The French government must have lost its mind...

[Torsten]

This is so ridiculous, it isn't even funny! I suggest we remove countries who have medieval governments like France from the EU. I had to re-read this article several times until I came to understand that this was not an April Fool's joke:

In a controversial move the French government has said that it will enforce a law so that the words 'Facebook' and 'Twitter' will not be allowed to be spoken on the television or on the radio.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's colleagues have agreed to uphold a 1992 decree which stipulates that commercial enterprises should not be promoted on news programs.
Broadcasting anchors from now on are forbidden to refer to the popular social networking site and the microblogging phenomenon, unless it is pivotal and relevant to a news item.

TOEIC short conversations: Two friends update each other on their schedules

[Tomasito]

Well, I think there is nothing wrong with this decision. It's a good decision by the way. Sometimes people get tired of hearying the words Facebook and twitter in every single second. Those companies in my view they even don't need to make advertisements because of their popularity, thanks to radios and tvs. .
_________________
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
- Will Durant

[Tomasito]

If we see and analyse carefully the reasons behind this decision, we will perfectly understand and maybe agree with the french government.
_________________
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
- Will Durant

[Torsten]

Reminds of the way communist regimes used to censor the language of the common people. It's a bit like in George Orwell's novel '1984'. Crazy French. Downright scary...

TOEIC short conversations: Employee is being briefed on how to get travel costs reimbursed.

[Jamie (K)]

I think it's just as weird that Germany doesn't let people under 18 get business permits. Or drive.

[Torsten]

Before you start 'a business' you will probably need to work as a freelancer which is something you can do as a teenager in Germany. I don't think there are many 15 year old business owners in the US. As for driving, you can drive a motorbike at the age of 16. In the US you need to give young people the permission to drive a car because you don't have a modern public transport system or bicycle lanes in cities. We have both in Germany and throughout most of Europe.

TOEIC listening, talks: Introducing the next speaker

[Jamie (K)]

Sorry, Torsten. Sixteen-year-olds were allowed to drive in the US even when cities were more compact and most people had access to mass transit. Actually, to be more precise, in most states 16-year-olds can drive only if they have taken a driving course and have passed the state test. If they don't take a course, they can't get a license until they're 18, even if they can pass the test.

One common phenomenon here is that many Germans visiting or living here think it's vitally important for teenagers to drink alcohol, and they're appalled that we don't allow it here. That's why one famous German CEO's wife was arrested for providing booze to kids whom she then let out on the roads to drive home. She was warned by the police a couple of times, but she continued to do it and was finally arrested and went to trial. This is German arrogance to the point of self-destruction, but it's a common mentality of Germans who come here.

There are teenagers in the US who do need to incorporate businesses because their idea or invention has become popular enough that they need the protection that a limited liability company would provide them. This includes children who have started everything from chocolate businesses to nail polish lines to electronics repair companies.

[Cgk]

[Cgk]

Although I'm not fond of either, I think that anybody on this planet, who wants to say "facebook" or "twitter" should be able to do so, no matter whether it is into a microphone or through a paper roll.

Claudia
_________________
In the land of the ignorant, the biggest fool is king.

[Torsten]

I like the following quote by an American reader of the Daily Mirror:

This smells of pure Provincialism. The French jealously guard the 'integrity' of their local language. They seem to forget that a language is a living thing - in so far as it exists only because it is used by living beings to communicate ideas that are relevant at a certain place and time. Canonizing a language is a death sentence because it keeps the language from adapting to changing times and the changing needs of the people who would use it. Remember Assyrian? Once the most widely used language in the world of politics and trade? The language is dead because it was canonized, As the speakers of Assyrian died out they were replaced by people whose needs were not met by the old language - people who spoke the 'new' language. But again 'Provincialism' was invented by the French, nicht wahr?

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1394558/French-ban-words-Twitter-Facebook-used-TV-radio.html#ixzz1eZn8yCwF

TOEIC listening, talks: Voice mail announcement

[Jamie (K)]

Claudia, I was being a little sarcastic, but it is a fact that when I deal with Germans here (many, many Germans) a main topic of conversation for them is constant complaining that US states don't allow people under 21 to drink alcohol. Even Germans in their 20s and 30s complain about this, because they see it as proof that the United States "takes away your freedom". (It's part of a pattern I notice of Germans constantly pointing out things they think prove that the US is not a free country. My impression is that they are trying to absolve themselves of what national guilt still remains since the Nazi era, and their way of doing that is to constantly point out things that "prove" that the US is "racist" and "not free".)

