I missed this when it came out. While it may stir some hope amongst those who want to claim a genetic excuse for poor FL test scores, any direct connection between genes and tonal languages is demonstrably false. The simple test is that people with the gene who grew up speaking other non-tonal languages, for example, say American born Chinese, have every bit as much trouble learning tonal languages as people without the gene. What it does seem to indicate is that the gene happened to be dominant in the speaker(s) of the proto-ancestor of SE Asian and sub-Saharan tonal languages. Whether one believes in evolution or the tower of Babel, most agree that human speech originated from a single source (i.e., there was once a single language — language did not evolve in multiple places simultaneously), and then fractured successively into increasingly different families. Tonal languages probably had some sort of very early proto-tonal ancestor from whom the majority are descended from, which would explain the correlation between the similarity between language type and gene dispersement. Still, I would have loved to see a map, as I highly suspect that the scientists were speaking in very general terms of geographic dispersement — i.e., SE Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. I’d be curious to know if there was any “genetic link” with Amazon basin tonal languages like Pirahã. Also, does this gene extend to areas of northern Europe where languages like Lithuanian (a strong tonal language) and Swedish (which along with close-cousin Norwegian employ some elements of tone– though not as overt as languages like Chinese). Ultimately, what do we do with this knowledge? As tonal languages comprises roughly half of the human offerings, finding a genetic link is interesting, but it doesn’t do a lot in helping us to trace that common ancestor. All it does is lend itself to abuse by convincing people that language fluency depends on physical characteristics.

As noted yesterday, literacy learning strategies vary between languages. The highest amount of variation is invariably to be found between languages with different orthographic systems. Today, we’ll start looking at the major categories of writing systems in the world, and how to deal with them.

Logographs… Logographic systems are the oldest form of human writing… Technically, they are the second-oldest… Pictographs are older, but are often omitted as they are are not a “complete” system of writing — i.e., one can make a picture of dogs barking, but it would be difficult to express “the dog’s passionate howling at the loss of his owner evoked a sentiment normally reserved for a Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor.” Logographic forms of writing manage to alleviate that limitation by using homophones (words that sound alike) to stand for more abstract ideas (i.e., how do you draw “love”). In logographic writing systems, characters carry a meaning — not a sound, and thus — due to the incredible volume of vocabulary inherent to human languages — tend to have a very high volume of characters.

While Chinese characters are the best known logographic language, other writing systems have existed through history: e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiforms. Actually, to be honest, we use logographs all the time in the U.S. For example:

While we all know intuitively what these signs mean, you’d be hard pressed to pronounce them. Chinese characters, of course are pronounced, but the pronunciation is arbitrary as there is nothing inherent in the character to indicate sound. They merely represent an idea. The following example means Chinese (person), and will show you some of the variation in pronunciation possible as the same characters are used by different languages.

中 国 人 (apologies to those whose OS doesn’t support Chinese script)

Zhong guo ren (Mandarin)

Diong gok lang (Taiwanese)

Jung kok yen (Cantonese)

Chuu goku jin (Japanese)

So, how do you go about learning a language like this?

Well, native speakers of Chinese have some distinct learning tendencies that it is important to be aware of:

1. Native Chinese speakers tend to learn their reading and writing skills through rote, word-by-word memorization, and frequent repetition (Chan, 1999).
2. L1 speakers of Chinese exhibit a large reliance on visual information in word decoding strategies (Chikamatsu, 1997). Children learning Chinese demonstrate a greater eye for minute detail than their English-learning peers.
3. Chinese-speakers also focus on semantic recognition of characters, as opposed to phonology (Pine, Huang, & Song, 2003). Characters have meanings, they do not carry fixed pronunciations.
4. Shu and Anderson (1997) determined that learners of Chinese made extensive use of knowledge of character radicals for determining semantic information. Literate readers also made use of radicals for recognizing less commonly used characters.
5. Highly literate speakers can also make use of phonological information sometimes embedded in characters, however, Shu and Anderson (1997) found this to be little used by lower-level learners – in native speakers, this strategy is not observed in a consistent manner until sixth grade (by which point most average children would meet government standards of basic literacy).
6. Kinesthetic recall methods, whereby a learner traces a character with the finger in the air, or with a pencil about an inch above the paper, are commonly employed (Pine, Huang, & Song, 2003).

