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Did Obama get it right or not?
Posted by augusta under Cactus Languages Abroad, English, In the Press, Learning a language
It’s not only Obama’s comment about learning languages that has been interesting over the past week here in New York - “we should have every child speaking more than one language” - but also the responses from a range of groups who agree and disagree with him to varying extents.
He’s come under quite a lot of criticism for (possibly) implying that speaking only English is not enough, and encouraging us to learn a second language. He’s not saying that we need to learn another language to use in the USA, but that it is advantageous for everyone to speak more than one language. To have the ability to say a few words in French, Japanese or any one of the over 5,000 languages in existence is a wonderful thing, and isn’t that hard to do.
I feel that Obama has a point: the sentiment comes from a man who is acutely aware of his own inability to speak any language other than English which, for me, is a welcome indication that at least one presidential candidate can think beyond his own intellectual context.
Augusta is Director of Studies at Cactus New York
Tags:English, French, Japanese, learning languages, Obama
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Great Blog post. I am going to bookmark and read more often. I love the Blog template
I have only seen bits of this story, as I live in the UK, did Obama offer free or state courses to students or was he just saying people should learn Spanish too?
I think it would be good if Americans got a bit more of a world view by learning languages. English people should do the same. As it helps people compete for jobs and travel more.
Hi Russell, and thanks for the comments.
Many people have misconstrued Obama’s comments, to infer that Spanish was the only language he was promoting for study. What he really recommended was that everyone should learn another language, regardless of which one they choose, as it opens doors both professionally and in personal situations.
While I don’t know how exactly he was planning to increase the numbers of language learners, I think it’s more than likely that there would not be public funding for this, and given the response to his comments many in the US would be against his promoting another language as there is strong feeling here that ‘English is enough’.
Spanish is seen as the logical choice due to the large number of native Spanish speakers who now live and work in the USA, but here in New York we have a large number of students studying German, Arabic and French as well as other languages, so it seems that anything goes.
Thanks Augusta,
I’ve seen several of the states have been ‘declaring’ English as their official language I wonder if it was in response to that?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/washington/19immig.html
People should not close themselves down to languages but I understand when governments do not what to produce work in lots of languages. Welsh is Wales will now take lots of money away from real work as the companies have to write everything twice.