For what it’s worth, I was in Mexico City on the metro yesterday, and tried to listen to the kiddos talk, it wouldn’t pass any litmus test of the Real Academia Langague Art of Madrid Spain, it was street lingo, and quite regional slang to the riff raff of Mexico City. Try riding in a taxi and understand the code words they use in Mexico. Some of this, will just happen. Wasn’t there a movie made about MY FAIR LADY of a guy who proved he could take a street girl and make her into a fit for an evening with the queen by just changing her speech?
Your punctuation is very bad. I suggest the following:
For what it’s worth, I was in Mexico City on the metro yesterday and tried to listen to the kiddos talk. It wouldn’t pass any litmus test of the Real Academia Languague Art of Madrid Spain. It was street lingo, and quite regional slang to the riff raff of Mexico City.
The rest of the post is even worse.
From what I've heard from others (I don't speak Spanish), many of the recent Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. are fluent in neither English nor Spanish. I'd guess their Spanish is the street lingo you mentioned.
I visited Mexico City many years ago. Even then the poverty was incredible. Miles and miles of slums. I imagine it's much worse today.
You’re kidding right? Have you ever heard a Spaniard pronounce the “Z” sound...with the “th” sound. They have butchered their own language. It sounds like everyone speaks with a lisp over there.
Shaw, it should be noted, was a language crank. He once wrote an entire essay on the desirability of dropping silent letters. The final 'b' in 'bomb' was his particular bete noire; he went so far as to ''calculate'' the national ''saving'' of time if the final 'b' were to be dropped.
GREAT point. One problem is that many of the kids flooding our schools don’t know Spanish either. They end up being illerate in two languages. Anecdote: More than forty years ago I taught math in high school in the Rio Grande Valley. Seventy -five percent of the kids were Mexican; three of the teachers were Mexican, and Spanish was not allowed to be spoken in the halls. The kids were as fluent in English was other high school kids I taught in Texas, since the poor students had dropped out by that time. But the story: One of the Spanish teacher in high school was a Mexican. She told me that her classes would be flooded with Mexicans kids who wanted an easy “A”. Invariably the best student in her classes would be some studious Anglo-girl. The Mexicans kids THOUGHT they knew Spanish; what they knew was very bad Spanish, or just Tex-Mex. The bummers learned to avid her classes and take Spanish from the Anglo teachers, who was most impressed with their ability to pronouce Spanish words and overlooked their lousy grammar and vocabulary.
IAC. my view is that bilingual instruction is bad. It takes a very high degree of culture IN THE FAMILY for a child not to be harmed by having to speak in two languages. A language is the vessel of a culture, and when the cultures
are different, a child must finally come down on one side or another. The schools are hiring teachers who speak poor English and mediocre Spanish. The result is confusion.
Still, the De Efes are more educated than the folks streaming across the border. Next, we'll need to learn Nauhuatl.