The key for the learner of Chinese (or other ancient logographic languages) is to recognize that 1) you need to concentrate on visual details to distinguish characters; and 2) make use of semantic radical clues. Most teachers don’t teach this in so many words, but if you bring it to their attention, I’m sure they can help you to duplicate the tried and true methods of Chinese children.

Postscript: One final note — it’s important to realize that for Chinese-speakers learning English will have the same problem in reverse. It is often necessary to explicitly teach them to search for the phonological information inherent to alphabetic systems, lest they go about memorizing words based upon construction and shape.

When I first began studying Japanese, I was amazed at how much longer it was taking to learn compared to the other languages I had studied before. Likewise, when I started Chinese, even though already having a significant background in the Japanese language was a large advantage, and the oral/aural component came much more quickly and easily than Japanese had, I was still disturbed by the somewhat slow pace of acquisition. When I began analyzing how I studied Chinese, with how I studied, say, French, the culprit quickly emerged — whereas, when I lived in France, I was regularly immersing myself in print literature, my poor grasp of Chinese characters precluded like activity in Taiwan. I was thus left with the question: why did it take me so much longer to gain basic literacy in Chinese (I got better!) than it did in other languages? At first glance, it seems like an obvious answer — the Chinese language has a separate character for each word, so achieving literacy in Chinese is a daunting task, to say the least. To read a Chinese newspaper, one must learn approximately 2,500 characters (this is usually accomplished by the 6th grade by native speakers). The average adult has a minimal vocabulary of 7,000 to 9,000 characters — enough to read general books. Of course, people in more academic fields will usually have an even more expansive vocabulary. This alone seems to readily explain the difficulty of Chinese study, however, as I dug into the topic, I discovered a little not-too-well-known-or-discussed fact of language learning: the native speakers of every language have slightly different literacy learning methods, and an L2 learner of the language will be delayed if he/she employs different learning techniques.

Once stated, this makes some intuitive sense: it figures that native speakers, with the collective wisdom of hundreds or thousands of years of learning and teaching the script of their own language, would come up with the most efficient means of learning literacy in the language; however if not explicitly stated, many (most?) learners will automatically employ the literacy learning strategies used in their L1. Unfortunately, depending upon the regular similarity or difference of the L1 and L2, the L1 literacy learning strategies may work very little, if at all. By and large, teachers tend to be unaware of this. Most native speaker instructors will tend to phrase instruction in terms of how L1 speakers learn to read/write the language, but without explicitly noting the inherent differences between the two languages, many students will fail to pick up that, in addition to the difference between the languages themselves, the learning strategies used to acquire the written language must be changed significantly.

This is, of course, a lot more noticeable with highly differing (to English, at least) languages such as Chinese or Japanese; but what about relatively “close” languages such as Spanish or German? Even these will require somewhat different focus. Worthy of particularly close attention is the concept of language depth (the extent to which a language’s writing system accurately represents its phonology). For example, a Spanish speaker used to close correlation between pronunciation and spelling will be thrown by a language like English where to, too, and two are all pronounced like “tu.”

Much more details to come in the coming days — I’ll break it down into the major writing system groups, and tell you what to look for in each…

One of the first literacy issues that the FL learner will face is determining when to start studying reading and writing in the language, and what proportion of your study time should be spent towards literacy acquisition. If you enroll in FL classes, you are quite likely to start all four skills — listening, speaking, reading, and writing — on your very first day.

The first thing that need be realized is that this approach is, according to most research on the topic, misguided at best. Look at how children learn to read and write their first language. We don’t shove a book and pencil at them the day they are born (or even the second week). Children typically learn quite a bit of oral language — in fact they become downright expressive — long before they start reading and writing in earnest. Sure, people read to/with their kids at even the earliest of ages, but the child is still interacting with what the parent says — not what is on the page. (This is not to knock reading to children — it’s, in fact, quite vital in helping children to later recognize the relationship between print and spoken language). We allow children the time and experience to build their vocabulary, develop the rudiments of syntactic structure, and develop semantic and/or background knowledge before expecting them to interact with the written word.

Foreign language students, on the other hand, are typically not given enough time to develop vocabulary and grammatical knowledge before being immersed in print (though we can reasonably assume that most school-aged or adult learners will have adequate background knowledge). This is the approach that would work best for most FL learners as well. Laufer (1997) showed in a study that the size of a reader’s active vocabulary is the key to literacy. One requires a threshold vocabulary of about 5000 lexical items before one can avail oneself of such L2 literacy strategies as guessing unknown words from the context. In an ideal world, FL learners would be able to spend at least a year building their vocabulary before encountering print.

