Latinos Learn English Faster Than Previous Immigrants, Study Finds

[DavidDvorkin]

All those Hispanic immigrants! Why don't they just learn English? Why, my ancestors etc., etc.

A new study demonstrates that Latinos are learning English faster than past immigrants in a country without an official language.

http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/06/19/2179521/latinos-learn-english-faster/

[byeya]

1. In my experience, this is true. In the neighborhood where I grew up, there were older people

who spoke only Italian, Greek, Irish, Chinese, and Polish.
Public school was the great leveler for the kids but the older people ofen did not learn English. When I got to high school, some kids had family that spoke only Yiddish.
Jack Kerouac, as an example, spoke only French until he entered school.

[DavidDvorkin]

3. Similar with my family

That was in England, not here. My grandparents emigrated to London in the 1890s. They lived in a Jewish area of the city and never learned English beyond a very few simple phrases.

As long as those ethnic neighborhoods existed in big cities, immigrants could function perfectly well by ignoring the fact that they were no longer living in their homelands.

[byeya]

4. I read a book recently on the Baltimore Oriole baseball team of the mid 1890s and the author

described Baltimore as a city of neighborhoods, strictly along ethnic lines. He said you didn't have a mostly Irish neighborhood, you had a neighborhood of Irish and Irish/Americans.
By the time I came along, this was breaking up and there was considerable mixing although you could see where I lived was mostly Irish and parts of the NW were mostly Jewish and there were large African American neighborhoods in both the east and west. Little Italy was still almost all Italian/American.

You are correct: A person could be Greek(say) and it would be almost like Greece with the markets, resaurants, church, and social clubs.

[darkangel218]

2. I agree with you

And that's because they love this country. I have met so many latinos on Miami. They worked so hard and really apreaciated what this country has to offer. :'(
It's not easy to leave everything and move here for a better life.