Reply #5: That has been my experience, too

[Lydia Leftcoast]

I've met second-generation Americans of German, Latvian, Norwegian, and Japanese descent, and even if they speak their ancestral language, they speak it with what sounds like an American accent. Many, like the American-born children of the Korean sandwich shop owners I knew in Portland, don't speak their ancestral language beyond a few words.)

The reason that there are so many Latinos who appear to be "refusing" to learn English (although the people who complain about such immigrants never explain how they know a particular person's life experiences, such as how long he or she has been in the U.S.).

One thing I know for sure: there are a lot of Americans living in Tokyo who actually do refuse to learn Japanese. Some rely on their spouses or partners to interpret for them. I even knew one family whose children had never learned Japanese, even though they'd come over when the kids were under five, so all they would have had to do was put them in a Japanese kindergarten or daycare center. The parents actually told me that I was wasting my time studying Japanese, because "all you need is a few phrases."

There's also my cousin, who married a German woman while serving in the U.S. military over there and retired to his wife's hometown. He still doesn't speak German, even after nearly thirty years in Germany and does all his socializing with U.S. military types.

These resolutely monolingual Americans are affluent, and therefore lack the excuse that the usually poor and hardworking Latino immigrants (some of whom are illiterate in Spanish) have for not learning the language of their host country.