Encountering print too early can lead to frustrations due to the students’ inability to directly apply L1 strategies to L2 decoding (more on that tomorrow), but early on, one of the main effects is to distort phonology. If print is encountered before students have a good grasp of the FL sounds, the writing may serve to help solidify bad pronunciation and make it harder to break bad pronunciation habits. In the case of languages that share alphabets, this becomes apparent when low level students consistently apply L1 sounds to L2 words (such as using the “a” sound from “apple” in the Spanish word “manzana”). Even with unfamiliar scripts, the ability to transcribe words makes students less dependent upon and inclined towards careful listening to the foreign language sounds.

This is not meant to be an indictment of the public school system. Formal FL classes have good reason for introducing text so quickly. While I would bet that most teachers are probably aware at some level that it would be beneficial to delay the introduction of the printed words until students had time to develop functional vocabularies and the ability to actually use the language in real conversation, most foreign language programs are simply pressed for time. The average American student will only spend two years studying a foreign language, and it would shortchange the student significantly to be deprived of learning literacy skills in the language during that time. The demands of assessment (i.e., testing) also necessitates the rapid introduction of reading and writing. Thus, formal language classrooms will not be spending the first 1-3 years in an all-oral environment any time soon. I will end, however, by merely encouraging anyone who is planning on making a longterm commitment to their language to investigate the possibility of adapting your study plan to emphasize oral skills and vocabulary building during at least your first year. Have something to read and write about before you attempt reading and writing.

Getting to this post late on a Monday. Sorry about the tardiness, but I had a hectic day…

This week I wanted to look a bit at the issues and possible trouble-spots in becoming literate in your foreign language. While, let’s face it, for most of us, the most pressing need will be oral comprehension, it’s really good to be able to read as well. For some learners, such as those learning their FL for research purposes, reading may be the main goal — but it must be noted that this is a minority. Many languages don’t even have writing systems — or at least what is in existence is mainly used by linguists and missionaries (for Bible translation), and not used much by the indigenous population. That being said, when a writing system is in wide use in a population, the ability to access that gives innumerable benefits, among which are: 1) better access to information; 2) the ability to effectively learn aspects of the language itself by oneself (i.e., looking in a dictionary); 3) the ability to gain information and learning from people not here in the present time and place; 4) etc.

That all being said, it is important to note that gaining literacy of any type (let alone FL literacy) is actually a more daunting endeavor than one would typically imagine. Humans are not endowed with an innate ability to read and write, as we are endowed with an ability to learn to speak and understand spoken language. Any able-bodied child given regular input will learn to speak and understand language, but reading and writing have to be explicitly taught. Most of us also spend very little time interacting with the written word, as opposed to the spoken word. It’s usually estimated that the average person spends up to 70% of the total time spent in communicative acts during the typical day merely listening to someone else. Speaking time accounts for another 20+%. Reading usually accounts for only 5-10% of total interaction for the day (although, I feel compelled to point out that for grad students like myself, that total is often much higher). Most people can easily go days at a time without writing anything (us internet blowhards bloggers excepted). Of course there will be personal variations on the totals — these are mere averages — but we can see that most people don’t interact with writing nearly as much as they interact with speech.

Thus merely becoming literate (in any language) requires more effort than most of us really realize. It’s not easy to remember how difficult something is after you’ve already mastered it, and considering that most of us started reading and writing out native language at age 6 or younger (my mom was apparently teaching me to read when I was two — I can’t claim to remember that at all, but I’m told they were good times). Learning to read and write in a foreign language, however, has its own difficulties, which we will discuss all this week….

