Response to foreign language in States

[Rosina Lila]

Hello Emily,
One the most significant truths I  like to convey to my students, when I
teach,  is that "ignorance is purposeful", as Socrates reiterated.
USA nationals find  this to be  painfully true when they travel to Spain,
France or Italy expecting the peoples of those countries to cater to them
linguistically.  The only people there, for the most part,  who study  English, in my
experience, do so for commercial reasons: hotels, stores and the like.  They
also study Japanese.
The friends that I have made in my many years of visiting Spain,  Italy,
France and Brasil, and, indeed, teaching at Universities there, speak French,
Italian,  Portuguese and  (to my surprise) German; languages that they have
learned, by choice, and for culture's,  literary bea uty's  and history's  sake.
To them "Othello" and "Romeo and Juliet" instantly conjure the  original
Italian authors of the stories, if not Verdi, and not  at  all Shakespeare (to whom
I am personally devoted).
Alas! What a two-sided loss!.
Rosina
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