{"id":56762,"date":"2023-03-01T00:41:55","date_gmt":"2023-03-01T08:41:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=56762"},"modified":"2023-03-01T00:41:55","modified_gmt":"2023-03-01T08:41:55","slug":"secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-an-english-language-learning-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=56762","title":{"rendered":"Secretary Antony J. Blinken At an English Language Learning Event"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
03\/01\/2023 02:30 AM EST<\/div>\n
\n

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State<\/p>\n

Tashkent, Uzbekistan<\/p>\n

Uzbekistan State World Languages University<\/p>\n

SECRETARY BLINKEN:\u00a0\u00a0<\/b>Well, first, thank you for letting me join your class today.\u00a0 Now, I was listening very carefully to the first question, about what would you do if you were president; what are the hard parts, what are the easy parts.\u00a0 I have a chance to sit with the president of Uzbekistan later today.\u00a0 I took very good notes in my head, so I\u2019m going to be able to share with him some of your ideas.\u00a0 But not just with him; also, when I go back to Washington and I see President Biden, I\u2019m going to share your ideas with him too.\u00a0 Because I heard some very, very good ideas \u2013 and thank you.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019ll also tell both of them that you understand that it\u2019s not always easy being president, because you have to make hard decisions, and sometimes you have to balance what one person wants against what another person wants.\u00a0 So it\u2019s not always easy.\u00a0 But thank you for sharing those ideas.<\/p>\n

And to all of you, it\u2019s just wonderful to be \u2013 to be here with you.\u00a0 When I was about \u2013 probably about your age, maybe a little bit younger, and in my case I moved to another country \u2013 I moved from the United States to France and I had to learn French, so I remember well what it\u2019s like to learn another language.\u00a0 But it\u2019s a wonderful thing because it just opens your mind to different \u2013 to different things.\u00a0 We were talking about some of the different books that you like to read in English.\u00a0 And I\u2019m really happy that we\u2019re able to help share English with you, because one of the realities now in this moment in history \u2013 and it was different before and it will probably be different in the future \u2013 but at least right now, English is probably the international language.\u00a0 When people do business together, they usually speak in English.\u00a0 If you\u2019re on the internet, which is maybe not such a good idea, it\u2019s often in English.\u00a0 A lot of the music, the movies \u2013 in English.<\/p>\n

And so it\u2019s a wonderful ability to have to speak English, to understand English, and it\u2019s something that we are very, very happy to share.\u00a0 We\u2019re working here in Uzbekistan not only to help instruct English, but also, especially, to help train teachers in English.\u00a0 And I think to date we\u2019ve trained almost 10,000, and now there are English-language school books in about 10,000 schools here in Uzbekistan.\u00a0 In many ways, English is the most important export from the United States to other countries.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m so glad that each of you \u2013 and boy, my \u2013 I don\u2019t think \u2013 I don\u2019t think I would be able to say what you\u2019ve said in English, never mind in a \u2013 for you, in a second language when I was your age.\u00a0 It\u2019s wonderful, and I\u2019m just very thankful to each of you for sharing with me today.\u00a0 And I wish you very good luck in your studies.<\/p>\n

Thank you for letting us drop into your classroom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

03\/01\/2023 02:30 AM EST Antony J....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56762"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56763,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56762\/revisions\/56763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}