This:
OK -- so this woman is obviously ignorant, and maybe not too bright: Fox News demographic, for sure.
On the other side of the equation, one of the games I play with myself when riding the bus is to figure out what languages I'm hearing. Russian and Spanish are easy; I can generally spot Hindi and Arabic, but the various African languages throw me, and I'm never quite sure whether it's Vietnamese, Korean, or some variety of Chinese on the East Asian front.
But that's what makes it fun.
The woman then launches into a tirade, linking bilingualism to the Nazis and the Russians.
“You want the Russians over here telling you what to do? You want the Nazis telling you what to do?” she excitedly asks, as Baez tells her, “That’s what you’re doing to my mom. You’re telling her what to do. She speaks English. She’s not perfect, but she speaks English.”
“We want English in the United States,” the woman replies. “We have freedom of speech, you’re the proof of it. We want that freedom.”
Following Baez once again telling her she can’t tell his mother what to do, the woman replies, “Yes. We want English. We don’t want the Nazis back. We don’t want fascists back. We don’t want Castro back.”
OK -- so this woman is obviously ignorant, and maybe not too bright: Fox News demographic, for sure.
On the other side of the equation, one of the games I play with myself when riding the bus is to figure out what languages I'm hearing. Russian and Spanish are easy; I can generally spot Hindi and Arabic, but the various African languages throw me, and I'm never quite sure whether it's Vietnamese, Korean, or some variety of Chinese on the East Asian front.
But that's what makes it fun.
2 comments:
I would take a class in identifying languages. I don't mean learning to understand them all, just something as simple as being able to say with confidence that's Chinese, that's Korean, that's Russian, that's Serbo-Croat, etc. Sort of like music appreciation, only with languages.
My major poblem, especially with Asian languages, is the I'm not clear enough on the sound values, which are very close, for example, in Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese. I tend to assume I'm hearing Vietnamese, because the major Vietnamese community in Chicago is on the North Side. I can sometimes identify others by context -- if it's an older woman wearing a sari, I figure she's speaking Hindi.
But it gets chancy.
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