There goes another couple million potential votes. I hope Obama remembers that this issue is VERY important for the undecided voters. The upcoming election is for Obama to loose. Issues such as this can make a difference.

No, too many Americans hate Mexicans and consider all illegal immigrants to be Mexican that often leads to this:

Spanish = Mexican = Illigrant Immigrant = Uneducated = Mexican

and it takes you right back to the beginning. It's a perpetual motion machine.

Do you think any of the xenophobes were going to vote for Barack Obama anyway?

I recently spent several weeks in Europe, and despite my best efforts I got a crash course in what it is like to be the ignorant foreigner who can't speak the local language. It's embarrassing and debilitating. My experience was vastly improved with even a little facility.

"English-only" is the latest denial tactic about America's real position in the world. If we so much as concede that we might want to speak fluently with non-Americans, well, that's practically treating them as equals. Which might mean that America isn't completely superior!

If you want to survive in the world for the next 50 years, think about picking up some Chinese to go along with Spanish.

and people in this country need to stop freaking out over learning another language.

His point (which is completely valid) is that we are now competing in a global marketplace. Knowing more than one language makes you more marketable.

I have a friend in Belgium, which is made up of three distinct regions- one area speaks Dutch, one French, and one small area to the East speaks German. If people with three different language backgrounds can work together to govern a nation for hundreds of years, I think we can handle it too.

If you live in Houston you must learn Laotian and Vietnamese. If you live in Dearborn you must learn Arabic. If you live in NYC you must learn Bengali, Korean, Hindi, Russian, Urdu, Spanish and Haitian French. Clearly the answer is to further hyphenate everyone everywhere so that the only thing that matters is the language you came here with. And for each new group make sure they are accommodated. Wolof (Senegal), Dan (Cote d'Ivoire), Afrikaan (RSA and Nambia). And then Ebonics, because why the hell not.

Whenever I hear English-firsters complaining about our eroding national fabric, I think of the Germans.

For nearly two centuries, there was an unreconstructed German-speaking community in the United States. Its subcultural integrity was finally punctured during the first world war, but a strong and explicitly Teutonophonic community thrived even afterward.

Wartime hysteria and the Nazi sympathies of the German American Bund movement notwithstanding, the era of German cultural separatism did absolutely no harm to the fabric of American identity. Given time and opportunity, the community assimilated linguistically with hardly a ripple.

Looking back, we would consider contemporary anxiety over the presence of unreconstructed German immigrants to be laughably absurd, and those who expressed it worthy of derision and disregard — a fact that modern-day language zealots might do well to remember.

The upcoming election is for Obama to loose.

I would love to see Obama loose. He's been way too uptight lately.

My class began taking Spanish in the second grade in what was then as homogeneous a white middle class suburb as can possibly exist, with many of us continuing to do so through high school. That course of study forced us to concentrate on using a different sentence and grammar structure in order to communicate effectively, since strict, word for word translation just doesn't work. (Tell your German hosts - in German - that you plan to "take a bath." Hopefully they will settle for only giving you an odd look, because you will have just informed them you plan to steal a bathtub.)

My Spanish skills are now rusty to the point of near uselessness. However, I still have a grasp of English grammar that I would never have gotten just by diagramming sentences.

Both Andrew and I toiled for years learning to speak/read/write putonghua. I've gone on to learn Cantonese, Thai, Lao, French, Spanish, Portuguese - and even a little bit of German. I am a language geek.

What have these efforts delivered to me?

Well - when I was younger, these skills enabled scores of liaisons with brilliant and interesting women around the world.

Understanding a foreign language helps enable genuine insight into the functioning of other nations/cultures. What is the real story behind the Chinese merchant class diaspora? What do Parisians really think of Americans? Why do so many Mexicans and Central Americans risk everything to seek their fortunes by illegally migrating into the United States? Is Thaksin Shinawatra *really* the asshole he seems to be? (Answer: Yes - Thaksin Shinawatra really is an asshole).

Familiarity and appreciation of foreign languages has also been invaluable to the many paths and forks my career has directed me onto over the past 20 years. Our American homes wouldn't be filled to the brim with cheap, plastic, injection-molded goods from China without the aid of cross-culturalists.

The rest of the world is filled with folks who embrace foreign language through multi-culturalism. Within our own country, however - not so much.

I am reminded of a friend of mine who performed poorly in his two years of mandatory high school French. "I could never learn a foreign language," sayeth he. After spending just a month in my wife's home country with us, he left speaking the local tongue almost as well as I do!

We're wired to learn foreign languages. Obama is right - it is harder at 46 than it is as a child, but it isn't impossible. Billions of people have done it over the past 5000 years. You could, too. Wouldn't it be great if we were able to institutionally push all American children further in this direction through public education?

(Right now, he "only" has about 67%.)

The English-Only people are kooks. If they ever got English-Only, then they would press for a uniform national accent, probably some annoying Texas-talk. And after that, they would campaign for mandatory bad grammar.

My mom, bless her heart, cannot even understand English movies and TV shows. She complains that she cannot understand the accent of the Philppina women who do her pedicures. And she blames them, rather than listening better and/or giving them credit for working hard and leaving their native land to file her calluses.

These English-Only folks really want Hicky-Accent-Only. My mom herself is not a hick, but she has been influenced by these grumpy twits. It shows how influential silly people can be, even with ridiculous issues.