Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for August 13, 2010
August 12, 2010
August 14, 2010
Transcript:
Dad: I don't get it! The gas company sent my bill in spanish! Baldo: And you can't read it? Dad: Of course I can... but why do they think I don't know english? Baldo: Maybe it's because when they call about late payments... Baldo: You speak spanish and pretend not to understand. Dad: ¿Que? No entiendo.
Learning any second language makes learning a third much easier.
Frankly, after a number of failed attempts (Russian, French, German, Spanish), I didn’t have any luck with the basics of language construction until I took Latin in college. Its relative lack of irregular formations meant all the rules of cases and tenses made sense, and since English is so entirely irregular, that was important.
My dad’s parents were both born in the U.S, but they were first-generation. They spoke German to each other in the home, but used it as a private language and wouldn’t teach it to the kids. Of course, between about 1914 and 1945 there was a concerted effort among German-Americans to erase their Germanicity. Still, my dad always regretted being monolingual, even though his own travels (Navy, between Korea and Vietnam) took him nowhere near Germany.
And Potrzebie, concerning your kids learning Chinese rather than Spanish, it can be useful to speak the language of your owners…