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> Because personally I doubt I will ever learn a second language, but I'm sure I could given enough time and the right incentive. Yeah—I know I can do it, and

> Because personally I doubt I will ever learn a second language, but I'm sure I could given enough time and the right incentive. Yeah—I know I can do it, and even know that I enjoy learning another language, but also know from experience that I don't have enough natural reasons to use anything but English, that I'll have any hope of keeping it up without committing to permanently spending 10+ hours a week doing nothing but practicing the language for the sake of it, all for the occasional few minutes a year (optimistically) in which it's actually useful, or for the once-a-decade trip I might take to somewhere it's widely spoken. Au revoir my once-somewhat-decent French. Europeans sometimes imply Americans are dumb or hopelessly provincial for being so persistently monolingual, but it's hard as fuck to keep up a second language when you can travel 1,000 miles and the locals are all still speaking English (at least, mostly). European learners of other European languages are doing it on easy mode, compared to us. It's hard to find a route anywhere in Europe that long that doesn't pass through at least three different languages, as primarily spoken by the locals, and even finding one with that few takes some effort. So I'm both aware that I can learn another language, and aware that I in-fact won't short of some huge shake-up in my life circumstances, which may as well be the same thing as "can't".

fluoridation 4y ago
>it's hard as fuck to keep up a second language when you can travel 1,000 miles and the locals are all still speaking English (at least, mostly) Nonsense. I live in Latin America and English is a second language for me. I'm not sure if there are even any land routes I could take to reach an English-speaking country, as I believe the Colombian jungle interrupts the road. Learning a language is about four things: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. With the Internet you can do three of those four things right from home. Hell, I've been learning English for 24 years and for the first 20 I had maybe one or two conversations with native speakers. The question is not how far you need to travel to speak to a native, but whether there's anything in that language that interests you. Language after all is just a tool to move ideas between people's brains. If there's not then yeah, you would have no reason to learn a language. And I'm sorry to say that does make you provincial. Please don't take it the wrong way; I don't mean it as an insult, just as a statement of fact. You were born into your culture and you're satisfied with ignoring everything else. You've never thought "oh, I wish I could read this, but it's not in English" or "I love this book/show/movie/etc.; I wish I could experience it as a native would", or at least not to the point that it inspired you to learn.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  English is a bit of a special case, being the modern lingua franca (LOL), having two top-tier media producing countries behind it (plus several smaller but not-insignificant ones), and representing an incredible proportion of the world's wealth and economic power. It's telling that a lot of successful creators of foreign-language film, in particular, end up switching to English—it's where the money is, which brings a lot of other benefits to speakers of the language (native or otherwise). I remember at one point, when I was a still trying to keep up my French, I spent a fair amount of time trying to track down some equivalent to what Friends has been (so I gather, anyway) for English-language learners—every option seemed much worse (far shorter, lower quality—which, Friends isn't even that high a bar) and even those were nearly impossible to get ahold of, because the rights holders just didn't care about foreign markets (since no-one who can speak English well is going to care much about a mediocre French sitcom, unless they're like me and trying to learn the language). Music's a little easier, but hell, even there half the time they sing in English. Maybe it's improved since about a decade ago, but at the time, there was just nothing. Meanwhile there are dozens of shows with many, many episodes that could help provide daily exposure to colloquial, conversational English, that are relatively easy to come by (just don't pick The Wire—even Americans have trouble with that, between the authentic Baltimore accents and slang and the pervasive cop-talk). I actually think another language that's got a huge advantage here, for foreign learners, is Japanese. It was hard not to be envious of the Japanese resources and media readily available, even back in the '00s (let alone now), compared with even a language as important and heavily-studied as French. Which is really surprising and impressive when you consider that Japanese is probably the most insular of the major world languages—one might expect French, German, and Spanish, at least, to do at least as well on that front, given that they're read and spoken widely on multiple continents by far more people than live in Japan, but no. I think it's in part because they've been able to resist the shift to preferring English media that other countries have experienced—you look at French TV schedules and there's a lot of translated English media on there, for instance, while I don't think the same is so broadly true in Japan, with the result that they have a stronger domestic media market than many other states.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
