April 16th, 2012
I really did try to tell the Republicans. I told them I know exactly how they can relate to Latino immigrants and their millions of friends and family. (They’re my friends and family too.)
But the Republicans wouldn’t listen. They’re too busy saying stupid stuff about all the ills of immigration, even though there are the exact same problems among a FAR GREATER number of citizens, costing us FAR MORE in every way.
Yes, we need to regulate our borders. Even the immigrants say that. I have been interviewing them around the country for years, and they all believe the border should be regulated in any country. But the immigrants are here, and most of them are eager to work, eager to buy, eager to raise a family or help support theirs.
I have so many reasons to enjoy the immigrants. If you’d like to know those reasons, you can read them in my book, Feeling Better Instead of Bitter about the Latino Immigrants (digital book on Amazon). If you want to know some of the things the Republicans would’ve heard if they had listened to me, you can read it in my upcoming book, I Tried to Tell the Republicans. I could steer them into the highest offices in the land, but don’t think I’m a fan of Republicans, because I’m not. It’s just that the Democrats give the false impression of caring and I thought the Republicans might want to do the same, although I’d be happy coaching any genuine human being through the correct process of building honest and honorable rapport with the Latino immigrants.
Tags: immigration
Posted in Controversies, Culture, borders | Comments Off
April 9th, 2012
An awful lot of one-language Americans are afraid their language is under threat, on the endangered species list, ready to be removed, fading from fashion.
Well, it ain’t so. There’s nothing to worry about. Part of the problem is that a lot of monolingual people in this country have become aware of the rise in prominence of other languages. Press 1 for English or Spanish or Chinese or French, depending on where you live in the U.S. and what service or product is involved.
Dumb businesses and organizations will complain about that and smart ones will do what they can to increase a bond of mutual interest. It doesn’t mean that everyone who uses other languages on the phone or on signage HAS to have it. In business, smart people know that options are profitable and that no patriotism is lost by using options like language. I myself prefer some things in Spanish. There are a lot of conversations I have never had in English and never will, and it’s because of the whole context. I just don’t talk the details with people who only speak English, because they haven’t had the experience that I would be talking about.
On the phone, I usually select English if given a choice. With signs, I don’t care about the choices. I love to see multilingual signage. English on Latino menus–no thanks. Can’t make sense of them.
A man going through a local coffee shop asked why everything was written in Mexican. He thought everything written in another language was Mexican. There is no one Mexican language. Mexico has hundreds of languages. And the coffee shop doesn’t have any “Mexican” written on its menu or products. The problem is that the customer only knows one language and he thinks it’s on the endangered species list. Drink your coffee with peace of mind, sir. Nobody in this country has any interest in seeing the English language disappear. More people than ever are speaking it in this country and beyond.
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April 5th, 2012
Canadians and Mexicans can’t help noticing that most people in the U.S. don’t know very much about Canada or Mexico. Our neighbors do know a lot about the United States. While I was touring New England recently, I met Canadians who had dipped below their border for a week or two of vacation. They obviously know all kinds of things about the United States that our citizens don’t learn about them. The average Canadian and the average Mexican can name far more of our states than we can name of theirs. My guess is that most of our citizens can’t name a single state of Mexico. And yet Mexico has 31 states and a federal district, Mexico, D.F. The federal district contains Mexico City, which has somewhere between 17 and 22 million people, depending on how you calculate. (It’s partly an issue of how a huge, sprawling, growing population spreads across city, county, state lines. It’s easy to see this if you visit the outlying areas.)
Anyway, everybody knows about Mexico City because it’s so BIG. But I really only mean they are aware that it’s big, really big. And anybody can tell you that the 100+ million inhabitants of Mexico eat burritos, except that they really don’t. People here just think that Taco Bell and the local “Mexican” restaurant are Mexican. Most Mexicans do not eat Mexican burritos. In fact, Mexican burritos don’t usually look or taste like the ones you buy in the U.S., unless you’re eating along the U.S.-Mexico border. So…maybe it’s safe to say that United Statesians don’t actually know a whole lot about our neighbor to the south.
