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.

[–] psilocybin@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have never been in an English speaking country. We learn it because of cultural hegemony

[–] ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] GreenTeaRedFlag@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago

I've met two other americans that spoke german after leaving high school, and one of them was in Europe

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

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.