When you can drive for more than a week straight and still be in the same country, needing to know other languages is a lower priority.
A low enough priority that the further I get in my efforts, the more it sinks in with me that I’m mostly wasting my time. It’s a hobby more than a skill.
My attempts to learn my family’s native language have hit a roadblock: now that I have a handle on the grammar, there is no one for me to speak to. It’s frankly pretty upsetting and I’m very discouraged about it.
You’re required to know at least a workable amount of English in order to live and work here, so no matter where they were born, there is absolutely no one in what feels like this entire NW hemisphere that I do not already share a language with. And only one time have I ever known before they said. All other times, they’ve just happened to mention they’re from there after I say something about learning it.
Most immigrants I’ve met are perfectly incognito, and they speak more than well enough for us to understand each other casually. The point of language is to communicate. Goal achieved.
Trying to find a language partner in this situation is proving not only impossible, it’s nigh-pointless to even do unless you’re bored. It’s the same online — nearly everyone already shares a language with me, you’d never guess most of the time, and even country-specific subs sometimes post things in english.
There’s literally no one for me to practice on and zero need to practice unless I feel like going halfway around the globe pretty often in order to make the effort worthwhile. At which point they will still speak to me in english unless I’m lost in the super rural areas, and I will simply cry.
I’ve come to accept that going overseas even once in my life is never going to happen. Europeans seem to vastly overestimate Americans ability to afford to do that. Even if we could, we still have an entire hemisphere to get through first. Which costs significantly less, is almost just as fun, and doesn’t take multiple years of work for a skill you’ll only ever use once.
Europeans seem to vastly overestimate Americans ability to afford to do that.
This part, I’m struggling to stay afloat I can’t splurge for a intercontinental trip. I can, however, drive my car for a day or less and be in a completely different biome/culture. Each state is essentially it’s own country with it’s own laws and cultures. An overarching American influence but each place is definitely unique to itself.
I like to learn a language not so much out of practicality though because you’re right, we can speak to everyone here with English. I like to learn a language just for the mental benefits of training my brain and learning more about another culture.
I think it’s more related to the language importance than it’s size. We have continental countries (Russia, Brazil, etc) that you can also drive for a week without leaving and learning English is important there.
If the world had chosen another language for communication probably US citizens would need to learn another language still.
Also when you genocided the indigenous people so hard you never needed to adopt any loan words from the native language.
A lot of Americans in the south appear to speak Spanish from what I’ve noticed while traveling there.
we insert token Maori words at the beginning and end of our emails, that totally counts
You might be surprised. Half of us were either born overseas or had at least one parent born overseas. A little under a third of us have English as our second language. That doesn’t mean that two thirds of us only speak English - only that English is our ‘home’ language.
I know there’s a lot of multiculuralism in the USA also, but I don’t know whether those percentages compare.
Source: https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/media release3
There are more Spanish speakers in America than Spain.
Australians be like: dnS
Legit though, nobody alive today had anything to do with English becoming the trade language. It used to be French, but that went away and English filled in.
Any country where English is the primary language is going to have less people needing a second language for anything other than the general benefits it brings, which aren’t truly necessary.
It isn’t like everyone, everywhere speaks English on top of their first language, nor does everyone speak multiple languages. They do just fine with the dominant language of their country, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Also, Australians don’t speak English. They speak Cunt :)
Also, Australians don’t speak English. They speak Cunt :)
It’s not like americans speak english either.
More like the Bri’ish don’t (know how to) speak their own goddamn language.
Dare I ask where the “T” is?
Also, the Bri’ish decided the adopt French spelling conventions into their language because they wanted to be
snobbyfancy, like “colour” and “theatre” – it’s a mess.We North Americans follow the lead of patriot and genius Noah Webster who just wanted words to have sane, consistent, intuitive spelling conventions.
“I could care less”
Ay, all’a y’all’ns kin jist git rait on outta hyuh. Dayum yankee carpetbaggera.
Even the English royalty would speak in French in official ceremonies
Yup. It’s just the vagaries of time, war, and shifting alliances that put English into the main trade language. The term for that is lingua franca because of the French dominance in that regard.
The only reason English is probably going to stay in that place is inertia. Well, that and the friendliness of English borrowing words so freely. It’s easier to just adopt words with complex meanings into English than it is to translate them. But why change the trade language when it would cost more to shift things for no practical benefit.
Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded more and better language options in school. But it was the eighties and very early nineties, in a rural town, I was “lucky” to have two choices in high school. But I think if I’d had access younger, the way some countries do English, I would have gotten much better at Spanish than I did. Even my ASL is better than my Spanish, and I have arthritis that makes signing hard.
Interestingly, while French was the lingua franca of Europe for several hundred years, it wasn’t the origin of the term ‘Lingua Franca’.
That term meant the “language of the Franks” and was the Mediterranean trade language in the medieval through Renaissance eras. It was actually a pidgin of Italian, French, Greek and Arabic adopted as being roughly mutually intelligible among Venetians, Byzantines and North Africans.
The reference to the ‘Franks’ is because the generic word for a western European (in the Byzantine, Greek world) had long been “Frank”.
My relatives in australia speak english and a bit of german. They told me they had the choice to learn german or spanish in school.
But what is the point, other than you really want to learn a random language? I learned french, then english and later i had the opportunity to learn italian or spanish if i wanted to. But that’s because these are the languages people speak here and the bordering countries. My relatives never used any of their german, except when they went to europe once.Learning a language is good for your perspicacity in general. Like doing sudokus except it lets you read the news or poetry or something from another culture in its original form.
Australians? You mean upside down Americans?
I prefer to call them Bruce.
The whole South America:
Well it depends, in my city in Colombia they pushed english a lot. Was also mandatory in my university in case your school was not bilingual. May be an oddity but you are certainly expected to learn it at some point to not fall behind in this globalized world. Also USA companies hire people cheaply across all industries and have common time zones, so it can be actually worth.
Yeah, in mine too. But if you are not going to leave the continent or study it is not so necessary. I mean the reason I know English is just to look for knowledge.
Also as just @Badass_panda says, 3 languages in the whole hemisphere.
New Zealand is at least teaching maori languages
And if anyone reading this wants to get a better understanding of pronouncing Māori words, it’s got some similarity with Japanese. Here’s a tip:
a = ah
e = eh
i = ee
o = aw (as in hawk, but not USA’s ‘hock’)
u = oo (as in ew but less of the ‘e’)
wh = f
The r consonant rolls a bit, so it’s like a very soft d sound.And when vowels are close together they tend to kind of mesh into one, like ‘ai’ into ‘eye.’
So the word whanau (family) is pronounced fah-know, and kaimoana (seafood) is k’eye’-maw-ah-nah. And the Māori word itself is maah-aw-ree, but we’d let you off if you said mow-ree (as in mowing the lawn) because you’re at least making an attempt.
With the 3rd official language being NZSL ( New Zealand Sign Language )
It’s an Anglosphere problem
It’s not a problem, though? Many people learn other languages in the US/Aus/etc. They just don’t get a chance to use them, and those skills fade very quickly.
I’m sure more people would be fluent in another language if daily life motivated retention.
I’ve studied 3 but only used French for the first time this year in my 40s. I just could never afford to travel until work sent me.
It was inevitable that some language would become the most “global.” It’s not anyone’s fault if it also happens to be their native tongue.
Even the Anglophones that live in places where they’re in minority refuse to learn the local language. That’s the case in Quebec anyway.
Chuck us English in there too please.
