In fact, they all spoke English amazingly well. I complain about Hungarian, but it is logical and is pronounced phonetically. What you see is what you get -- kind of like Spanish. There is no gender issue, like French. There are very few irregular verbs. In contrast, English is amazingly difficult, and the more I learn about other languages, the more impressed I am by people who manage to learn English.
It's full of irregular verbs, and the spelling and pronunciation seem to follow no rules that one can hang on to when trying to navigate the words that come from many different roots. Then there are all those homonyms -- words that are pronounced the same but spelled differently, or words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, depending on context. It's a mess.
I want to say that I can't understand how English became a world language, but I kind of know why. It is infinitely flexible, and most English speakers -- the ones I know, at any rate -- are pretty forgiving. If they get the meaning, they don't usually care whether you were "correct."
In contrast, everyone in Budapest is a Hungarian teacher, from the shopkeeper to to the ticket taker at the movihaz to the kind stranger who gives up her seat on the bus for a gimpy American. Whenever you open your mouth, they correct the fine points of grammar that you have missed because you've only been speaking the language for three weeks.
So to those yahoos who want to restrict entry into the US to English speakers only, or keep citizenship away from people whose English doesn't measure up to some impossible standard, I say this: Go try to learn a new language yourself. Especially if you are over 21, you'll find it amazingly difficult. And bear in mind that English is one of the hardest.
I bet that the loudest English-only advocates don''t speak any other languages. Just a guess ...
