<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><BODY BGCOLOR="#ffff80"><FONT COLOR="#ffff80" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #8000ff" SIZE=2 FAMILY="SERIF" FACE="Palatino Linotype" LANG="0"><B>Hello Emily,<BR>
One the most significant truths I like to convey to my students, when I teach, is that "ignorance is purposeful", as Socrates reiterated.<BR>
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.<BR>
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).<BR>
Alas! What a two-sided loss!.<BR>
Rosina </B></FONT></HTML>