Learn Spanish? Si, se puede!

Thu, 07/10/2008 - 6:57pm
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Barack Obama's urging this week that Americans "learn a foreign language" -- he suggested Spanish -- sparked some healthy back-and-forth on Passport and beyond. The key question: Putting "learning for learning's sake" aside, can Americans really maximize their utility by learning another language? My sources and instincts say sí.

According to a 2006 survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, around 30 million people in the United States call Spanish their primary language -- and about half of them don't speak English "well" (keep in mind, too, that these numbers only represent legal citizens). That's not a small slice of the U.S. population of 304 million. What that number represents are roughly 15 million people who work for companies and contractors, and who buy groceries, cars, and clothing. That's 15 million people who need healthcare, legal advice, and schooling. It's 15 million people who seek Spanish-language entertainment on the radio and television, and in magazines and newspapers.

So here's the translation: Those needs increase the demand for doctors, teachers, lawyers, writers, radio hosts, construction foremen, salesmen and many other types of blue and white collar U.S. workers who can speak Spanish. This need has already begun impacting hiring practices. Bilingual job fairs and Web sites are increasingly popular, and nearly half of corporate managers are starting to target Spanish-speaking job candidates. More schools have begun targeting Spanish-speakers too, even shelling out bigger bucks for bilingual teachers.

In fact, Spanish may even someday be an unofficial prerequisite for the biggest job of all: the U.S. presidency. President Bush, hardly a globe-hopping polyglot, speaks the language (sometimes to a fault), and Obama knows "a little Spanish" in addition to his Indonesian. But with America's Spanish-speaking population growing by at least a million people each year, it won't be long before un poquito doesn't cut it anymore.

Katie Hunter | Permalink | | Comments? Login or register
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I'll repeat my comment from

by departuregate on Thu, 07/10/2008 - 7:11pm
I'll repeat my comment from the previous post: I used to subscribe to this notion, until I heard Obama say it. I never realized how arrogant some of my ideas were until I heard them voiced by a presidential candidate. Why should we look down our nose at people who can barely afford to travel two states over, much less go to a foreign country, just because they do not speak another language? I think the thing that made me realize this was silly was finding out just how few Americans have passports. If people are lucky, they will get to an Mexican resort once or twice in their lives or maybe go to Europe to blow the retirement money. I have a damn good job and I am still scraping the barrel to afford a plane ticket anywhere. I agree that we should improve language study in schools and get it moved down to at least the upper levels of elementary school instead of introducing it in high school. It's pointless to start teaching it so late. I am also all for people learning Spanish to welcome immigrants. Many people in the Southwest already do. Even that idiot President Bush is a good example. That said, it is rather rich to insist that people spend time and money to learn languages so that they do not look stupid to the rest of the world, or only to accommodate people who are moving to THEIR country. When there is significant economic pressure on Americans to learn other languages, like there is in Europe, then they will do it.

What's the real problem?

by Brian D on Thu, 07/10/2008 - 8:38pm
"As of 2004, 85 percent of America's 17 million high school students were graduating with two or more years of foreign language instruction and a third had three or more years. Both figures are records."

Source: Progressive Policy Institute.

I'm willing to bet that Sen. Obama was completely unaware of this. I'm also willing to bet that a large chunk of those high school students are graduating with foreign language skills far superior to his own.

Spanish is not second everywhere

by JTheriault on Thu, 07/10/2008 - 9:05pm
The choice of Spanish certainly stems from the idea that it is the de fact national second language. My irritation with this is because it seems to result from a mistaken use of a statistical distributive property that assumes that Spanish's use nation-wide is a direct indication of its use at more local levels. In the Northeast United States, for instance, the second most spoken language of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont is French. This is due, in part, to the shared border with our other neighbor, Canada. However the larger factor is the 2 million Franco-Americans that make up more than 20% of each of those states. Consider also Obama's birthplace, Hawaii, and imagine how the native Hawaiians would feel to have their language further disregarded in favor of a push toward greater adoption of a language used the better part of an ocean away. So my only request, as people think about this, is to recall that, while America's Spanish-speaking population may grow by a million each year, it does not do so in an equal distribution throughout the country and there are other immigrant or native populations that would appreciate some of the hospitality that this implies for our Hispanic citizens and immigrants.

Second language is important, but Spanish should not be mandated

by samiles2008 on Thu, 07/10/2008 - 10:27pm
I believe that having our citizenry learn a second language is extremely important. However, I believe the government should not mandate that Spanish be the target language. The government needs to start investing in foreign language education in "hard target" languages like Russian, Chinese, Farsi and Arabic in the primary and secondary level. We should have more choices available to students. Spanish is a very useful language but learning one of these languages, especially Chinese, can give a student huge advantage in life.

NO NO NO NO

by kidzib on Fri, 07/11/2008 - 7:40am
George W. Bush does NOT speak Spanish. Let's kill that myth right away. If you want to see him attempt to speak Spanish, he reads one painful sentence from a cue card in a 2004 ad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdlHxzRoJ8I) but the rest of the ad is awkward Spanish text floating on the screen, presumably because it would be an embarrassment for Bush to attempt to read anything more than one sentence. George's brother Jeb, however, is a COMPLETELY different story. He speaks beautiful Spanish (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3Fm8ik5DPg). As for Barack Obama, I doubt he speaks much, but he can fake it pretty well (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2T2kNxpLuE)!