I hope that your classes don’t look like this…

One of the greatest frustrations one faces in language study is getting honest constructive feedback. Simply put, it’s hard to get anyone to tell you when you’re speaking wrong. At beginning levels, it’s a bit easier to deduce — either a construction works (i.e., the phrase you employ obtains the desired result or not) or it doesn’t. If you order a Pepsi, and the waiter brings out a squid platter, for instance, or even if you just receive a blank stare, you can reasonably assume that what you just uttered did not jive with the listener. It’s at the more intermediate and advanced stages of language learning that getting meaningful feedback becomes tricky. Most people in the world have an “if I understand you, that’s good enough” type of attitude towards people who are non-native speakers of their language. This becomes particularly strong when the language is one not very often taught to or studied by outsiders. A person’s opinion of how “fluent” a non-native should be, or even how fluent that the person could possibly ever become, is greatly influenced by how many non-native speakers of the language the person has come into contact with before — and just how successful they were. Natives of languages with relatively few non-native speakers generally tend to think of their languages as being exceptionally difficult, and thus tend to keep the bar very low for non-native speakers. Visitors to Japan, for instance, are probably well acquainted with being complemented on their Japanese prowess for saying as little as a single isolated word of the language. Furthermore, some people, whose language, due to geographical or economic reasons are not often studied by the outside world, are actually a little hostile to the idea of foreigners mastering their language (i.e., speaking like a native). While there is a lot to say about the psychology behind such attitudes, such is not the purpose of this posting — suffice to say that, for some, their language is a “members only” club.

So once you get to the point of basic comprehensibility, most people will not correct you for the most part. In a way, this is good — it would be prohibitively difficult to speak to anyone if we were getting constant criticism of our vocabulary choice and grammatical accuracy. Even in formal classes, corrective feedback is not as common as you might think. In the last 30 years, there has been a movement in foreign language education that stresses communicative competence over form. The short version is this: teachers shouldn’t stop students communicating in the language over grammar errors if the message (content) is still clear. To do so would discourage open communication by the students. The teacher is supposed to take note of the mistakes and to build future lessons around such, but in practice, that happens less than one would like.

The problem with having little or no corrective feedback is that it allows mistakes to become ingrained habits. If you’ve been using an incorrect word or form for years, you will not be able to change overnight when you discover you’ve been mistaken. This is one of the culprits behind fossilization (when language form and accuracy cease to improve despite continued residence in the L2 environment).

So what do we do? We want to continually improve, so how do we get people to give us feedback. Simple… I just involves a little begging…

Basically, you need to get one or two people who are close to you — they can be friends, teachers, etc. — and convince them to give you regular feedback. They don’t have to always stop you mid-sentence, but they need to feel comfortable giving you an honest critique of your language accuracy. Perhaps at the end of conversational topics, at the end of the day, or via regular appointments, get them to take notes on what types of errors you commit, and then explain them to you — along with what the correct form should sound like.

You may find that you have to change partners with this. Different people will focus on different issues, but beyond that, some people simply don’t offer very good critiques. If the person you’ve asked has a tendency to brush off the question with a “you’re fine,” it may be well worth your time to find someone more critical.

Finally, you have to be willing to take the criticism as a critique of your speech — not of yourself. Don’t let your ego be bruised, but instead, be willing to act on the advice offered.

Yesterday we talked about the trouble with perceiving the new sounds of a foreign language. Today, we’re going to look a little at the mechanical issues involved with reproducing them.

The ability to perceive (i.e., hear) the sounds in another language are a prerequisite for accurate reproduction. In sound production, speaking is literally subordinate to listening, as there is no way that you will reliably be able to produce sounds whose contrastive features are invisible to your own ears. Most students will gradually start to “hear” the differences in foreign language sounds anywhere from a few months to a couple years into study, but it can be much longer before students will be able to consistently produce the sound on their own (particularly in the context of normal conversation — i.e., outside of classroom drills with a focus on pronunciation). It simply takes continual practice, as the mouth and assorted vocal apparatus (tongue, nose, throat, etc.) need time to get used to contorting themselves to the required shape to modify airflow into this strange new phoneme. It is a mere mechanical issue of your body adapting to the new requirements you are throwing at it.

Interestingly, newborn babies go through a period of sounds discrimination. If you listen long enough to babies cooing and gurgling to themselves, you will hear them utter every possible phoneme existing in human speech. Babies are cool that way… They gradually narrow the sounds they produce down to those which exist in the language(s) spoken in their immediate environment. Parents will note that they hear babies talking to themselves a lot, literally practicing sounds: “bababababababababababababa….” etc. The infant identifies the sounds in its environment, and then practices how to reproduce them. Mind you, some sounds are harder than others — thus, for example, most English-speaking children often exhibit trouble with certain phonemes (such as /r/) up to 5 or 6 years of age. It takes children significant time and practice to get used to new sounds, so why should it be any different for us?

