4 ms·
This is only true in bigoted European stereotypes of Americans. 20% of the country is bilingual. In port cities such as San Francisco or New York the ratio is m
by xiaoma 12y ago
This is only true in bigoted European stereotypes of Americans. 20% of the country is bilingual. In port cities such as San Francisco or New York the ratio is much, much higher. It's just not that special. Non-Asians learning Chinese is still somewhat special, though much less so than it was in the 90s.
- raverbashing 12y agoBigoted European stereotypes? Yes, a lot of them know a second language, usually because of family. Of course that's not what it shows when most tourists don't even try to speak the local language in Europe.
- tluyben2 12y agoWell it's not that strange; in many EU countries most people also only speak their own language. I'm not sure it's more normal in the EU to speak two languages than the US. I'm from the Netherlands so I have a skewed perspective on all it considering all the people I know speak 3-5 languages well enough to hold a non casual conversation. 20% is rather a tiny % for my taste anyway, so not difficult to be an bigoted European as the chances of running into a non 1st / 2nd gen American who speaks two languages is just not very high. And seems tv-shows / films want to push that idea a bit more by, whenever someone blurts out a foreign sentence, making it grammatically wrong and pronunciation wise a complete joke (no-one would recognise it as the target language if they didn't say it explicitly). Not that i'm saying tv shows are a good reflection of how it is, but a lot of people don't know any different... (Same vice versa by the way).