make some extra money. Too often it’s the recent immigrants who are the only ones willing to work their butts off in low paying jobs. So quit your freakin’ whining and pass that salsa verde, por favor.”
As for bilingual education, I really think you need a “one size doesn’t fit all” strategy. Recent immigrant children, say 10 or under, can probably be mainstreamed very quickly, as per 227. Immigrant children who are, say 15 or 16 might need a different approach. They might need more help, but I’d also expect them to be able work harder than their 10 yr old siblings. And I think very few, if any, immigrants don’t want their kids to learn English.
What gets me is people who use store clerks as examples of immigrants who “don’t want to learn English”, when in fact these are probably the immigrants who are trying the hardest to learn English. People forget sometimes how difficult it can be to learn a foreign language - and of course it’s more difficult for some than for others.
It seems self-evident to me that different people learn things in different ways, and that there should be room to maneuver on these issues. I find it astounding that things like bilingual education are put to a public vote - WTF does the average voter know about how children learn languages?
Thanks for the information, tom. The quotes and links clarify questions I had before.
ruadh: The process of teaching English to non-English speakers is not what was put to a vote.
Because of where I live, I’ve often gotten people who only speak Spanish where I’m working. Often, they’re from Mexico–I can see their plates, after all, but I’m used to people having Spanish as a home language. Now, I don’t know much Spanish besides some numbers, the other essentials (please, thank you, restroom, etc.), and various words and phrases I’ve picked up over the years. In my experience, the customers that only speak Spanish are polite and try to help me with overcoming the language barrier. 20 bucks on 2 is easy enough, but there was a time when a guy came in wanting propane. I don’t know the Spanish for propane, he didn’t know the English, but as soon as he said American gas (the propane supplier is Amerigas) I knew what he was talking about.
On the other hand, I had a couple from Jersey (I swear, all the weirdos I get come from New Jersey) come in, immediately starting in Spanish, and were aghast when I cut them off in English. I wasn’t too rude about it, but I was annoyed. So, I guess the assholes can be on either side of the language issue.
gas propano = propane gas 
Now you tell me.