Same about Canada. Canadians can name lots of prominent people of the United States, but can you name any prominent Canadians?
If you don’t know much about your neighbor, you’re not alone. A woman from the Dominican Republic recently proved that she doesn’t know much about her country’s nextdoor neighbor, Haiti. Did you know that Haiti and the Dominican Republic share an island? They do, and yet this Dominican woman of about 25 years did not know what language Haitians speak. I had just spoken with a typical Haitian who speaks English, Creole, and French. I asked the Dominican if she spoke the Haitian language, and she said no. She explained that people in Haiti speak…Portuguese.
It doesn’t seem possible that someone living right next to Haiti, sharing the same island, could think that.
Just imagine what you might not know about your neighbor to the north and your neighbor to the south. There’s a whole world out there to know!
Tags: Geography
Posted in borders | Comments Off
April 4th, 2012
Parents have asked me from time to time for suggestions on which guitar or other instrument they should buy for children who want to learn to play it. The parents don’t usually like my answer, which is always the same. I tell them to buy a good instrument. They want to buy what are called beginner guitars or beginner pianos, etc. A good piano can cost at least three times as much as a starter. A good guitar can cost several times what a starter guitar costs. Same with a trumpet.
If you want to save money, try NOT buying starter instruments. The value of getting a kid an instrument of decent quality is that it’s likely to be a lot easier to play, because the mechanics are better. That is, it’s made to play, not to fight with. A cheaply made guitar will usually hurt your fingers. The strings press too hard into fingertips because the instrument isn’t made right. A cheaply made piano or an inexpensive out-of-tune one–and most people’s piano are out of tune–will train a kid’s ear to inexact sound.
When I taught elementary school in buildings (later I taught on TV and now online), I used guitar and piano to teach lots of Spanish songs. A large number of students would start taking guitar or piano lessons or they would pull an instrument out of the closet and bring it back to life. The kids WANTED to be able to play an instrument. That’s why they need an instrument that is at least good. When people have a desire to learn to play, they need instruments that don’t make them work to overcome the instrument’s poor craftsmanship.
Buy good instruments if you want your kids (or you) to learn to play music. Buy starter instruments if you want to make it difficult for someone to enjoy learning.
Tags: Music
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April 4th, 2012
People keep wanting to know, What is the best way to learn another language?
Everyone already knows, without being told, that we all learn our first language just fine at home. When we go to school, we learn that some of the things we learn at home aren’t proper. So then we learn another way of talking and we mostly hang on to the first way, because it’s the way people actually communicate in most real-life contexts.
In the same way, school language courses teach a proper way of speaking modern languages that people in the multilingual world don’t actually speak. We break the rules the same way we do at home. We use languages the way they’re actually used outside school hours. Not realizing this is part of the reason so many foreign language teachers are (1) dismayed when students speak without following “the rules”, and (2) usually don’t speak very much real-world language in their area of certification.
How does a person become good at language? By using it and using it and using it. You use it by listening, by responding physically, by responding verbally, by responding nonverbally, by watching, by analyzing and by learning rules and facts about language. Language is for USING. Use it! There simply is no substitute.
Tags: Academia, Learning a Language, Speaking
Posted in Academia, Learning Language | Comments Off
December 7th, 2011
A couple from Mexico were sitting in a bus station. I said something to them in Spanish, using the word for car–coche. The woman told me that coche was a degraded, Anglocized word and that I should instead use carro. She said coche sounds like coach, but carro is its own word. I kept thinking that carro sounded like car.
People throughout Latin America have their opinions on Spanish words. Most people there don’t have strong opinions about words. Some do have a narrow enough view of the world as to think their way of speaking is THE way. Never let this make you feel inferior. Just enjoy the differences. It’s part of the language journey.