myth2018 4y ago
> Europeans sometimes imply Americans are dumb or hopelessly provincial Indeed, and not only because of monolingualism. During my time abroad, one thing frequently caught my attention: when I first met someone, they'd always said "I'm from country A"... except people from US. They introduced by mentioning their cities instead. I always wondered why is that so? Do they assume people around the world know their geography? Do they don't learn at least a little about other countries at school? And on monolingualism: granted, English is currently the de facto international language, so the economic incentive for them to learn a second language might be lower. But don't they generally feel curious about other cultures, reading foreign original works, or simply getting a grasp on how other languages express ideas?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I think when we travel abroad, we're aware everyone can tell we're Americans without our having to say so :-) > I always wondered why is that so? Do they assume people around the world know their geography? Do they don't learn at least a little about other countries at school? It's habit. It's how we talk to one another about where we're from—major city, or nearest major city. Aside from a few states where people like to lead with that (mostly Texas and California—meanwhile, if someone says "New York", they probably mean the city; there's a little easy-to-miss comic jab about this in the show Archer, where Archer a couple times corrects someone who says "New York City" with "you can just say New York", as the latter usage reads "higher" in a social-class sense). It's a consequence of our largely-homogenous culture being spread over such a huge land area, I think. Recall, again, that we generally have way less experience talking to people who live in other countries, on account of how very far we have to travel to encounter many such people—and even then it's mainly Canadians, who can and do sometimes pass for American pretty well (we're much worse at passing as Canadian) and Mexicans, those being the only two countries that share a land border with us. 99.9% of the time when we're telling someone where we're from, it's someone who is familiar with US geography. Besides, "American" doesn't narrow things down very much. It'd be like someone from Germany leading with "Europe" when describing where they're from. Right, I guessed that already—but where? Germany? Austria? Switzerland? Belgium? Our nationality is far less specific, geographically, than those in Europe. > But don't they generally feel curious about other cultures, reading foreign original works, or simply getting a grasp on how other languages express ideas? Sure, but it's a big commitment to both learn a language and keep up that skill, and it mostly has to be maintained kind-of "artificially", for Americans. Conversational skills and accent in particular can be very difficult to maintain. Americans remain strong aspirational speakers of second languages, it should be noted—Spanish and sometimes a few other languages (French is common, Chinese increasingly so, others like German or Italian sometimes) are taught, to some degree, to nearly all our kids, but it's hard to even find good teachers because there's just no culture in which to keep up those skills, so a lot of the time those classes are taught by people who aren't good speakers (let alone native) themselves. The kids, for their part, promptly forget everything except a phrase or two, since they never use the language outside class, and even the ones who try to go farther find it both practically difficult and, lacking much extrinsic motivation or a kind of natural need, discouraging. > reading foreign original works I mean... very little reading happens these days, period, aside from trash-tier online reading, romance novels, and self-help books. At least in America. We're far removed from a time when "author" could practically be counted a blue-collar profession, there was so much demand for fiction. Among the same groups of people in which reading remains semi-common, you're likely to find folks trying desperately to hold onto their grasp of one or more major literary foreign languages (and mostly failing at it). [EDIT] Actually, now that I think about it, you may also be seeing some class bias—Americans who can travel abroad are more likely to have at least some of their culture and norms influenced by the set of people who think in cities (if not more specific!) everywhere—they don't visit France, they visit Nice, they don't visit Italy, they visit Milan, they don't have a modest apartment in America or even New York (City) but Manhattan, and so on.

