Here are a couple of interesting links for your coffee break reading:
- Get Rich Slowly on How much house do you need?. As a small house dweller (we have our family of three and my office in an 1,150 square foot ranch with no plans to move or expand) and an envier of Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, I really enjoyed this post.
- White House Notebook on Language skills on display. Whatever your political views, I think it’s impressive that President Obama has placed so much emphasis on language skills during his current China trip. He went to the trouble of greeting his town hall attendees in the local dialect, had the U.S. Ambassador introduce him “in polished Chinese” and even acknowledged his own linguistic disadvantage by telling the audience, “I’m very sorry that my Chinese is not as good as your English, but I am looking forward to this chance to have a dialogue.”
Happy reading!
I’m so excited to have a representative of our country who makes public attempts to reach across the cultural divide. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar!
I definitely like the Obama administration’s emphasis on linguistic fluency, but I’ll just note that Bush Jr. was fluent in Spanish and often gave speeches in Spanish. I wasn’t in the US for his presidency, but I understand that he eventually stopped doing that.
I don’t speak Spanish, but maybe the issue was his “fluency”? Anyone recall?
I’ve seen him speak in Spanish when he was the governor of Texas. He’s got an accent, but he’s pretty fluent, even when going off script. I think the problem was that his handlers wanted to ensure control over all the weasel-word political nuances that presidents make.