Posted on 02/24/2009 4:39:24 PM PST by christianhomeschoolmommaof3
A middle school in Southern California is spending $10,000 a year to teach Advanced Placement Spanish to 35 of its 650 students -- and all but one of them are already fluent in Spanish.
Thirty-four of the kids in the AP class are from Mexico or are the children of Mexican immigrants. They all grew up speaking Spanish at home.
The program -- the only one of its kind in California -- has outraged some critics who say they are concerned that the AP course wastes public resources – including taxpayer dollars – to teach native Spanish speakers how to speak their native language in an American public school.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I hadnt heard of this. A link?
There’s an old line about Heinrich Schliemann, the man who discovered Troy, speaking better Greek than any of the men he hired to help with the dig.
Most illegal Latino immigrants come from poor Mestizo or Uto-Aztecan backgrounds; their families’ grasp of proper Spanish is probably pretty marginal to start.
The Uto-Aztecans should go to Utah--see if they could communicate with the Utes by trying out some Nahuatl phrases on them.
You are absolutely correct. Add to that the incredible amount of idioms and regional/slang expressions found in Mexican Spanish (similarities in Guatemala and Honduras) and the enduring use of and mixture with Nahuatl varieties...and you have a veritable soup of communicative twists. For this reason, you also find that many speakers of Spanish from countries in South America (as an example) are constantly stereotyping and making fun of that “soup.”
My understanding is that there is very little difference between Ute and the other dialects of the Nahuatl family. It’s just that the Utes are the only ones who wound up on the northern side of the border.
The general tendency among Indo-European languages is to lose inflections over time--none of the Romance languages is as highly inflected as Latin, English is much simpler than Anglo-Saxon, Modern Greek is simpler than classical Greek, etc. The Slavic languages have kept more inflections than some of the other European branches. I don't know if that's true in the Indo-Iranian languages.
I bet you are right. It’s probably like a kid from the ozarks trying to learn to learn chaucer.
There’s research which indicates that the English variants spoken in the Appalachian hill country are actually closer to Middle and Early Modern English dialectical variants from the areas from which the original settlers came than to Modern Standard English.
Appalachians talk funny because they come from areas which are linguistic time capsules, most illegal aliens speak funny Spanish because their families never mastered it to begin with.
When I was in highschool, I took french II. I had a buddy that lived in france until age 7, iirc. He couldn’t decifer one sentence of my french homework. He said it was completely different than “real” french.
Mark Twain gives the Goshutes a hard time in Roughing It (although it's all a set-up for his real target, who are not Indians).
OK, allow me to modify my analogy...
It’s probably like a cajun kid trying to learn chaucer.
Exactly.
phew!
I was worried for a sec, that you were going to tell me a cajun’s french background would enable him to pick up chaucer with ease.
In case you did, I had 2 more backups prepared...
It’s probably like andrew dice clay or fonzi fonzarelli trying to learn chaucer.
Cheech And Chong - Mexican American
Mexican Americans don't like to just get into gang fights, they like flowers and music and white girls named Debbie too.
Mexican Americans are named Chata and Chella and Chima and have a son in law named jeff.
Mexican Americans don't like to get up early in the morning but they have to so they do it real slow.
Mexican Americans love education so they go to night school and they take spanish and get a B.
Mexican Americans love their Nana's and their Nono's and their Nena's and their Neno's........ Nano Nano Nena Nono!
Mexican Americans don't like to go to the movies where the dude has to wear contact lenses to make his blue eyes brown cause don't it make my brown eyes blue.....
"And thats all i got, how do ya like it?"
In HS I took French I,II, and III. My French speaking friends were Haitian. They helped us with our French and we helped them with their English. They mastered English long before most of us even had the basics of French down.
English, French, and Spanish classes were really fun because of the Spanish speaking Cubans and South Americans and the French speaking Haitians along with us English speaking Americans.
Cramming 10 years of language into 4 years was interesting — a 6th year of English was an option, but 5 years of English and foreign languages were mandatory and our only choices for a 2nd language were Spanish or Latin, 3 years of French were mandatory.
Let’s see...10 grand...26 kids in a class... $260,000 a year. Those poor, underpaid teachers. No wonder they all voted for Obama. He wants more money for education.
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