Job Discussion Forums

[shaner]

Here's one for the kids at home. I teach at a company in Mexico and in the middle of class one of my students a 32 year old woman made the comment that Spanish is a wonderful language with so much vocabulary and that English is ....."poor and boring." I kept calm even though this the hundredth time my language has been attacked.

I tried to explain that the English language has one of the most extensive vocabulary. She wouldn't hear of it.

Anyone else deal with these narrow minded statements in class?

Oh by the way, according to many Mexicans, Americans and Canadians are cold, boring, unexciting people who kick their children out of their homes at 18 and force our old people to live in hospitals. We also do not care about our families because we do not spend every waking moment with them. Yeah....I need some prespective. Can anyone help me out, before I get jaded.

[M@tt]

yeah, go to the middle east and latinos will seem soooo mellow in comparison. didn't you know that arabic is the most perfect language (the one God speaks) and family is worth killing for?

but seriously, the one about vocabulary is pretty easy to shoot down. english has by far the largest vocabulary of any language, numbering around half a million words. it would also be laughable to compare the volume of "important" literary works in spanish to those in english (or even french, or german, or chinese).

as for coldness, it's true that many english speaking countries have "cold" people in them. you might try to show them how too much dependence on family and too much independence from family are just different symptoms of the same disease.

[leslie]

Bye

[Guy Courchesne]

On North American coldness, I'll recommend The Labyrinth of Solitude by Mexican writer Octavio Paz for an interesting insight as to why many Mexicans feel that way about us.

On the languages, a Mexican writer and professor once said this to me. "English can use many different words to say one thing. Spanish can use one word to say many different things."

The joy is in being able to operate in either language and express a far wider range of ideas. Don't get jaded...you and the students can learn from the experience

[M@tt]

yeah, what they said!

i esp. second leslie's thoughts although i don't think it's impossible to change someone's mind when the point of debate is more factual than subjective.
when emotion is involved i think most people are better off coming to conclusions themselves, over time, rather than being confronted directly with what might be true (as i came to the conclusion that i don't completely agree with my own previous post).

[MELEE]

By any chance shaner, is this women required to take this class? either literally or by strong suggestion from her employer? It sounds like someone who resents having to be there to me. You can easily prove her wrong vocabulary wise, if you want to, but there probably isn't much point in it.

[ls650]

Why argue with this woman? She is the customer, and the customer is always right. If it were me, I wouldn't get upset; I'd smile and silently thank her for paying my salary.

[ontoit]

One's native language is always the most expressive. This is indeed because of the very deep emotional connection between the words and ideas that develops over a lifetime of use and experience. It is often very difficult to develop such a relationship with a language you have not grown up with. Thus, all others pale by comparison.

[J Sevigny]

�Poor�and �boring�are very subjective observations. And I don't think the number of vocabulary words a language contains has anything to do with it.

But I doubt that someone who holds such an opinion of English would make for a very good learner.

[wildnfree]

Just to play the devil's advocate, she may have a point to some extent...

In high school I was forced to read shakespeare and the like and the language was rather flowery and emotive. I think that has been lost today and we tend to speak a sterile, P C mainstream English. I also speak other languages and in comparison, English tends to be more scientific, more precise in its expression.

I always find it peculiar when people develop emotional attachment to languages. I wouldn't be offended in the least if a student said that English or Spanish was boring to me, but I would try to change the lesson to include some of the richness, sarcasm or general beauty of the language. That might alter her opinion somewhat.

Every language has its own beauty and richness...but maybe you need to bring that into the lesson.

[MikeySaid]

To provide a little perspective here... Mexicans are FAMOUS (in the Spanish-speaking world) for their albur--which means, more or less, wordplay. I think when someone really develops a command of a second language by soaking it up through music, print, and the spoken word, s/he can reach a place where communication can be effective, flowery, poetic, and inventive, even.

Perhaps the student's comment reflects her opinion of the OP, or maybe of greater North American culture (or lack thereof, ha).

Sidenote to the sidenote: I have heard people in Mexico comment similarly about the English language's lack of vocabularly. Generally, they're unaware how much we've added to the language from other languages and ignore that English is the source of most of the technical words in the world today. Make 'em look in a thesaurus or something... or read them Shakespeare.

What if we used flowy flowery speech in our day-to-day lives?

[wildnfree]

[MELEE]

I'm sorry wildnfree, but you don't read much modern literature do you? Literature, or any kind of written language, is always different from the spoken language of that time. The average Joe in civil war times didn't go around saying, "pretty as a June bug sunning itself on a lily pad just south of Savanna" they just said pretty. Besides, June bugs are far from pretty, I hope no one ever gives me such a compliment.
There is plenty of flowery English written today. Part of being a writer is telling a story, the other part being a word smith, molding and bending the language into something worth reading. You can't compare the language we use on this forum to Shakesphere or Margaret Mitchell.

[hlamb]

I agree that one's first language often seems the most emtional or expressive. I can appreciate how expressive Spanish is but I'm not at a level yet where I can use the language that way myself or understand it all when someone talks that way to me. I think until a person is completely fluent the second langauge will seem less emtional than the first language.

My Spanish teacher last year was completely fluent in English and he would still at times ask me to explain a joke from a movie or maybe an idiom to him. Even though his English was excellent, he still had trouble with some of the cultural references. Travelling to the country where the langauge is spoken can help with this.

[leslie]

Bye