From: tmh@keks.first.gmd.de (Thomas Hoberg)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Date: 19 Dec 92 20:14:51 GMT
	<id.M2XV.VTA@ferranti.com> <1992Dec18.043033.14254@midway.uchicago.edu>
Followup-To: comp.unix.bsd
Organization: GMD-FIRST, Berlin
In-reply-to: goer@kimbark.uchicago.edu's message of 18 Dec 92 04:30:33 GMT

Subject: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
   From: goer@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
[...]
   Incidentally, although it's true that US Engineers often have really
   terrible language skills, this is due more to geographical isolation
   than to organic stupidity.  There's just no need for multilingualism
   here in the states, the way there is in Europe, esp. in the low coun-
   tries and Scandinavia.

So there are no hispanics in Chicago? I've heard it said and seen it
written, that it's downright impossible to get a haircut in downtown
Miami, if you don't speak Spanish (and easy to get your throat cut in any
language :-) Chicago at the turn of the century must have been far
worse than Europe; there were all kinds of nationalities there, far to
many that everybody could learn each other's language. So they chose a
"lingua franca" only that it was English rather then French (or
Polish, as your name seems to suggest). I've heard that there was a
vote in Congress at one point in the past of the US of A, where
English won over German as the national language by a single vote !?!
I had more than eight years of Latin in School (first foreign
language in fift grade), then English in seventh grade, French in
eighth and Spanish in tenth grade. Did some Chinese at the university
for kicks and got along quite well in Rome last week, were people
threw Italian at me (I threw back a mixture of Spanish and Italian words
that I was picking up).

You say that US engineers have terrible language skills. This is often
said about engineers in general and not limited to the US (many of
us are said not to be able to form a single grammatically correct
sentence). What you probably meant was that US engineers didn't speak
foreign languages. I believe THAT phenomenon isn't limited to US
ENGINEERS :-) US citizens don't speak foreign languages, but so don't
people from the UK. While I put some blame on the US educational
system (very bad the foreign language section) part of it is an odd
mixture of ignorance and arrogance. But mostly it is: Which language
should you learn? Most everybody speaks English, so why bother?

It is said that most people in the world speak Chinese. Unfortunately
there is no Chinese but more than 600 dialects with often enough
people from one village unable to understand a single sentence from
people of the next village. Most educated Chinese speak the Bejing
Dialect as a foreign language (an easy LANGUAGE to SPEAK,
unfortunately it can't be written or read--you have to deal with the
symbolic writing used by ALL Chinese and the Japanese).

Perhaps you should learn Arabic (wide audience but some tough
pronounciation) but in any case Spanish should be useful and easy to
learn and apply in the US.

Does this post contain a message or some deeper meaning? Not that I
noticed, sorry for wasting your time...
---
Thomas M. Hoberg   | Internet: tmh@first.gmd.de
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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd