the status of Spanish in America [was: the man who...]

Carsten hat geschrieben:

> Others writing in Spanish:
>
> > [...]
>
> I guess I should take a Spanish course one day ... In the US
> you learn it in (high-)school like we learn English and
> French or Latin, right?
Not exactly.  Far, far more Germans learn English well than
American anglophones learn Spanish well, if only for the obvious
reason that it makes it more difficult to move up in the world
only knowing German.  The economic incentive in America simply
isn't there to the same extent, even in the Southwest where large
minorities of the population speak the language natively.

Based on my outsider's experience of the German schoolsystem
and an insider's experience of an American one (there is no
one system here), I'd say a better analog in Germany is French:
historically important, lots of neighbors speak it, highly useful
in some professions, but not absolutely essential.

Trebor wrote:
> Wow! I really hate you now! ;) J/k. Seriously, if you knew how
> dumbed-down the education system is over here in North America,
> you would probably die of shock ;) F'rex, the French teacher was
> unsure of what "(in)transitive" means! :S
As I noted above, no such system exists, certainly not across the
whole continent! In my highschool, my German teacher had two doctorates:
one in German literature, one in English literature.  She knew or
spoke German (natively), English, Russian, Italian, Latin and French,
and would go off on tangents about Indo-European historical linguistics
every now and again. She also wasn't the only one with a doctorate.
(And that was in my public highschool, too.)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637