As an example, I will readily admit that it took me roughly 3-4 years of study before I was even physically capable of pronouncing the Spanish “rr” sound. The key point is to not get lazy about it. Often those sound distinctions are more important than we would think. A (semi-embarrassing) personal example happened to me while I lived in France. I had struggled with the French “r” sound — a much more guttural sound than the Spanish or English ones. One day, I was at the local grocery store to pick up some bread. I queued up at the bakery counter, and when it was my turn, I asked (sweetly!) for un pain rond (a round loaf). The lady behind the counter came back with un pain longue (a long loaf). I reiterated my original request, whereupon she looked at me with an “aren’t-you-too-cute-you-know-nothing-foreigner” look and said, “oui, ce-ci c’est un pain longue” (yes, this is a long loaf). The people behind me began to titter. Everyone of them knew what I was saying, but I could tell that I would get no support in the matter. I would have to get her to understand by myself. I finally repeated my request with a clearly enunciated, rolling Spanish “r” which could practically cut the bread, let alone order it… I got my bread, and determined that I certainly had to work on my French “r” pronunciation. The key point is that I had gotten lazy about it. I knew that my “r”s were off, but I hadn’t cared, because, up until that time, I had never failed to make myself understood. Once this became a matter of getting what I wanted or not, however, I began tackling the pronunciation task in earnest, and, I’m happy to report, was producing the correct sound within a couple days.

A lot of the hallmarks of foreign accents are due to inabilities to either distinguish or accurately reproduce a sound in the foreign language. All the accent stereotypes you can think of, from the French “Yes, ah cahn speek zee Eengleesh,” to the Japanese “I rike to eat lice” can be traced to this problem. Today we’ll look at learning to discriminate unfamiliar sounds.

This failure to distinguish sound differences between languages can actually be split into two categories. First is the most easily recognizable failure to distinguish sounds that are contrastive in the language of study. These are sounds that make a meaning difference. For example, in English, “l” and “r” are contrasting phonemes. Simply put, changing the sound can change the word — note: “lice” and “rice”; “lift” and “rift;” etc. English speakers are just as likely to make similar mistakes in any other language. For example, most beginning learners of Spanish will have an awful time hearing the difference between “pero”(but) and “perro”(dog). The single “r” vs. a double “r” is a contrastive phoneme in Spanish. Tonal languages like Chinese, likewise, will be difficult for English speakers, as we are not used to tones signifying word meaning, but rather, we use tone to signify meaning, intent, or questions. Those tones in Chinese are contrastive, and can spell the difference between “wo gan mao le” meaning “I caught a cold” or “I copulated with a cat” respectively.

Less critical, and thus often ignored, are the distinctions in sounds which exist in out own languages. When an English speaker hears a word like the Spanish “total” (means exactly what you think it does), there is a tendency to assume that we can pronounce such perfectly with little effort. Even assuming a knowledge that the vowel sounds are not what we would say in English, most English speakers will still produce the word with an English “lilt.” The problem, in this case, is the “t” sound. While Spanish and English speakers certainly can recognize each other’s pronunciation of the “t” phoneme, they form the sound differently, and thus pronouncing “total” with an English “t” will tag you as a foreigner (just as saying the English equivalent with a Spanish “t” sound is one of the hallmarks of the “Latino” accent). In case you’re wondering, the difference is this: in English, the tongue touches to the gum ridge behind your front teeth, and the sound is normally aspirated (you release a “puff” of air). In Spanish, the tongue is placed on the back of the teeth, and it lacks the “puff.” A lot of what we interpret as a foreign accent comes from these kinds of “similar but different” sounds.

