… But, after 7 months in the service industry…
Yo, immigrants! Learn to speak fucking English!
:mad: :mad: :mad:
Did you previously hold the opinion that it was a bad idea for immigrants to learn English?
BTW, if the immigrants can’t read English to begin with, a larger font size ain’t gonna help.
Any reason you can’t learn their language?
If they’re in a customer-facing environment in a predominantly English-speaking country, then I totally agree. But not everyone is good at languages, and two guys working in the kitchen in a Chinese takeaway aren’t likely to chat to each other in anything other than their native tongue.
I have to say it amused me that an Aussie girl I worked with once had a massive go about a receptionist whose English was really bad. Not a big deal normally, except we were in Hong Kong at the time, and this girl couldn’t speak a word of Cantonese.
Technically, “Learn to fucking speak English!” is better. “Fucking” as an intensifier is an odd beast, grammatically speaking. You could also say “Fucking learn to speak English.” In fact, if you want to keep the intensifier before “English,” it should be a secondary intensifier: “Fucking learn to speak fucking English.” (“Fucking learn to fucking speak English” is also acceptable.)
How about because FlyingRamenMonster isn’t in their fucking country?
English is the de facto official language here. If one is going to live here, one should
assimilate to our ways and language.
Exactly. Not to mention the fact that we don’t know how many different languages FlyingRamenMonster has been exposed to on the job. What if it is 10 different languages? People come here from all over, you know.
Well, technically, FlyingRamenMonster is in their country - that country being Australia. (They are immigrants after all.)
Yeah. And English is the de facto language in Perth, Western Australia, too…which is where FRM lives. 
You can imagine how incredibly blown my mind is by this response to my question. Why, I’d never heard it put that way before!
Why? Why shouldn’t we learn to speak more than one fucking language and be a country where more than one language is regularly spoken? What’s the tragedy?
Dr. Drake: That was brilliant. I totally heard the voice of this man while reading your post.
Ooh, I like playing What If. What if there’s only one language? What if some of them are from Venus? What if by trying to learn a language other than English, we accidentally insult their mothers and start a war, or somehow stumble onto an ancient invocation of Cthulhu? This is fun, your turn.
Well, “assimilate to our ways” seems a tad bit excessive. Our country is what it is because we all came here as immigrants. If all immigrants immediately assimilated to the mainstream upon their arrival, our rich meltingpot of a country would cease to exist as we know it.
However, it is fucking annoying when you’re trying to order food and the counter person is incapable of communicating with you at any level beyond pointing at the pictures on the menu. I wouldn’t try to get a job that involves communicating with people in a foreign country if I couldn’t speak a word of their native tounge and I’d like to think that if I moved to a foreign country permanently I would make some effort to learn the language of the country I’m calling my new home. It always blows my mind when I see people who have lived here for a number of years that still can’t hold a very simple conversation in english.
I heard this guy.
Yeah, you have to say it sloooooooowwww.
The tragedy is the fact that it’s a lot easier to communicate when we all speak the same language. Why have 2 when you only need 1?
Are you serious?
There is no reason to be obtuse. It is entirely possible that someone could run into more than one language in everyday life. Personally, I deal with people who come from Spanish-speaking countries, Russia, Poland, and India on a regular, if not daily, basis, plus a lot of other languages less regularly. Should I have to learn all those languages so I can go about my daily business?
First off, didn’t realize FRM lived in Australia. So, scratch the whole “assimilation” portion of my last post.
Secondly, give me a break with this quote, Ensign Edison. Are you even trying to make a rational, logical argument? No one is saying it’s a bad thing to speak more than one language. It’s a great thing. However, that doesn’t mean that someone who moves to a foreign country shouldn’t bother learning the language predominantly spoken in that country. Not only does it show respect for your new home, it’s just common sense. Why should the burden be on those already living in the country and already speaking the national language to learn the language of every immigrant that moves to their country? That seems a tad excessive, not to mention increadibly egocentric on the immigrant’s part. Would they be so willing to learn the language of anyone who decided to immigrate to their country?
I don’t know about the immigrant situation in Australia but in America, we get people from all over the damn place. So are we expected to learn hundreds of different languages just so we can communicate with those immigrants, or should they just be required to learn the one predominate language spoken here? What makes more sense? What seems more fair?
Cool! This argument again. I bet we resolve it this time.