I attended a wonderful wedding and reception this past weekend. Happiness was everywhere. Balloons stuck to the ceiling and their ribbons hung down like a colorful drizzle. All the tables were adorned perfectly, and the people who sat at them were speaking and smiling and enjoying the festivities, the dreams of the new couple, the reunion of families, and the food and drink.

My niece looked across the large room and noticed some of the workers whispering. They might as well have been shouting. Clear across that room, my hard-of-hearing, 15-year-old niece read their lips as clearly as if they were at our table.

“Those people over there are complaining,” she said. They thought their conversation was private. It might as well have been recorded with spy equipment, because people who are used to reading lips don’t need to hear to know what is spoken.

Speech is more than words. It is more than vocabulary and grammar. It is what you are saying with all of your self. And it is more than sound. It’s on our face, in our hands, in our chest and legs, on our lips. It can be loud or quiet or even silent. But silence is loud enough to the deaf who read the speech on someone’s lips.

Most of us are always producing language, often communicating more than we intend. We see it in each other. The deaf aren’t the only ones reading inaudible language. We all read each other like books. We do in fact read each other’s minds by means of facial expressions and body language. Language is a very large thing, very complex. No wonder it takes so much effort to learn another language in this kind of depth that puts you on equal footing with native speakers.

Of course, there are plenty of Mexican-Americans who like to think and say that they are simply reclaiming their ancestors’ homeland when they immigrate here, but that is far from the truth.  Mexico took the land by force after Spain had tried its hand at “owning” much of the current USA.  Furthermore, the different populations native to some of the United States never considered Mexico to be the rightful heir to their land and people.

Still, many Latinos have been here for hundreds of years, well before the European ancestors of some people who gripe about America being sold out to immigrants.  If we say that almost all of us are immigrants, we can sort ourselves out into groups of those whose ancestors came long ago and have lived here for several generations, and those who are fairly new.  Yes, some Latinos are new to this soil, but others were here possibly before your great-grandparents.

I find that nonLatinos have a strong tendency to think that people who speak more than one language and who are not white or black are immigrants.  That’s a hilarious misunderstanding of the American patchwork.  We are many different groups and languages.  Always have been.

That’s why everybody knows about Mexico City. Well, I mean they know it’s big, like really big. And everybody here knows that everybody in Mexico eats burritos, except that it’s not really so. Most Mexicans don’t eat burritos. And most Mexican burritos don’t look or taste like the ones you buy here. Well…maybe people here don’t know much about Mexico after all.

Or Canada. Can you name any prominent Canadians? Canadians can name lots of prominent people of the U.S.

I met a woman from the Dominican Republic the other day who doesn’t know much about her island country’s neighhbor to the west. Do you know which country that is? I asked the young woman if she spoke the neighbor’s language, and she said no. She said Haitians speak Portuguese.

How is it possible that she could think that? Haitians speak French, Creole, and oftentimes English.

People born and raised in U.S. aren’t the only ones who don’t know much about their neighbors.

My team and I are glad we took the more disciplined route.  Two books we recently put out are Dating Latino Immigrants: Five Pitfalls to Avoid So Your Relationship Can Last Forever, and Feeling Better Instead of Bitter about the Latino Immigrant.  Both books are on Amazon and other places.  I used to have to practically beg publishers to look at a manuscripts for magazines or books.  Not anymore.  Plus, my writings have a farther reach by being available in digital and hard copy form.

All kinds of people are doing this the fast, cheap, and not-so-professional way.  In my opinion, you’ll be a lot happier and more influential if you do your books the right way.  Spend the necessary money.  You will get what you pay for.  (Because we handcraft people’s books when putting them into digital form, we only accept a limited number of requests.)

Some people debate whether he said those exact words, but if he was like most other people, he made good use of a good line when he found it, and he probably said it in many variations. It really is a great comment on English grammar.

Unless they’re weirdos, people usually use one way of talking and another way of writing. The rules of written language are considered the official ones, but most of us don’t care so much about them when we are talking, and it is truly WEIRD when people insist on speaking according to the rules of proper writing.

Spanish uses a few dangling prepositions. For instance, to say that one group of people is always the group working for another, we might say, “Siempre trabajan para.”  They’re always working for.  (Emphasis on “for”.)

Siempre tratan de.  They’re always trying to.  (Emphasis on “trying” with no success.)

Siempre vienen de.  They’re always coming from.  (Emphasis on “from”, never going “to”.)

These normal examples of Spanish, but they are not used often, nothing anywhere close to the every-other-moment way we do in English.  You can almost say the dangling preposition doesn’t occur in Spanish, but only almost.  If you want to talk like a textbook, that’s your choice.  If you want to sound like you actually know the spoken language, you’ll dangle an occasional preposition like a real pro.

