We need lots of ideas like this!

The majority of adults are bilingual. Most commonly conversations will flow effortlessly between English and Spanish, depending on who is in the room.

People who are intolerant of hearing languages other than English as they go about their daily business simply don't live here. Shopping at our local Target I'll hear people speaking languages from all over the world.

It actually makes me a little uncomfortable when I visit places where everyone is white and speaking English.

Let's all learn Tamil.

I know lots of (R) and conservatives that speak Spanish. Many natively and they voted for Trump.

Now, if you learn Spanish don't learn standard Spanish but street Spanish from small bergs in Guatemala. (It's a bit issue in language teaching/social justice circles--do you reinforce the home/group social dialect of Spanish immigrant children or do you teach them the educated, normative standard, albeit that may vary by country?)

Just generally in California. One of my nursing instructors was taken aback last week because I was idly chatting with a patient in Spanish while we were waiting on something. Wasn't expecting the white guy to do that. I took seven years of it in school. Over time, a lot of Spanish-speakers married into my family. So it just became useful to have during big family gatherings when in-laws are visiting from Mexico and things.

Right now I'm learning Tagalog. My partner is Filipino, and he and his family use it all. the. time. amongst themselves. And I want to know what his mother is muttering at me under her breath! One day, I will catch her . . .

Also, there are a lot of Filipinos in medicine in Northern California, and they chat with each other in it all the time.

It will be an important skill to know when your co-workers are plotting.

But I recommend everyone take a second language. Not only for practical use, but it expands ideas and ways of thinking about life, culture, relational concepts, and how ideas are visualized. It's like adding a new color to your mental crayon box.

Highlights words from around the world showing different concepts, relationships, etc.

That book sounds like it's right up my alley. I have added it to my reading list. I appreciate it!

I should see if my library has an e-copy. Would like to reread it, been decades.

Last time I was in a hospital in Dallas, on my last day, a woman came into my room with breakfast, saying, "Good morning, sir!" I took one look and and answered, "Magandang Omagá!" She nearly dropped the tray. She asked how I knew her language, and then asked how I knew that was her language?

The hotel I stay at in Brussels has had a wonderful crew of Filipinos for almost twenty years. They are in service industries EVERYWHERE. They were with Lufthansa at the airport in Dallas when I returned here ten days ago. They were on the only cruise ship I was ever on from Vancouver to Alaska, from security to laundry to food. They are in every restaurant in Barcelona, and, probably, the rest of Spain. They are in seafood snack shops on Cape Cod, and, of course, they rule Hawai'i. It's a good thing they are peaceful in nature, because if they wanted to, they could rule the world tomorrow. It seems they are the nuts and bolts that make every service industry function everywhere.

If they weren't all so good at learning English, I'd say that Tagalog would be the third most important language to learn, after English and Spanish. Just a couple of words of Tagalog can get you a big smile almost anywhere, too. Just a "Salámat po!" instead of "thank you," or "Hangang samulí" instead of "see you next time." It works wonders!

I love using magandang omagá on people just for the pure reaction facial expression. I live in the Bay Area, so a lot of my social circle is Filipino to begin with (driving through Daly City and SSF when masses let out is an entire situation). But my partner's rather large family feels like 80% of them work in a healthcare related profession. He's a PharmD, his sister is in hospital administration, another sister's an MA. Then all the nieces and nephews are in school going for something or recently finished. Just had a nephew inform us yesterday he wants to do a stint in the military on his way to getting his PA.

I've been knee deep in nursing clinicals this fall, and all my nursing instructors/educators have been Filipino aunties who've been doing it for decades.

But lets get down to brass tacks here. The real reason I want to learn Tagalog is so that I can be serious competition in family karaoke that happens at every gathering.

I have no Filipino family, and in my little town outside Düsseldorf, Turkish, Kurdish, Albanian, Russian, Polish and Romanian are the "second" languages that will get you somewhere. Most people have heard of the Philippines, but ask them what Tagalog is, and they'll draw a blank.

We also have a ton of Germans. When I go to the grocery store, almost everyone is speaking a different language. We have a ton of tourists down here in my area. Most educated people in other countries speak at least 2 languages - they have to know English and other languages to be successful.

especially at the airport !

Totally normal stuff.

Porque en realidad no es tan difícil aprenderlo.
Tu misma te puedes auto enseñarte/ self-taught Español en tu casa o si no tú puedes buscar una escuela en donde tú puedas ir a estudiar Español.

Hay un libro muy fantástico que tú puedes comprar en el Internet se llama Easy Spanish
Reader, the publisher is McGraw-Hill Education.
También en el Internet tú puedes encontrar muchos otros libros que son buenisimos y te pueden ayudar a mejorar tus destreza y tu aprendizaje del idioma Español.
Buena suerte con tu Español mi amiga/o

I take a daily lesson.

streak going now.

Without ads, it's by subscription.

Less than $100/yr. Its worth it. I must have upgraded early on. I use it every day.

but I think anyone living in the U.S. who doesn't speak it should learn English.