So how do you go about learning to distinguish these unfamiliar sounds? Unfortunately, there is no trick, “easy,” way about it. Most infants start to discriminate their native language sounds (at the expense of recognition of the sounds of other languages) by their first birthday, so if you’re reading this, you’re most likely far past redemption in having the infantile ability to distinguish the entire catalog of existing sounds in human languages (either that, or you’re the most computer savvy and literate baby the world has ever seen). The key is to be aware of sound differences. Encourage your teachers/tutors to give you honest feedback on pronunciation drills. At the beginning, it’s next to impossible to hear the difference between the sounds. It usually takes a lot of practice (sometimes years!) before you really “hear” the difference in context. In the meanwhile, have your teacher point out where sound differences exist. At advanced stages of study, demand detailed analysis and feedback of your own pronunciation. Show your teacher this post, if necessary, because, while any teacher worth his/her salt will be well aware of the sounds from category number one that will give you trouble (French: un coup vs. un cul — look it up, yourself), teachers may not be aware of category two. Native speakers will simply be aware that you “have an accent,” but may be unaware of the fine differences in pronunciation of the same phoneme that will cause them to hear such. It may take you a long while to be able to actually distinguish such sounds (particularly in real-time speech), but it does come eventually. The key point is to be aware from as early-on as possible that such differences exist, and thus prevent yourself from developing bad listening/speaking habits that you will later have to spend significant time and energy in breaking.

Happy Monday!

Today, I’m introducing a new feature to this blog — languages in the news. This new segment, which will appear as often as I have material (guessing around 1x per1-2weeks), will look at news foreign language learning issues that appear in the news.

Our first news article concerns the governor of California himself - Arnold “the Terminator” Schwarzenegger. At a convention for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, when asked how Hispanic students could improve academic performance, he said, “You’ve got to turn off the Spanish television set” and stay away from Spanish-language television, books and newspapers. “You’re just forced to speak English, and that just makes you learn the language faster.”

By any measure, it must be admitted that Ah-nuld is an exceptionally successful immigrant, so it’s reasonable to assume that, when speaking from his own personal experience of assimilation, his advice would carry some weight. He would probably be the first to admit that his path to success would not work for everyone, but assuming that he’s sincere in his desire to impart some word of advice to aspiring immigrants, it’s only natural that he would give advice based on his own experiences. After all, it worked for him, and it worked in a big way!

However, he was immediately roundly criticized for by the convention attendees for who were incredulous at the “insensitivity” of the remarks, but was his suggestion good or bad advice? Let’s take a look.

Pedagogically, any honest teacher would be inclined to agree with Arnie. It’s a simple concept really: the more time you spend in L1 (native language — in this case, Spanish) activities (i.e., conversation, media consumption, etc.), the less time you have for L2 (the second language being studied — here, English) learning/practice. While taking time out for a little L1 entertainment now and then is great when it’s available, and it would be foolhardy at best to expect all immigrants to completely stop conversing in their own language (especially at home), a potential problem arises when native speakers of your L1 and L1 media is too readily available — it largely kills the desire and need to learn/improve the L2 (which, keep in mind, in this case is the dominant language of the country). Immigration in of itself is fraught with pitfalls, a big one amongst them being language study. When forced by the situation, most immigrants will quickly learn the dominant language of their newly adopted country to whatever extent they need to to meaningfully participate in and contribute to life there. When their own language is widely available, however, it is often much easier to “cocoon” oneself in L1 print, television, etc., and to only associate with other speakers of your language. This is not at all unique to U.S. Hispanics. This is a worldwide phenomenon found anywhere you see widespread immigration originating from a similar source. Actually, Anglos are one of the worst perpetrators of this — living abroad, in every country I visited (though much more common in Asia), I would meet numerous westerners who had lived there for years, and never attempted to learn a word of the local lingo. They would simply build a barrier of English print, HBO access, and English-speaking companions to make them feel like they had never left home.

Mind you, it bears noting that it is very useful for that media to be available for immigrants. It is very useful for immigrants to have immediate access to local area news, for instance. I’m going to go out on a limb, however, and guess that the governor was not saying to completely eschew Spanish media, but merely to limit their own consumption so as to prevent retarding their English development. That’s what this really comes down to: the more time the immigrant spends watching Spanish TV, the slower they will learn English. Additionally, a parent who watches nothing but Univision could unintentionally negatively effect their children’s English development. While kids, through schooling and play, certainly may have a lot more opportunities for English development, don’t limit them to the TV that you (the immigrant parent) likes. Let them watch Bugs Bunny from time to time.

It bears noting that the journalists who were hyperventilating over Arnold’s suggestions were largely from Spanish-language media companies, so their “outrage” at the governor’s comments should be seen in that light. If I were speaking with CBS and said that people shouldn’t watch Katie Couric, I suppose I could expect the same reaction. So, in total, Arnold’s comments may have been a bit gauche, considering his audience, but he was giving sound advice from a pedagogical standpoint.