In this issue
December 2, 2014

Jonathan Tobin: Defending the Right to a Jewish State

Heather Hale: Compliment your kids without giving them big heads

Megan Shauri: 10 ways you are ruining your own happiness

Carolyn Bigda: 8 Best Dividend Stocks for 2015




April 18, 2014


Caroline B. Glick: The disappearance of US will

Megan Wallgren: 10 things I've learned from my teenagers




April 14, 2014


Greg Crosby: Passing Over Religion



Cameron Huddleston: Freebies for Your Lawn and Garden



Justin Caba: Eating Watermelon Can Help Control High Blood Pressure


April 11, 2014

Rabbi Hillel Goldberg: Silence is much more than golden

Caroline B. Glick: Forgetting freedom at Passover


Cameron Huddleston: 7 Financial Tasks You Should Tackle Right Now

Sandra Block and Lisa Gerstner: How to Profit From Your Passion

Susan Scutti: A Simple Blood Test Might Soon Diagnose Cancer



April 9, 2014

Jonathan Tobin: Why Did Kerry Lie About Israeli Blame?



Kim Giles: Asking for help is not weakness

Kathy Kristof and Barbara Hoch Marcus: 7 Great Growth Israeli Stocks


Sabrina Bachai: 5 At-Home Treatments For Headaches


April 8, 2014

Lori Nawyn: At Your Wit's End and Back: Finding Peace


David Muhlbaum: Smart Tax Deductions Non-Itemizers Can Claim





April 4, 2014

Rabbi David Gutterman: The Word for Nothing Means Everything

Charles Krauthammer: Kerry's folly, Chapter 3




Cameron Huddleston: Best and Worst Buys of April 2014

Stacy Rapacon: Great Mutual Funds for Young Investors



April 2, 2014

Paul Greenberg: Death and joy in the spring



Frank Clayton: Get happy: 20 scientifically proven happiness activities


Lecia Bushak: Why Hand Sanitizer May Actually Harm Your Health


Cameron Huddleston: 7 Ways to Save on Home Decor


Jewish World Review

‘You are a toilet, where am I?’

By Jim Mullen

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Can you say "Why don't they learn to speak English if they want to live here?" in Spanish? In Italian? In Greek? I can't. Unless you learned another language as a child or are particularly gifted -- I saw a guy with Asperger's on TV who learned to speak Icelandic in two weeks -- it's hard and extremely embarrassing to speak another language while you are learning it. Even if you know the vocabulary, you know you're speaking with an accent, you know that you're making a fool of yourself. Four-year-olds can speak the language better than you. So you try to avoid situations where you have to speak another tongue, usually until you really need to find a bathroom in a foreign land. Then you carefully compose the question in your head and screw up your courage say in their language: "You are a toilet, where am I?" Good luck on trying to understand the answer. Try to get through your day only speaking in the present tense and saying "he" when you mean "she" and you'll get a feel for how awkward it is. Sure, people who plan to live in an English-speaking country should learn the language. I just don't think we should pretend that it's easy.

I just finished the third level of the Rosetta Stone course in French and I enjoyed it. They make learning another language almost as painless as playing a video game. It's not cheap -- from $200 to $575 depending on how many levels you get -- but compared to the $400 it costs to take a semester of forgettable French 1 at my community college, it's a bargain. It took me 10 months to complete three levels; 15 to 20 minutes a day of watching pictures pop up on my screen as they told me in French what I was looking at. No conjugating, no lectures on masculine/feminine agreement, no endless discussions on tenses and when to use them. Compared to my mind-killingly boring high school French lessons, this was entertaining and fun.

I now feel comfortable ordering food or taking a cab in France, but that's a long way from being fluent. I still can't make heads or tails of French movies -- they talk too fast and they use too much slang, and they're always smoking and discussing incomprehensible philosophies. I try to keep up by puzzling through the front pages of online French newspapers. It's tough. Rosetta Stone taught me all the everyday normal verbs: being, having, standing, sitting, driving, walking, speaking, taking, finding, looking. But when I tried to read the headlines of a French newspaper, I realized quickly that they had left out the most commonly used newspaper verbs: murdered, killed, wounded, shot, stabbed, drowned, bled, kidnapped, strangled, robbed, beaten, divorced, cheated, embezzled and electrocuted. None of those words were used in any of my lessons, and words like oil spill, hurricane, disaster, tragedy and crash were also missing.

Thanks to my lessons, I can ask for directions to the theater in French, confidently and correctly. But if I get mugged on the way, I don't know how to say, "Please don't shoot me." And if I did know how to say it, should I use the polite form or the familiar form of "please"? I suppose it would depend on whether he's older or younger than I am. I'm hoping that's covered in Level 4 or 5. In my panic I would probably say something idiotic, like: "My flight will be 45 minutes late," which always comes in handy. He'll realize he's dealing with a crazy foreigner and run away.


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Don't we all cheat at the game of life?
What happens when I forget where Google is?
Don't let the doorman hit you on the way out
Picasso fiasco
Purple (hair) ‘Daze’
Let me hear your body talk
Working from work
Babies deserve clean restrooms, too
Money-making ideas on the fly
Collecting and hoarding
Chain of fools
You've been superpoked by the U.S. gov't
A pose by any other name
Warning: Column contains 2010 spoilers
‘He loves only gold, only gold’
Think about direction, wonder why …
Flushing your money down a diamond-studded toilet
More like ‘wack’ Friday
The good, the ad and the ugly
The desert of the real
Let books be large and in charge
I was insulting people way before the Internet
GPS drill sergeant: Left, right, left!
Butterfly in the sky, you make winds go twice as high
Music to my ears it's not
You don't light up my life
A parable for the ‘ages’
Top 100 Cable news stories of the century
Green dumb
A developing story
Thinking outside the lunch box
What's good for the goose is good for the scanner
Newspapers will survive, but network TV?
A really big show of generation gaps
When pigs flu
The reports of our decline have been greatly exaggerated
Mergers and admonitions
Invest in gold: little, yellow, different
Stuck in Folsom Penthouse
Collecting karma
Setting loose the creative ‘juice’
It's all in the numbers
You're damaging your brain with practical skills
The real rat pack
The unspeakable luxury of the Park-O-Matic
Gross-ery shopping

© 2009, NEA