Posted by
Dakota Voice on Friday, July 11, 2008 12:00:00 AM
GUEST COLUMN
BY ANTON KAISER
Why should we worry about immigrants learning to speak English, Barack Obama tells us. Instead, “You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual.”
What is it about learning to contort and twist the tongue, in harmony with guttural and melodic sounds, that supposedly would make American children better? By fact, shouldn’t we all learn to speak our own native language first, before attempting to acquire any elementary skills in one or more other languages?
“We should have every child speaking more than one language. It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beacoup, right?” says Obama.
Ignoring the terrible construct of Obama’s own extemporaneous English (a man so praised for his eloquence when reading from a teleprompter), we are now told that every American child should learn to speak Spanish. (Personally, I would prefer if they learned to speak proficient English first.) Like most liberals, Obama believes that to be multilingual is to be worldly, educated, sophisticated, inclusive, progressive, futuristic, admired, and respected in the world. Really?
Why learn Spanish? Why not the most common language in the world, Mandarin Chinese. Why not Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), the third most common language after English? Better yet, why learn another language at all?
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