Obama made his remarks as a way of criticizing those who want to make English America's official language, but having English as an official language while pushing our students to learn foreign languages aren't necessarily mutually exclusive ideas. I've suggested that we make English the official language while still requiring students to graduate high school fluent in French and Spanish. But then I start getting those funny looks again.
What prompted my zeal that Americans learn French and Spanish was an incident that occurred when I went to San Diego and took a trolley down to the border and crossed over into Tijuana, Mexico. My sense of direction being what it is, I couldn't find the entrance to take the trolley car back to the United States. (I tell people I got lost in my room as a child. That's an exaggeration. What's not an exaggeration is that, as a squad leader during basic training in the Air Force, I marched my squad from the mess hall to the wrong barracks.)
There was a guard on the Mexican side of the border who was, appropriately enough, Mexican. I decided to take a chance to see if he could help me.
"Habla ingles?" I asked him. When he shook his head, I knew I had a problem - one that I solved when I bungled my way to the correct trolley car entrance to get back to the American side of the border.
And it wasn't that I hadn't taken some Spanish. I had. I just couldn't dredge up the little I'd learned to ask the proper - and, as it turned out, excruciatingly easy - question "Donde est? la entrada por los Estados Unidos?"
It was Walter Carr, my buddy from Harlem Park Junior High School, who told me what I should have said when I visited his home in San Diego later that evening. Carr had been a police officer in San Diego for years. At Harlem Park, we'd taken French, not Spanish. But Carr soon realized he needed to know some Spanish if he was going to be an effective police officer in San Diego.
There are some who say Americans should indeed learn another language, but Spanish isn't necessarily the one. An Asian-American who frequently e-mails his reactions to my columns made a very persuasive argument that the second language Americans need to know is Mandarin, not Spanish.
Whether it's Mandarin, Spanish or French, Obama has a point: Americans need to get on with the business of learning to speak a language other than English.
gregory.kane@baltsun.com
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