If I decided to move to France, or any other country, the very FIRST thing I would do would be to learn their language.

Our cleaning person cleans our house on a weekly basis. She's lived in the U.S. for at least 40+ years. She has exactly ZERO knowledge of English. Who - What - When - Where? Not a clue. My wife is fluent in Spanish so it works, but my question is why, after all these years, hasn't she learned even a tidbit of English? Simple things, trying to help her out, such as "would you like for me to move the vacuum cleaner up the stairs for you?". Nada.

And she's a lovely person, I like her, but I just don't get it.

There are American ex-pat communities everywhere, and plenty of them never learn a word of the local language. There are Americans living here in Germany who can barely say "Danke schön." I remember the "American Women's Club of Barcelona," comprised of plenty of women who didn't speak a word of Spanish, let alone Catalan. Many Americans abroad tend to seek out other Americans or at least English-speaking communities, and never delve into the local culture at all. And these are not just uneducated domestic help. These are people in serious professions, many of who have at least undergraduate degrees. They don't even make the effort. "There's always somebody who speaks English there, why should I bother?" If that sounds arrogant, maybe it explains why some people who never even had a chance to go to high school take a similar attitude, like, maybe, "there's always somebody who speaks Spanish there, why should I bother?"

We aren't always the best role models. You and I appear to be in the minority in this respect. I live in Germany and have learned, to at least some degree--fluent down to rudimentary--, also not only German, but the language of every country with which Germany has a common border. Look at a map, that's a LOT of countries, and none of them are farther away than a day's drive. No one here even bats an eye when a Turk, an Arab, an Italian, a Russian, a Dutchman or a Pole shows up speaking in broken, but adequate German. But an American who speaks it fluently? Wow, now there's a rarity.

does not need the language skills for their job, then OK, but I would want to learn at least the basics if only out of curiousity. It's been a number of years since our first trip to France, but I found a person on Wyzant who taught French and actually came to my office. She was great, always left me with some lesson plans for the next visit, and as I recall only charged around $18.

Wow, the number of languages you speak is impressive, especially considering not all are from the same "family".

I'd be some kind of idiot (arrogant, too) if I didn't learn the languages of people with whom I have been working for decades. Granted, there are probably precious few Americans who work with people from other countries, and who would agree with me. I get the "why bother? Everybody knows English" line tossed at me all the time by "my fellow Amurkins." But I have been doing this job for 49 years now, and I know what is appreciated and what is not. They say so, and they mean it.

A teen in my family has a delightful friend who loves to mess with people in public. The two of them speak their little fake made up language complete with facial expressions and hand gestures. It's terribly high school, but the looks they get give me a laugh when they do it around me.

Aren't those clever nicknames good enough anymore?

Grands are good at all three. We elders, not so much. One granddaughter also has mastered ASL.

It was during the Franco dictatorship, so school by law was in Spanish, but at home (I lived with a local family), Catalan was the language spoken, so I learned both. The "Spanish (really Castilian, to be precise) " I learned was the "peninsular" version, which comes across to many Latin American ears as would British English to us. My accent back in Texas has earned me, on numerous occasions, "¡Que español tan elegante!" which, of course, it isn't. It's just the version that was used where I used to live. What you hear in parts of Latin America varies widely. In Argentina, they use the antiquated "vos" as a second person address, not used anywhere else any more that I know of. In Cuba, consonants are prohibited by law (or at least that's what it sounds like when they speak). "Oye, tu, yo soy Cubano" becomes "Oye, u, yo oy u'a'o."

But in Trump's America, you don't have to use Spanish to get the Trumpanzees riled up. During his first term, a visiting German manager for the German Mercedes manufacturing plant in Alabama was detained for being a foreigner. The idiot cops were quickly informed of their stupid mistake. It probably earned a quick word from the Mercedes plant to the town's mayor asking if the factory, employing hundreds if not thousands of Alabamans with the resulting tax base, was being encouraged to move to another state.

And after all the rulers start speaking Russian the MAGA’s will have no idea what the hell to do.
And then can’t whine we are talking down to them.

...to go back to our own country, and it's hard to go back to somewhere that you are standing in.

Spaniards conquistadores came to America in 1513 which was 107 years before the Pilgrims arrived in New England on November 11, 1620.
As an 11th-generation Floridian, ( that's according to our grandfather, one tour of duty in Korea and two tours of duty in Vietnam, and a family genealogist) everyone in my lineage has continuously instilled in the next generation the importance of speaking the enjoyable Spanish language.

Currently, in Florida, the Spanish language is spoken by the majority of native-born Floridians.

PS
Thankfully for us, RacistTraitorTrump can not
do shit about it. Because the Spanish language
is here to stay. Ay ay ay, que bueno😂
A proposito, yo me cago en tu madre
RacistaTraidorTrump
🖕🏻

All the Indigenous tribes here before the conquistadors arrived spoke Spanish?

Right.