Really sorry for ranting on your blog Deas, I’ll stop before I make this another essay. I have no interest in learning Spanish now, but certainly not because it’s “Not particularly interesting or useful… for native English speakers” and completely because of my geographical location and future prospects. If anything, my friends who did learn Spanish formed lasting friendships with the fairly segregated and large Mexican community, not by learning Russian or some random language in vogue.
That bitch-slap of Spanish/Latin American language, culture, and history (indirect as it was) rubbed me the wrong way, seriously.

On the other hand, I strongly disagree with the implicit assumption that if Americans are going to learn a second language it’s probably going to be Spanish. That’s a very myopic view. Spanish is, as languages go, not a particularly useful or interesting choice of second language for a native English speaker. For one thing, it’s so similar to English, that it really doesn’t teach you that much about languages to learn it. It has the same basic word order as English, extremely similar grammar, even more similar writing system, practically every word a cognate, and so on and so forth. On top of that, there’s practically no interesting literature written in it. (Yes, there’s Don Quixote. Now, name something else.) Frankly it’s just a poor choice all around, for most Americans, unless your main goal is for us to be able to chat it up with first-generation immigrants who don’t speak English, and I don’t think that’s a particularly important goal. As the senator says, immigrants will learn English, and furthermore (this he does not say, but I will) if they don’t bother, it’s not our problem; it’s theirs.

Not that there aren’t good reasons to learn Spanish. For some people, there are. I mean, say you want to travel in South America, for instance. That would make Spanish a logical choice. But for most people I’d say almost any other language would be a better choice. You could learn Russian, or Greek, or Sanskrit, or Japanese… there are dozens of good choices. I suppose it’s possible that when he says, “You need to make sure your child can speak Spanish”, he really means any foreign language. I’d like to think that’s what he means. But that’s sure not how it comes across.

OTOH, I agree with what he says about Americans going abroad and 99% of the time not speaking the language, while almost all of the foreigners who come here speak ours. That, to me, is very embarrassing.

Jonadab the Unsightly Ones last blog post was: Bad Analogies 101

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Obama was getting at the lack of necessity to emphasize a “Only English” policy, as those who need it to survive in society will learn it naturally. I also believe (or want to believe) he wanted to show that second, third generation immigrants often can’t speak with their parents and grandparents, and don’t recognize their own culture or history – thus we should worry about children of immigrants not being able to speak Spanish, etc.
Forcing immigrants to assimilate linguistically into society creates a “double-bind” situation where they are damned economically if they seclude themselves from majority society, or oppositely, are damned by a loss of culture and communication to family (causes family strife often, if you can imagine)
as well as a recurring problem that – as they spend so much time making themselves like a “native speaker” they lose time to study meteorology, physics, or whatever field they wish to enter, and can be easily outspoken by those who were native speakers from birth and only needed to focus on their own specialty.
…
Some of his comments are going to be called by his campaign “inartful” for sure. But there are a lot of hidden problems with forcing languages and other subject matter that don’t have universal utility.

BTW, while I believe Japan’s education is fairly hopeless as long as it continues emphasizing nationwide “standard” curriculum and text, and that will not change until the University exams change (both are changing Japanese-time slooowly) – there are some private and public schools that do give Korean, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese options instead of English.