BS

Darn !!! ;) ,...

This idea that only some people can earn languages is simply not true. The examples are all around us. What should be your comment is "people have a hard time learning languages" which is true. Learning languages is a hard thing to do. It was hard for me to learn Arabic... but it happened. It was probably hard for you to learn your first language as a child as well.

Only Arab Jews know how to pronounce Hebrew the way a Semitic language rightly ought to be. But pronunciation doesn't matter. Latinos don't speak the Spanish spoken in Spain either. It's still mutually intelligible without the "correct pronunciation".

Having studied another Semitic language, Arabic, and having peered at Ancient Hebrew. I must disagree with you. The pronunciation and maybe certain words have been changed due to European influence but much of the language retains the Semitic aspect of the language.

My grandfather spoke only Yiddish when he came to the US in 1908 from what is today the Ukraine. Until his death in 1935 he struggled with the English language and had to put up with a fair sharet of anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant bigotry. All of his children went on to finish University while all of his grandchildren have post graduate degrees and of course have integrated fully as "Americans". I have no doubt that if Israel can remain strong in face of it's adversaries who by and large pray for her destruction, it too will bear the fruit of a country of immigrants. The payoffs of bright and motivated immigrants usually takes a generation or two to realize but the success of their offspring pays dividends for generations.

I talk to Blacks and Hispanics all of the time. Where I live, they make up most of the population. As far as I can tell, they were speaking English. So your comment kind of left me confused as to where you got your information. Understanding Blacks from the most of the US is no harder for me than understanding white people; in fact, understanding people from some parts of the south is much harder for me, regardless of their race. For most people IN THE US, understanding Blacks is not hard. I don't know who told you that or which Black people you tried talking to, but what you said is ridiculous. Have you ever heard Barack Obama make a speech? Was it hard to understand him? Most Black people in the US are about that hard to understand. As for Hispanics, it's true that a lot of them don't speak English. But a lot of them do. Almost all Hispanics after the first generation of immigrants do speak English fluently. I doubt that almost none of the 16% of Hispanics can fill out a form.

Ask Rabbi Google-there are hundreds of examples there. Just as your jewish genes are nothing like those of jews 4,000 years ago, this is all a "man-made" culture for those who want to play the game.

Lordy, how we Jews can beat up on each other. The talkbacks that have it right say "this is a nation of immigrants, so what do you expect?" and those that say that most older people have a much harder time learning a new language than do young people. (And unlike many European languages, Hebrew doesn't have roots in Latin.) Those are facts, as is the reality that the less you are surrounded by people from your former culture, the more you are forced to learn the new culture's language. Many U.S. citizens had grandparents and great-grandparents who never learned to read, write or speak unaccented English. Somehow, the United States scraped by anyway.

Arab Jews speak only that common dialect, not the official one!

I believe Amnon Rubenstein, when Educ. Minister, proposed English become the official language. Here, here.

Huh? Arab Jews speak the same dialect of Modern Hebrew as other Israelis for the most part. But whatever dialect of English you speak, it is clearly not the common one.

I live in Canada. One thing Canada and Israel have in common is that they are both nations of immigrants. I grew up in an Italian area of Toronto and while the parents of my school mates either spoke no English or broken English, their children spoke the language like any other native Canadian. Nothing to worry about.