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Are English speakers lazy with languages? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 33 of 37 09 April 2013 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
And you point about raising Hitler is? To annoy Germans? I have never met any who wouldn't be delighted to have watched Owens run. If we are going to talk about racism, let's bring things a little more into the present. The Olympics were in 1933. The Nazis were out of power by 1945. The last lynching of a black American was 23 years after the War ended in 1968 as I remember. The Tuskegee Institute recorded 3,437 lynchings of African Americans between 1882 and 1968. Check out this Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States So I am sure there were lots of Americans who were equally appalled that Jesse Owens was representing them in 1933. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5299 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 34 of 37 09 April 2013 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
I knew you would walk into the trap. O sanctam simplicitatem. And you call others stupid? 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 35 of 37 09 April 2013 at 8:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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...people wonder why we don't discuss politics here! It almost always escalates into ugliness. People feel they have to defend their positions, which leads to attacks, which, in turn, leads to more attacks...
Whenever a thread starts out with associating a group (in this case- "English-speakers"), any group, with a descriptive value judgment (in this case- "lazy") in a generalized way, the thread is bound to head downhill, fast. Languages, folks! This forum is about languages and language learning. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4263 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 36 of 37 09 April 2013 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
An aside, but Germany actually had the most (by far) gold medals as well as total medals in the 1936 olympic games. Jesse Owens did show up the third reich, however. And let's not forget that Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin actually killed a lot more people than Hitler, although they all were terrible dictators. :( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_Summer_Olympics#Medal_coun t But returning to the main topic: I actually would agree that most Americans aren't as politically or geographically knowledgeable as Europeans, for example. However, I was surprised when my South American friend didn't know who her country's president was! (and I did) But again, this comes down to how influential a country is in politics or whatever. A country like the Ivory Coast doesn't grace the headlines much so people don't know much about their recent civil war but almost everybody in the world knows who Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton are. Americans have less incentive to know about the events unfolding in Africa than vice versa. So unless you think that Americans are genetically hard-wired to be less worldly than others, you have to kind of admit that the same would happen if the Belgium people had become the world's superpower and occupied a country that was the 3rd largest in the world. (the US is smaller than Russia and Canada) Edit: forget to add link Edited by casamata on 09 April 2013 at 8:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 37 of 37 09 April 2013 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Our host has kindly asked us not to discuss politics on his forum, and it's also mentioned in the official rules:
Since this has already degenerated into a heated conversation about Hitler, I don't see any way to get this thread back on topic. So I'm locking the thread. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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