Teenagers in the North do need someone to buy alcohol for them, because we don't have a tradition of moonshining up here, and if someone's mother found that some kid was hiding some fermenting beverage or other, there would probably be hell to pay.

The other thing they do a lot is try to demonstrate that "Americans are stupid". Sometimes you'll see a German's business failing here because of outrageous, easily preventable cultural mistakes, but the German won't adjust, because he thinks that if Americans weren't stupid they'd do things his way. There are even famous cases of large German corporations having lost massive market share due to this attitude.

[Jamie (K)]

The French intellectual class is so paranoid about the entry of new English words into their language, while they use hundreds of English words that entered at a previous time and are now not recognizable as English. Nowadays some of the English words they object to are actually French words that entered English centuries ago and then returned.

This foolishness has its counterpart in the attitude of many of the British toward Americanisms being used on their soil. Often the person condemning them will use several older, domesticated Americanisms in his statement without even realizing it.

[Cgk]

[Jamie (K)]

Claudia, the Germans who come here do not succeed in showing us that the United States is "not free", because all they're doing is pointing out that the US is not an anarchy. We already know that, because we're taught in 9th-grade civics about the difference between freedom and license. Apparently these Germans were out sick the day that lesson was taught at their school. They expect that "freedom" in the US means the ability to do absolutely anything you want with impunity, which is ridiculous.

I think the people here who asked you what it feels like to be free must have been the same ones who (quite seriously) asked a Ghanaian student of mine if she wore clothes in her country.

Most states actually did lower the drinking age to 18 around 1970, but the huge increase in drunk driving fatalities convinced them to raise it again.

And I won't even get into foreigners' ideas of what the US is like or what they think we do in the world. I know that Germans typically think that the entire US is California, that approximately 50% of the population is black, and that our banks will give you a rifle as a gift for opening an account (thank you, Michael Moore). The Spanish think we lie around on nude beaches. To see the distorted conception foreigners have of American life and behavior, you just need to watch what they do when they think they're imitating us.

Beyond that, we get blamed for a lot of things we don't even do, because dictators and others in some countries use us as a scapegoat for preposterous things, much as past generations blamed "The Jews". A Greek or Swiss Internet service provider that hasn't invested in enough technology to handle its peak traffic times will tell customers they're being bumped off line because "the Americans" are all online during those hours. People in North Africa are told by their potentates that their unemployment is caused by the US, and not by all the corruption and poor law enforcement that drains their economy. Nigerian Muslims are told by imams that the polio vaccine was developed by the US to make black men sterile. There's more fantasy than fact abroad about what the US is and does.

The reason there are no German towns in American cities now is not merely that Germans integrate here, but that life is pretty good in Germany, so we don't get consecutive waves and waves of German immigrants. The Italian town and the Irish town, or in my city, Greek town, largely consist of ethnic restaurants and bars, but the Italians, Irish and Greeks who own them are scattered out in the suburbs with everybody else. The people in the China towns aren't the same ones who lived there 20 years ago, because those people moved out to the suburbs and sold their places to newly arrived people. It's the same with the Mexican towns. And everybody intermarries. I know this, because in my neighborhood the kids with the Arabic, Greek and Asian names familiar to me from childhood do not look even remotely Arabic, Greek or Chinese a generation later. A white family owns the Chinese restaurant, but it has never changed hands. It's the same family that ran it when I was in high school, but they don't look Chinese anymore.

The only ones who don't integrate are certain (usually less educated) segments of the Polish and Irish community, who retain an ethnic jingoism generations after all knowledge of the original country has faded. Usually they have little or no contact with people who are actually from Poland or Ireland. Half of them are mixed with some other ethnicity, but they've decided to identify as Polish or Irish. They're like the freckly green-eyed redheads you meet who insist they're American Indians.

[Torsten]