In my second paragraph, I mention 50E6 current students. Many of them will take spanish lessons. All of them reside in the US. Let's say only 50% does that, we'll be talking 25E6 with english (sic) as 2nd language.
You can prove almost anything if you get to invent your own facts. There are over 4 million children in Venezuela. All of them reside in Venezuela. Let's say only 50% take English lessons. That's 2 Million extra English speakers.
But wait, for every English/Spanish bilingual, you add a number to both the English column and the Spanish column. So its a wash.
I also mention a reference to some 41E6 hispanic US residents. What kind of funny math are you trying to use here? Those 41 million are already counted among the Spanish speakers (whether as a first or second language). Adding them in means you're double counting. What we really need to further the debate is a source which measures growth rate of languages, and maybe a human interest story about what they're teaching as second languages in India and China.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|