TV hinders immigrants from learning English

After the ballgame the other night, when the Sox lost a tough one to the Blue Jays at Fenway, I began surfing the 450 or so channels of TV that are available to me on my Comcast system. I really don't know how many channels there are, but there are many.

As I was surfing along, I discovered that it seemed like on every other channel someone was speaking Spanish.

So after finding nothing interesting to watch and not being tired enough to go to bed, I thought it might be fun to see exactly how many Spanish-speaking channels were on the TV that I was paying for and could not understand because I do not speak Spanish.

There were 17 Spanish-speaking stations on TV at that time. I thought about it for a few moments and said to my bride: "If there were no Spanish channels on TV, the Spanish-speaking people in the area would have to learn English."

I remembered then that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that he learned English by watching and listening to American television.

Maybe if we could get all of the communication companies to pull the Spanish-speaking stations off the air all over the country, we'd finally be able to get rid of "Press one for English and two for Spanish" every time we make a phone call to our local bank, hospital, department store, or whatever type of business we call.

It is high time that the immigrants coming into this country learned our language so as to be able to hold a normal conversation in English, the language of this country, and learn how to read road signs, etc., or get out.

I think that by having 17 Spanish-speaking stations on the TV at one time, all the time, encourages the immigrants to go to those channels for news and entertainment, rather than watch and listen to the American English version channels as Arnold did when he came here from Austria.

He didn't demand, nor did he get, a TV station in Austrian for him to watch at his leisure so he wouldn't have to learn the English language. Spanish-speaking channels shouldn't be available, either.

Ron Peters
Hudson