Then he took a commercial break and on came a software company advertising fast, fun and easy foreign language. Why, anybody could do it. Fast. Fun. Easy. I think it was indeed made for Americans! You could probably learn it while you lose weight and get rich. Multitasking like a productive American!

I agree with Clark. We don’t want to lose weight; we want to have lost it. We don’t want to save and plan; we want to have saved and planned. We don’t want to learn language; we want to have learned it.

If Americans stop to think this over, I believe they have it in them to approach language learning with a new attitude. They would make language a daily matter, not a fast and easy thing, but a daily thing. Ordinary. Practical. Daily. Encouraged in class. Spoken and sung around home, at play, in the car, on the bus, at the games, at bedtime. That is exactly the kind of feedback we get with Max and Max Spanish, and that’s why people who follow our lead do well. Anyone really can do this.

(Note: Clark Howard does not choose the radio commercials.)

As time goes by, students who are faithful to the supervised learning process are able to tell when they need to pace themselves in certain areas. However, the farther they go into the learning, the more new things they run into that require a supervised pace. Students need both a supervised pace and a self pace.

Designing supervised pacing requires a lot of skill, but most people think self-pacing is a glorious indication of high quality. A well designed supervised pace will yield wonderful results that self-pacing can never deliver.

He wasn’t interested in saying even one sentence right. People who want to be fluent in a language usually want to sound like they’re speaking the actual language instead of a distant imitation of it. If you feel that fluency comes with difficulty, it’s because so much has to happen in the brain to get those words rolling out.

I tell students to be patient with themselves for at least three reasons when they are working toward fluency:

1. Fluent speakers have their mouths two or three syllables ahead of what they say at the moment. It takes time to rewire your head to process another language that way, but you most definitely, without question, certainly, no doubt can. If you will be patient.

2. Fluent speakers have learned to think in ways that a given language requires. They don’t put a new language into all the old patterns. Be patient with yourself while you rewire your brain to think new ways.

3. Fluent speakers master small amounts of vocabulary at a time. They may pound their head with more, but they master a small amount at a time, using it in daily life.

Language learning is not easy or fast or always fun, but it’s always good.

One of the biggest roles a classroom teacher plays in the kind of instruction we deliver is the interest that the teacher shows toward our instruction. The students take their cues from on-site adults.

Our instruction can put students past 1st-year high school Spanish in a relatively short time, if the on-site adults believe in the program. If they don’t, it doesn’t stand a chance even to make an average dent. Technology just can’t replace humans altogether. It will always be a tool. As people give us feedback, we adjust the tools. That makes the on-site adults that much more irreplaceable.

1. Spanish classes teach that Las Posadas are a central religious Christmas tradition in Mexico. But people in Mexico will tell you that the tradition is no longer widely observed in the way our schools tend to teach. In fact, I just listened to two well-educated men in Mexico say: “Las posadas ya no son nada.” (Las Posadas are nothing anymore.) They were referring to the way the tradition has turned increasingly into parties and dancing. It’s not that nobody observes the tradition in its religious form, but its meaning continues to disappear from Mexico’s cultural landscape. Schools just need to keep things in perspective and up to date when they teach about holidays.

2. Día de los Muertos is another Mexican tradition that our schools teach as the BIG deal in Hispanic culture. In most places in Mexico, the holiday is still celebrated, but in different ways and with different theologies. On the other hand, almost all Mexicans who come here leave the holiday behind, except as a memory. It is pretty doggone hard to find many immigrants who still celebrate it the way our schools describe and reenact it. Whether I check in with Hispanic bakeries, party supply stores, or individuals as I travel around the U.S., I get this answer: “Really, I don’t know of anyone who is actually celebrating the holiday anymore.” This doesn’t mean schools are wrong to teach about it, but they should stay up to date on it. For instance, there are very interesting reasons why most Mexican immigrants do not continue the tradition, and these are sometimes the same reasons why many people in urban centers in Mexico have a difficult time continuing the tradition.

3. I’ve said it before, and so have Mexicans: Hardly anyone in Mexico celebrates or cares about Cinco de Mayo. Yet our schools continue teaching it as a point of cultural contact with our neighbor to the south. Cinco de Mayo is not a Mexican national holiday. Somehow it has stuck like glue to the curriculum, whether in regular schools or homes.

There are many other Hispanic countries and customs to talk about. Max and Max Spanish lessons give kids all kinds of insights into daily life. Holidays, whether accurately portrayed or not, are a relatively small piece of culture. Students like to learn about the several hundred other days of the year too.