Latino Congressional Democrats: learn English, pay taxes to become citizen - Page 2

Yeah, French is the same as Spanish in that inanimate objects somehow have a sex. It helps that I'm fluent in spanish, but French is still hard to me. I'm 28 now so giving it another try would be incredibly hard.

I know that I live in a Mexican neighborhood where everything is available to you in Spanish. You are insulated in this little world and thus there is no need to learn English. Thus, you get a large portion of Latino immigrants who don't see a need to learn English, which is really sad and unfortunate.

I came here in my 20's after I graduated college. While people usually think that I'm a smart guy, it doesn't mean that I don't spend time learning the language. For the first couple of years I would come home really exhausted from school, because listening to lecturers speaking in a language that I hadn't mastered was tough.

It took years of conscious effort to improve my written and spoken English, but I persevered because I know Americans won't take me seriously until they stop suspecting that I'm foreign-born. Now their jaws drop when I tell them that I wasn't born here, that I actually graduated college before I got here. One of my daughter's friend asked: "I thought you speak a second language?"

In short, it's a matter of effort.