The day Roger Federer couldn’t stop laughing at CNN correspondent’s Spanish phrases — it wasn’t funny!
Federer’s wife was in the kitchen cooking and had her arms full. Federer’s five year-old son was watching movies. Federer was laughing at the news anchor with the broken Spanish: “This is the most beautiful day in Madrid in more than 50 years — more than 50 years,” the anchor was saying. Federer was laughing so hard, tears were streaming down his face.
At the end of the day, though, he couldn’t stop laughing. “I’m so sorry that I couldn’t hold it together,” Federer said to himself.
Well, this is CNN. It’s a news network. There’s no need to apologize. But, it wasn’t funny. At all.
CNN’s Spanish analyst has been “hilariously wrong” about what happened at Federer’s wedding. Juan Pablo Fernandez-Castroviejo is a self-identified and “reluctant Spanish expat living in New York” who has “been on CNN several times in the past few years and been mistaken for a Spaniard multiple times.”
This is from Fernandez-Castroviejo’s own Facebook timeline:
The media has recently been obsessed with how the Spanish media and Spanish people are so passionate about their language and pride themselves on their pride and their language.
The irony is that this type of “incomprehensible” over-representation of a country’s language in the media is one of the main reasons that Spain is a country of immigrants. Spanish-speaking immigrants tend to speak Spanish at home since they don’t feel the need to learn a foreign language at home.
The Spanish media has a large following in the United States because, quite frankly, Americans tend to be ignorant to foreign languages. The number one language barrier in the United States is in English, where the person most likely to have a conversation is