Ahh yes the blanket shit on Americans post.
It’s timeless
A classic
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 20 percent of Americans can converse in two or more languages, compared with 56 percent of Europeans.
Excuse me, but as an American I take offense to this meme. I speak 4 languages, English, Southern, Bostonian, and Spanish /s
Spanish
I refuse to believe any
American can speak Spanish well.(this is a joke)
Meanwhile, many africans speak 2 languages in their family, a third one for people that don’t speak one of theses two and have studied french and english.
So, exactly how it works in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesian.
They speak native local language from their city, other two from other islands, English for international language, sometimes Chinese, Malay, Arabic, Korean, or Japanese. Not to forget the national language, Indonesian.
Basically most European are the second worste in the world when it comes to language. The worst being the Anglo-Saxon with special mention for the amercain among they who think it is normal to only speak one.
They don’t think it’s normal, it’s all that’s necessary. English is the lingua franca
The incentive to learn a language is in software, not human.
English is the lingua franca
My french side scream every time I see this oxymoron.Also, it is the lingua franca only in some context like international business and internet. But for many other thing including international business that doesn’t occure world wide other language are more useful. Such as mandarin chinese, arabic, spanish, french, russian.
Learning 3+ languages sounds like a lot of work. Colonizing the entire world so that you never have to learn a second language seems like the smarter move if you ask me 🧐
I am a bilingual illiterate. I cannot read or write in 2 different languages.
Pretending not to know is the preferable choice for me.
What were we talking about?
The distance from Atlanta to LA is about the same as the distance between Paris and Beirut. There is somewhat less linguistic diversity on the Altanta/LA route than the Paris/Beirut route (because of the genocide).
There’s actually significantly more but you’d have to stop ignoring indigenous languages. Look, all those different families whereas from Paris to Beirut it’s Indo-European over Turkic to Semitic, that’s all (assuming you manage to avoid Hungary, that’s Uralic, just like Finns, Sami and and Estonians. Then there’s the Basques, but that’s really it. Yes Albanian is Indo-European even if it’s hardly recognisable).
Of those languages, the population is very small and centralized to the point of being not noteworthy as a factor in language learning. This is not to mention that the map you’ve cited was a pre-contact linguistic graph, and unfortunately many of those languages have become extinct with their unique aspects lost forever to humanity. Compared to Europe, the states have become a desert of language with few natural language learning opportunities outside of English and Spanish
Why speak human languages when you can be cat meow nyaaaa meow meow
Americans: “I Don’t think about you guys at all.”
Um, plenty of Europeans speak 3 or more languages. Native language, language of the country you’re living in, and English.
Dutch, English (Traditional not simplified), and french, and I can understand german but not speak it myself.
This. I think european and asian should be swapped in this meme. I think its rarer to see asian speak 3 languages than seeing european speak 3 languages
Surely that depends on where in Asia you’re looking at as well? On average, the number of languages people speak is quite different between, say, India and Japan. Or Switzerland vs Romania in Europe.
“Hey let me just make a quick generalization about like three billion people”.
German, Bavarian and English 😁
My 3 favorite experiences with language as an American:
(1) My Jamaican coworker who I couldn’t understand for the life of me and my Ukrainian coworker who my Jamaican couldn’t understand at all, the Ukrainian coworker understood the Jamaican coworker just fine though and I understood my Ukrainian coworker just fine. Basically it turns into a fun game of telephone whenever we need to talk.
(2) My former coworker from Haiti who no one but the hiring manager and I could understand, the best part about this is that I didn’t know he had an accent. I just didn’t hear it somehow. He was a great guy, he went back home a few years ago when his mother passed. Got stuck due to the pandemic and never came back to the company. I hope he’s doing well.
(3) My former coworker from Guatemala insisting English wasn’t my first language as to him it sounded like English was my second language at best. I’ve been working on it since then. I still suck at it.
Europeos, cuando llegan a México y no pueden hablar Espanol:
“Voy a coger el autobús”
I’ll never understand this attitude that Europeans have towards Americans. I thought we were friends.
North Americans and Europeans are only friends when someone from a different continent is in the room.
I remember back in high school there was this Danish foreign exchange student one year, and she would not shut up about how this or that was better in Denmark.
Well in fairness if you came to America and saw what a depraved, decaying shithole it is after being raised on a diet of airbrushed American media you’d probably be appalled, too.
I can’t count how many stories I’ve heard of people visiting from civilized parts of the world and breaking down crying in the street when they see how American’s treat homeless people.
The average Dane is firmly convinced that Denmark is the most perfect place on earth, a paradise that the rest of the world can only dream of. It follows that any reasonable person who’s not already a Dane must have a desire to become one. If they don’t, there must either be something wrong with them or they simply haven’t heard enough about how good Denmark is.
When you like paying taxes cos you get something for it, thats saying something!
The upper class in Denmark are just as big piss babies about paying their taxes as they are anywhere else. Ordinary Danes might like to say they’re happy to pay taxes but in reality few of them would pass the opportunity to have their car fixed off the books or to buy beer in Germany to avoid the Danish alcohol tax.
Those kind of people exist anywhere, that isn’t tied to any nationality. Guess it stemms from insecurities and chasing some weird need to feel superior about something.
They believe themselves superior in every way, including racially. Look up the racist “le 56% face” Nazi memes to see what they think about that.
look up racist memes intentionally
I think I won’t thanks
Hey we speak two languages…English and Bad english…
Oh look, it’s the same old reposted garbage meme that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Oh look, it’s the same old reposted garbage comment that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Americans have trouble with any accent that isn’t the blandest, nails on chalkboard accent.
Once had one ask me if I was speaking English when I spoke to him (for context I am Irish, the north bit)
My god son, just how many marbles were you trying to eat while talking to those nice Americans? You do know that the untied states has around 30 dialects, and every accent from around the world, right? I’m sure you knew better than that when you generalized 300 million people into one anecdote.
Bland and nails on chalkboard? That’s like the opposite of bland. Not great, but definitely not bland. Bland is blunt and flat. Nails on chalkboard is shrill, sharp, and grating. I just don’t understand how you can believe both at the same time.
Here, I mean more the reaction to it, I sometimes cringe at the pronunciation or intonation in the way one would to nails on a chalkboard (the idiom can have more than one meaning or reaction attached to it)
That doesn’t change the argument. Bland and cringe are also not like each other. I’m all for you criticizing something because it’s different than you, but at least use your language consistently and properly. How would anyone interpret a secondary analogy without knowing how you personally react? It already has a clear meaning on its surface. Occam’s razor would indicate that’s enough. Why would anyone invent a second possible scenario that’s only knowable if you have access to information that isn’t well known, and in this case, near certainty of being unknown? Just say hearing the accent from some other country makes you cringe. Communication doesn’t have to be difficult unless you make it so.