My wife and I have different opinions about what a cushion is and what a pillow is. As far as I’m concerned, a pillow can never never never be a cushion, and a cushion can never be a pillow. You might not believe this, but my wife sometimes calls cushions pillows. It doesn’t seem to bother her one little bit. She’s the kind of person who would probably use coche and carro interchangeably. Well, I am too, but I have my limits. A cushion cannot, or at least should not, ever ever ever be called a pillow.
Posted in Learning Language | Comments Off
November 16th, 2011
English is famous for its dangling prepositions, and Winston Churchill spoke for lots of English-speakers when he said something like, “The rule of the dangling preposition is a rule up with which I cannot put.”
Some people debate whether he said those exact words, but if he was like most other people, he made good use of a good line when he found it, and he probably said it in many variations. It really is a great comment on English grammar.
Unless they’re weirdos, people usually use one way of talking and another way of writing. The rules of written language are considered the official ones, but most of us don’t care so much about them when we are talking, and it is truly WEIRD when people insist on speaking according to the rules of proper writing.
Spanish uses a few dangling prepositions. For instance, to say that one group of people is always the group working for another, we might say, “Siempre trabajan para.” They’re always working for. (Emphasis on “for”.)
Siempre tratan de. They’re always trying to. (Emphasis on “trying” with no success.)
Siempre vienen de. They’re always coming from. (Emphasis on “from”, never going “to”.)
These normal examples of Spanish, but they are not used often, nothing anywhere close to the every-other-moment way we do in English. You can almost say the dangling preposition doesn’t occur in Spanish, but only almost. If you want to talk like a textbook, that’s your choice. If you want to sound like you actually know the spoken language, you’ll dangle an occasional preposition like a real pro.
Tags: Speaking
Posted in Learning Language | Comments Off
October 18th, 2011
You would think you wouldn’t be able to find many cellphones in countries where poverty afflicts the majority of people. I met three salespeople in a hotel 15 years ago who were on their way to South America to sell cellphone service. I asked who in the world would buy it. Since then I have found out that even very poor people throughout Latin America have found a NEED for a cellphone. I interviewed a poor, young woman from Honduras who said the phones are now everywhere in her little country. Everyone seems to be telling me the same thing about their poor little or poor big countries. People need cellphones like they need water and their next meal.
As a matter of fact, I am finding that impoverished people in almost every country are finding a way to get their hands on a cellphone so they can call, text, tell time, and play ringtones and music. All this is aside from surfing the web. Same in the USA. Poor people sacrifice almost anything to get a phone. Middle-class people stretch beyond their budgets to upgrade their phone plans. Gotta have the upgrade. Gotta have the upgrade.
It all shows how much people are alike in some ways, no matter what language we speak or what culture we come from. My cellphone still doesn’t do anything but tell time and make calls.
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October 1st, 2011
A Canadian-born American raised in Massachusetts and living in Indiana told me that the people of New England are gracious people. “You will like them,” she said. “We are not snobs.”
So! She knows about the way we Midwesterners grow up with the belief that New Englanders are snobs. I don’t know where I got it, but I grew up with that impression. And because I thought they were snobs, I saw their behavior as snobbish.
Now that I’ve finished my 10-day tour of the six states, I can say that I was treated with respect and good humor everywhere I went. No snobs in sight on this trip into the nooks and crannies of northeastern United States. The people wanted to participate in the culture and language lessons I create. My team and I can’t wait to return.
Tags: Culture
Posted in Culture | Comments Off
September 25th, 2011
My 10-day tour of New England to collect lesson content for some of the hundreds of PK-8 video lessons I make is all the more interesting because of the way people here speak English. I’m not the only one struggling to understand what Americans are saying when they speak English. A man from Maine says he can’t understand the people on Long Island. A woman from New York told me just last night that she can’t understand Long Islanders either. I’m asking a lot of New Englanders to please repeat themselves. It’s a lot like the trouble I had on my recent trip to South Carolina. It’s exactly the same problem I have adjusting to certain Cubans and Argentines. It’s all part of the language adventure.
Tags: Culture, Pronunciation
Posted in Culture, Learning Language | Comments Off
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