fluoridation 4y ago

>it's hard as fuck to keep up a second language when you can travel 1,000 miles and the locals are all still speaking English (at least, mostly) Nonsense. I live in Latin America and English is a second language for me. I'm not sure if there are even any land routes I could take to reach an English-speaking country, as I believe the Colombian jungle interrupts the road. Learning a language is about four things: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. With the Internet you can do three of those four things right from home. Hell, I've been learning English for 24 years and for the first 20 I had maybe one or two conversations with native speakers. The question is not how far you need to travel to speak to a native, but whether there's anything in that language that interests you. Language after all is just a tool to move ideas between people's brains. If there's not then yeah, you would have no reason to learn a language. And I'm sorry to say that does make you provincial. Please don't take it the wrong way; I don't mean it as an insult, just as a statement of fact. You were born into your culture and you're satisfied with ignoring everything else. You've never thought "oh, I wish I could read this, but it's not in English" or "I love this book/show/movie/etc.; I wish I could experience it as a native would", or at least not to the point that it inspired you to learn.

yamtaddle 4y ago
English is a bit of a special case, being the modern lingua franca (LOL), having two top-tier media producing countries behind it (plus several smaller but not-insignificant ones), and representing an incredible proportion of the world's wealth and economic power. It's telling that a lot of successful creators of foreign-language film, in particular, end up switching to English—it's where the money is, which brings a lot of other benefits to speakers of the language (native or otherwise). I remember at one point, when I was a still trying to keep up my French, I spent a fair amount of time trying to track down some equivalent to what Friends has been (so I gather, anyway) for English-language learners—every option seemed much worse (far shorter, lower quality—which, Friends isn't even that high a bar) and even those were nearly impossible to get ahold of, because the rights holders just didn't care about foreign markets (since no-one who can speak English well is going to care much about a mediocre French sitcom, unless they're like me and trying to learn the language). Music's a little easier, but hell, even there half the time they sing in English. Maybe it's improved since about a decade ago, but at the time, there was just nothing. Meanwhile there are dozens of shows with many, many episodes that could help provide daily exposure to colloquial, conversational English, that are relatively easy to come by (just don't pick The Wire—even Americans have trouble with that, between the authentic Baltimore accents and slang and the pervasive cop-talk). I actually think another language that's got a huge advantage here, for foreign learners, is Japanese. It was hard not to be envious of the Japanese resources and media readily available, even back in the '00s (let alone now), compared with even a language as important and heavily-studied as French. Which is really surprising and impressive when you consider that Japanese is probably the most insular of the major world languages—one might expect French, German, and Spanish, at least, to do at least as well on that front, given that they're read and spoken widely on multiple continents by far more people than live in Japan, but no. I think it's in part because they've been able to resist the shift to preferring English media that other countries have experienced—you look at French TV schedules and there's a lot of translated English media on there, for instance, while I don't think the same is so broadly true in Japan, with the result that they have a stronger domestic media market than many other states.
- fluoridation 4y ago

myth2018 4y ago

> Europeans sometimes imply Americans are dumb or hopelessly provincial Indeed, and not only because of monolingualism. During my time abroad, one thing frequently caught my attention: when I first met someone, they'd always said "I'm from country A"... except people from US. They introduced by mentioning their cities instead. I always wondered why is that so? Do they assume people around the world know their geography? Do they don't learn at least a little about other countries at school? And on monolingualism: granted, English is currently the de facto international language, so the economic incentive for them to learn a second language might be lower. But don't they generally feel curious about other cultures, reading foreign original works, or simply getting a grasp on how other languages express ideas?

yamtaddle 4y ago
I think when we travel abroad, we're aware everyone can tell we're Americans without our having to say so :-) > I always wondered why is that so? Do they assume people around the world know their geography? Do they don't learn at least a little about other countries at school? It's habit. It's how we talk to one another about where we're from—major city, or nearest major city. Aside from a few states where people like to lead with that (mostly Texas and California—meanwhile, if someone says "New York", they probably mean the city; there's a little easy-to-miss comic jab about this in the show Archer, where Archer a couple times corrects someone who says "New York City" with "you can just say New York", as the latter usage reads "higher" in a social-class sense). It's a consequence of our largely-homogenous culture being spread over such a huge land area, I think. Recall, again, that we generally have way less experience talking to people who live in other countries, on account of how very far we have to travel to encounter many such people—and even then it's mainly Canadians, who can and do sometimes pass for American pretty well (we're much worse at passing as Canadian) and Mexicans, those being the only two countries that share a land border with us. 99.9% of the time when we're telling someone where we're from, it's someone who is familiar with US geography. Besides, "American" doesn't narrow things down very much. It'd be like someone from Germany leading with "Europe" when describing where they're from. Right, I guessed that already—but where? Germany? Austria? Switzerland? Belgium? Our nationality is far less specific, geographically, than those in Europe. > But don't they generally feel curious about other cultures, reading foreign original works, or simply getting a grasp on how other languages express ideas? Sure, but it's a big commitment to both learn a language and keep up that skill, and it mostly has to be maintained kind-of "artificially", for Americans. Conversational skills and accent in particular can be very difficult to maintain. Americans remain strong aspirational speakers of second languages, it should be noted—Spanish and sometimes a few other languages (French is common, Chinese increasingly so, others like German or Italian sometimes) are taught, to some degree, to nearly all our kids, but it's hard to even find good teachers because there's just no culture in which to keep up those skills, so a lot of the time those classes are taught by people who aren't good speakers (let alone native) themselves. The kids, for their part, promptly forget everything except a phrase or two, since they never use the language outside class, and even the ones who try to go farther find it both practically difficult and, lacking much extrinsic motivation or a kind of natural need, discouraging. > reading foreign original works I mean... very little reading happens these days, period, aside from trash-tier online reading, romance novels, and self-help books. At least in America. We're far removed from a time when "author" could practically be counted a blue-collar profession, there was so much demand for fiction. Among the same groups of people in which reading remains semi-common, you're likely to find folks trying desperately to hold onto their grasp of one or more major literary foreign languages (and mostly failing at it). [EDIT] Actually, now that I think about it, you may also be seeing some class bias—Americans who can travel abroad are more likely to have at least some of their culture and norms influenced by the set of people who think in cities (if not more specific!) everywhere—they don't visit France, they visit Nice, they don't visit Italy, they visit Milan, they don't have a modest apartment in America or even New York (City) but Manhattan, and so on.