Please share the reasons why "it is very important to teach at least two languages". I find that pretty funny considering we seem to have done just fin as a country with the vast majority speaking only English. The only real advantage I can see is convenience for those that don't want to learn English.
I am not sure it is accurate to say most the people flooding across the border are Hispanics. Most of them appear to be Central American and Mexican Indians with no spanish blood. These people are in fact heavily discriminated against (second class citizens) in their homelands. The white Hispanics who actually run mexico and central america are all to happy to have their underclass move here.
Fair is fair I suppose. So once the native Russian speakers comes somewhere close to equaling the number of native Spanish speakers we should take care of that. "Spanish is the second most-common language in the United States after English. There are more Spanish speakers in the U.S. than there are speakers of Chinese, French, Italian, Hawaiian, and the Native American languages combined. According to the 2009 American Community Survey conducted by the United States Census Bureau, Spanish is the primary language spoken at home by over 35.5 million people aged 5 or older.[1] There are 45 million Hispanics who speak Spanish as a first or second language [2] and there are 6 million Spanish students,[3] making it the world's second-largest Spanish-speaking community, only after Mexico and ahead of Spain, Colombia and Argentina.[4] Roughly half of all U.S. Spanish speakers also speak English "very well", based on the self-assessment Census question respondents.[5]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_language_in_the_United_States
"The Neural Advantage of Speaking 2 Languages Bilingual people process certain words faster than others By Melinda Wenner | January 21, 2010 | 32 The ability to speak a second language isnât the only thing that distinguishes bilingual people from their monolingual counterpartsâtheir brains work differently, too. Research has shown, for instance, that children who know two languages more easily solve problems that involve misleading cues. A new study published in Psychological Science reveals that knowledge of a second languageâeven one learned in adolescenceâaffects how people read in their native tongue. The findings suggest that after learning a second language, people never look at words the same way again. Eva Van Assche, a bilingual psychologist at the Univer_sity of Ghent in Belgium, and her colleagues recruited 45 native Dutch-speaking students from their university who had learned English at age 14 or 15. The researchers asked the participants to read a collection of Dutch sentences, some of which included cognatesâwords that look similar and have equivalent meanings in both lan_guages (such as âsport,â which means the same thing in both Dutch and English). They also read other sen_tences containing only noncognate words in Dutch. Van Assche and her colleagues recorded the participantsâ eye move_ments as they read. They found that the subjects spent, on average, eight fewer milliseconds gazing at cognate words than control words, which suggests that their brains processed the dual-language words more quickly than words found only in their native language...." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bilingual-brains
I wonder how things will be by 2050. Makes you wonder what the prison population will be like in the U.S. by 2050.
First, I was being sarcastic...guess that didn't come through. My point is who cares if signs are in English and another language? It takes no time to decipher whether we are adequately literate in the language or not, or rather, can't read Spanish but can read English and they're BOTH on a sign, ignore the Spanish and read the English...what does it matter if there are additional languages on there? Second, I'm not sure I understand your comment...can you please restate it?
As I said, this apparently doesn't equate to standard of living or wealth, at least in relation to this country. We seem to have done better than most multi-lingual countries.
Totally dude. Hate that shit when I have to press 1 for english and 2 for spanish. I came to this country when I was in the 4th grade, spoke no English whatsoever. I learned it just like everyone else that did before me, and my parents did the same. Why the fuck should we accommodate them, why don't they try to assimilate to our culture? The neighborhood I used to live in the 1990s is now Mexico. 99% of the people there are Mexicans. It was a thriving community back in the day. Now it is a shit hole. I even wrote a paper on this neighborhood and how the people there moved outward as they learned English, put their children through college and found better working opportunities as a result of it.