"J. Clarke" wrote in message
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"GeeDubb" wrote in message
m...

"J. Clarke" wrote in message
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"Stoutman" .@. wrote in message
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He and his child were not given a choice. In the states we've been
hearing a lot about bilingualism for many years. And I can't stand
it.
Why? Because bilingualism is semi-officially English/Spanish. It's
ubiquitous: ATMs, on-line banking, phone help lines, ad nauseum give
us the
choice of English or Spanish. NotGerman, Swedish, Russian, etc. Why
only
Spanish?

I am also intrigued by this. Why Spanish? I am also disgusted by the
English/Spanish choice at the ATM and grocery store U-Scan.

The Dora the Explorer show really ****es me off. When I was a kid (I'm
35) we were never exposed to a foreign language at that age. Maybe
very infrequently on Sesame Street. The Explorer show he watches
teaches Spanish every other phrase. Why is there such a big push to
force feed Spanish to American children?? So they can communicate with
Jose down the street who can't speak English?? Why shouldn't Jose
learn English instead of our kids Spanish? Now he is getting force fed
Spanish in preschool! Why not Yiddish? Oy Vey!

My biggest fear is that he might get words mixed up and start speaking
Spanglish!

Statistically 82 percent of Americans speak English at home, 10 percent
speak Spanish, and the next most common is Chinese (all dialects) with
less than 1 percent. That being the case, if one is going to encounter
a person who doesn't speak English in the US the most likely language to
encounter is Spanish. You'd rather they teach Hungarian, which is
spoken by only 0.045 percent of Americans?

I just don't understand your hostility to Spanish--if one speaks English
and Spanish one can make oneself understood anywhere in North and South
America except Brazil, where they speak Portuguese. Why is that a bad
thing?

As for a choice at the ATM, why does that anger you? For what it's
worth the local ATMs support something like 8 different languages, one
of which is Spanish.

If this was costing you something I would understand your ire, but it is
not and there just plain is not any downside that I can see.

good points right up to the last paragraph. In Arizona it does cost us
since everything government and school is printed in both spanish and
english (with the exception of street signs). My kids school has more
mandarin chineese kids than hispanic kids so why doesn't the school
supply mandarin documentation as well? Answer, the chineese take the
initiative to learn to speak english......

I was addressing my comments to Stoutman, who is distressed by "Dora the
Explorer", the day school his kid attends, and automatic teller machines,
not about documents printed by the government.

Apolgies, sometimes it's difficult to separate everything. What you pointed
out does not add cost.

Gary