this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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damn, bro. It's almost like America is bigger than all of Europe and shares one language, and it's hard to become fluent in a language when there's no one to speak it with. If you are asian or european you can hop in the car or on a train to practice your french or vietnamese, but unless you're practicing Spanish or some specific language kept in your area(Polish in Chicago, Pennsylvania Dutch, German in some parts of Wisconsin) you have no way to practice.
Not only this, but I've met one German speaker irl since german class about 15yr ago. Many times "bilingual" in europe means "X and English," do German people oft go 15 years without meeting another English speaker? Seems like there'd be one on every corner.
I have never been in an English speaking country. We learn it because of cultural hegemony
That's what I'm saying, that is pretty common over there whereas here the only other useful language is spanish (or maybe mandarin depending on location), and that is only to help people who come over and only speak spanish, it isn't like english which can be necessary for business or culturally just normal due to british occupation. I do think spanish should be a bit bigger of a focus in school but also you'd be 100% fine not knowing it.
I've met two other americans that spoke german after leaving high school, and one of them was in Europe
There's tons of Germans who don't go a year without being exposed to Catalan so there's that. Given that the mandatory third language tends to be Romanic (usually French or Latin) it's not terribly difficult to pick up, either.
What's true though for pretty much all of Europe is that multilingualism still tends to be solely within the Indo-European family, unless your native language isn't that is which is quite the minority.
Please add a /s to your comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States#/media/File:Languages_cp-02.svg
There are even plenty of first language speakers of 30+ languages in the US with hundreds of thousands and millions of speakers. In addition to the people that immigrated.
Spanish – 41.3 million (13.2%) Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and all other varieties) – 3.40 million (1.1%) Tagalog (including Filipino) – 1.72 million (0.5%) Vietnamese – 1.52 million (0.5%) Arabic – 1.39 million French – 1.18 million Korean – 1.07 million Russian – 1.04 million Portuguese – 937 thousand Haitian Creole – 895 thousand Hindi – 865 thousand German – 857 thousand Polish – 533 thousand Italian – 513 thousand Urdu – 508 thousand Persian (including Farsi, Dari and Tajik) – 472 thousand Telugu – 460 thousand Japanese – 455 thousand Gujarati – 437 thousand Bengali – 403 thousand Tamil – 341 thousand Punjabi – 319 thousand Tai–Kadai (including Thai and Lao) – 284 thousand Serbo-Croatian (including Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian) – 266 thousand Armenian – 256 thousand Greek – 253 thousand Hmong – 240 thousand Hebrew – 215 thousand Khmer – 193 thousand Navajo – 155 thousand other Indo-European languages – 662 thousand Yoruba, Twi, Igbo and other languages of West Africa – 640 thousand Amharic, Somali, and other Afro-Asiatic languages – 596 thousand Yiddish, Pennsylvania Dutch, and other West Germanic languages – 574 thousand Ilocano, Samoan, Hawaiian, and other Austronesian languages – 486 thousand Other languages of Asia – 460 thousand Nepali, Marathi, and other Indic languages – 448 thousand Ukrainian and other Slavic languages – 385 thousand Swahili and other languages of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa – 288 thousand Malayalam, Kannada, and other other Dravidian languages – 280 thousand Other Native languages of North America – 169 thousand other and unspecified languages – 327 thousandyeah we're not sorted by ethnicity/language, so unless you live in a big city with a china town or little italy, you'd have to know the local Thai family to learn their language.
Its a pet peeve of mine, which urban-rural area are you living in? Which language would you like to learn?