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| Re: What's Sonia Sotomayor's racial background? (456267) | |||
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Re: What's Sonia Sotomayor's racial background? |
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Posted by Stephen Bauman on Sun May 31 20:31:28 2009, in response to Re: What's Sonia Sotomayor's racial background?, posted by LuchAAA on Sun May 31 17:27:09 2009. Do you really think these Russians learned English in their country?Most of those I know, who emigrated in their teens or later, told me they had. I visited China in 1981. The hotel personnel disappeared for an hour in the afternoon. I discovered they were watching English lessons on the television. Many of them couldn't even practice their religion. Some countries made a value decision. Learning foreign languages was deemed valuable. If someone wants to learn another language, they can. A person's ability to learn a new language declines rapidly with age. Children under 5 can learn several languages simultaneously. The key is that each language has a different person speaking it. Louis St. Laurent, a Canadian Prime Minister, once remarked that it wasn't until he was 8 years old that he realized that not every child spoke English to his mother and French to his father. A more recent Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Cretien, was an exception. He was in his late 30's before he started to learn English. Cretien was also described as being inarticulate in two languages. If someone does not want to learn another language, they'll just watch television, read newspapers, and listen to radio in their native language. Let's hope their exposure to their native language exhibits better grammar than you displayed in this sentence. :=) |
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