I think that’s true.
I see no downside to teaching Spanish at all levels in school. English is the most important language in the world and arguably Spanish is the second most important.
Why on earth would anyone be against being bilingual?
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Yes. The next American generation should grow up bilingual. It’s easiest when you’re a child. Speaking as an adult trying to learn Spanish, it’s extremely hard.
It’s time to recognize what we already are.
At least bilingual.
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They should offer other languages as electives.
But the requirement should be proficiency in both English and Spanish.
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Is my math wrong?
Allan
No, your source is
So what your source?
Allan
Speaking Spanish.
Wrong. Spanish speakers at home is the gold standard.
Allan
I do.
Actually Chinese is the second most important.
And Chinese as a written language remains important in Japan, Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere.
Spoken Chinese at home is an enormously important language in all those countries plus Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore Indonesia and Macau.
“Help my kid is not able to learn English the way the Cubans and Italians and Poles and Russians and Germans did,” is a gimme welfare mentality. It is limited only to a subset of the Spanish-speaking subset of speaking immigrants to the US and was completely absent even there as little as a generation ago.
The US is not the only country that occasionally produces a spoiled brat generation.
Spanish is spoken in more countries than Chinese. It is the predominant language in North and South America.
Although there are more Chinese speakers it is a regional language.
And we are decoupling anyway.
binary language could be important as well…
Computer?
Worldwide Chinese speakers outnumber Spanish:
That’s it, U S kids should learn Mandarin as their second language.
It’s actually not that difficult except for learning the characters, and there are simplified characters.
There’s one verb form, it’s pretty gender neutral— masculine or feminine nouns, or adjectives, separate ways of talking to members of one sex or the other don’t exist.
Wo xue pu tong hua (I’m learning Mandarin).
I honestly don’t get the idea that those whose native language is Spanish have a harder time learning English. It seems snide and condescending, really.
Look at where it is primarily spoken. The international business world and Asia. And even in the international business world it’s still behind English.
North America is dominated by English and Spanish. French would be a distant third thanks to Quebec.
Mandarin should be an elective language, not an official language. In US primary school it should be English as primary and Spanish as secondary for non-home Spanish speaking students.
English is a difficult and complicated language.
It’s hard for anyone to learn.
That’s just it.
More non European immigrants have come since the 1960s.
Is it assumed Haitian immigrants don’t speak English and maybe those French or Creole speaking kids should have teachers who speak their language? There’s no push I’m aware of for teachers in the northeast or Miami to learn French or Creole.
Chinese?
Vietnamese?
Russian?
Most likely, no. Yet it’s assumed by many as well as implied in this thread that native Spanish speakers should get additional help, have Spanish speaking teachers.
Why is that? Most Latin Americans I’ve known, whether Cuban refugees, from indigenous majority nations like Guatemala or Ecuador, or Dominican—a variety of different peoples—learned English and didn’t ask for assistance in their native language.
It seems bilingualism, in education in particular, is one of those causes white liberals in particular want, yet the populations that will be affected don’t.
