Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for August 13, 2010

That one is funnier to first-time readers. Regulars already know Sergio is too responsible of a person and a parent to do that.

this is why children should be bi-lingual…

Everyone should be bi-lingual. At least.

JA JA JA JA JA Para aprender español yo toco el numero dos en el teléfono cuando llamo al banco…………. Translate? I learned Spanish by pressing number two on my phone when I call the bank………….

My kid is in what seems to be the only school teaching chinese in the county. We’re hispanics and she has yet to learn spanish. I’m thinking that she will probably be doing business trips to LatinAmerica before any chinese trips.

I never knew CHEAP was bi-lingual ?

(And for the record, Sergio is not cheap, nor irresponsible.)

But I do get the joke.

yeah, this doesn’t fit sergio’s character. it’s definitely a one-off.

Sadly to many people pretend to not know English in order to get what they want. Anyone working retail knows this as it has happened to them. They can be speaking in perfect English until they can’t get the response they want, then all the sudden they don’t know a word.

I think the authors are making fun of those types by showing how silly it makes the person doing it looks. By having a serious character do this it only makes the point sharper.

Bi-lingual? Which of the 100+ languages and dialects should you adopt as your only choice as a second language? To say that English/Spanish is the only two language choice for being bi-lingual is a bit much.

when i was stationed in another country in the military, i was in a local bar and some ladies were talking (not so nicely) about one’s husband, in their native tagolog. not realizing that i understood what they had been saying until i laughed

Learning any second language makes learning a third much easier.

Frankly, after a number of failed attempts (Russian, French, German, Spanish), I didn’t have any luck with the basics of language construction until I took Latin in college. Its relative lack of irregular formations meant all the rules of cases and tenses made sense, and since English is so entirely irregular, that was important.

My dad’s parents were both born in the U.S, but they were first-generation. They spoke German to each other in the home, but used it as a private language and wouldn’t teach it to the kids. Of course, between about 1914 and 1945 there was a concerted effort among German-Americans to erase their Germanicity. Still, my dad always regretted being monolingual, even though his own travels (Navy, between Korea and Vietnam) took him nowhere near Germany.

And Potrzebie, concerning your kids learning Chinese rather than Spanish, it can be useful to speak the language of your owners…