Speak for yourself. You’re probably a native English speaker and have it easy.
Speak for yourself: I built on learning 2 foreign languages in highschool to end up speaking 7 languages (granted, only about 5 at a level of easilly maintaining a conversation).
The more languages you learn and the more you use them, the easier it is to add more languages to the pile.
Also, at least for European languages, because they generally are related, learning a few helps with learning others: for example, my speaking Dutch helped me learn German and there are even weird effect like me being able to pick up words in Norwegian because they’re similar to the same words in the other two or when somebody gave us an example of Welsh in a trip to Wales I actually figured out he was counting to 10, both because some numbers were similar to the same numbers in other languages plus there is a specific rythm in counting to 10.
As I see it, the more languages you know, the more “hooks” you have to pick stuff up in other languages plus you’re probably training your brain to be better at learning new ones.
That said, you have to actually try and practice them: for example, most of my French language was learned in highschool, so when I went to France or even Quebec in Canada I tried to as much as possible speak French, which helps with retaining and even expanding it so my French Language skills are much better now than when I originally learned it in a school environment.
I can speak English quite well.
It is still very good brain exercise to learn new languages. It’s a way of keeping your brain muscle in Shape. Just like math exercises and reading books.
I speak three languages. My native, one learned at school and another self taught.
In my experience, the inability to learn languages is mainly English speaking people problem.
In my experience when I lived in Holland, compared to me my friends and colleagues from English-speaking countries had the additional problems in trying to learn Dutch that people would tend to switch to English when they heard them speak in Dutch (probably because they picked up from their accent that they were native English speakers) plus their own fallback when they had trouble expressing themselves or understanding others in Dutch was the “lowest energy” language of all - their native one.
Meanwhile me - being a native Portuguese speaker - suffered a lot less from the “Dutch people switching to English when faced with my crap Dutch language skills” early on problem (probably because from my accent they couldn’t be sure that I actually spoke English and they themselves did not speak Portuguese) and my fallback language when my Dutch skills weren’t sufficient was just a different foreign language.
So some of my British colleagues over there who had lived there for almost 20 years still spoke only barelly passable Dutch whilst I powered through in about 5 years from zero to the level of Dutch being maybe my second best foreign language, and it would’ve been faster if I didn’t mostly work in English-speaking environments (the leap in progression when I actually ended up in a work environment were the working language was Dutch was amazing, though keeping up was a massive headache during the first 3 or 4 months).
That said, some other of my British colleagues did speak good Dutch, so really trying hard and persisting worked for them too (an interesting trick was when a Dutch person switched to English on you, just keeping on speaking in Dutch).
That’s because of the “language tiers”.
People don’t usually learn languages for fun, at least not to a point where they can actually speak it fluently. They learn it because they have an use for it. If you learn a language without having an use for it, you lose it quite quickly.
The highest tier language is the worldwide lingua franca: English. You learn English to talk to anyone, not to talk to English native speakers. For example, my company (a central European one) uses English as the work language. We don’t have a single English native speaker on the team. But if I want to talk to a colleague from Rumania, Egypt, Spain or the Netherlands I will talk English with them.
The next tier is the regional lingua franca. That’s e.g. Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Russian or Arabic (and likely a few others, I don’t know the whole world). These languages are spoken in certain regions and can be used to communicate with people from neighbouring countries. You can get around with e.g. German in Hungary, because most Hungarians learn German. It’s also sometimes necessary since TV, books or other media might not be available in the local language. For example, a lot of Albanians speak Italian, because TV shows and movies are rarely translated into Albanian and instead broadcast in Italian. (Also, since Italy was so close, many people watched Italian TV while Albania had communism.)
The lowest tier are local languages. These are languages that are only spoken in their own country. For example: Rumanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch and so on. People speak these languages because they live in that country. For someone who doesn’t live in that country, there’s rarely any major benefit to learning these languages.
In general, people only really learn to speak languages that are on the same tier or higher.
If you live in Albania, you learn Albanian as a child, then probably add Italian to understand TV. In school you will learn English and once you go online you will use it. You might also learn Russian to be able to communicate with people in nearby countries and if you are from the muslim part of Albania you might also learn Arabic.
If you live in Germany, you’d just learn German and English. No need for any other languages. If you spend some significant time in France, Spain or Italy, you might pick up one of these languages.
If you live in the US or GB, you start with English, and there’s hardly any point to learn anything else. By default you can already communicate with everyone, read everything on the internet and watch all TV shows and movies (pretty much everything is translated into English, if it isn’t even refilmed in English). If you try to learn another language and try to use it with native speakers of said language, chances are pretty high they just switch over to English.
I mean, I took Spanish and use it, but I’m New Mexican and work with Cubans elsewhere.
I always immediately think Jack Sparrow is Russell Brand and recoil, then remember who it actually is and then recoil again because it’s crook blokes all the way down.
You had me recoiling with you all the way through this comment bravo
I am the world’s shittiest polyglot. I lost a lot of my native language, turkish. I can get by. I speak english, but my accent is getting worse. I studied german in school for 5 years and forgot most of it. I live in the river plate, so the shitty amount of intermediate spanish I can speak has one of the worst accents for spanish, just behind tied first of caribbean and chilean. I can READ cyrillic, but not understand it, except few words whichever language has in common with languages I know. I can recognize some chinese glyphs, and understand some words.
I have no idea about any grammar words except the obvious ones (verb, noun) and get as much use of IPAs as I do IPAs (the pronunciation guide/the beer)
I have seen the vowel chart a billion times and still don’t understand it.
But did you use AI for this post? … otherwise your English is pretty sound (to me as a non-native speaker) :D
English is my primary language. I said my accent is getting worse, which is only a spoken thing
Don’t forget that you can also understand beginner level Azerbaijani and Gagauz but not speak either of them.
mən çox eyi Azərbaycanca konuşorum. /s
I probably speak better portugese than azerbaijani. / Eu problamenche falo melor portugues que azerbaijani.
Most people who take a language in school don’t keep at it. We’re just doing it because it’s required, and to pass the class. I took French in high school. The only person I’ve ever met who spoke French fluently was my teacher. I really should have taken Spanish, but I wanted to be “different”.
In Europe, also, because of the open borders, and being packed so close together, people encounter foreign languages far more frequently. It makes sense they’d all want to, and benefit from, knowing multiple languages. And, they’d have more opportunities to practice. Not many Japanese speak a second language, compared to Europeans, for instance.
I am from Portugal - which is a very peripheral region in Europe, bordering only Spain - but do speak several European languages, and one of my most interesting experiences in that sense you describe was in a train in Austria on my way to a ski resort, an intercity train (so, not even a long-distance “international” train) which was coming from a city in Germany on its way to a city in Switzerland just making its way up the Austrian-Alps valleys, and were I happened to sit across from two guys, one Austrian and one French, and we stroke up a conversation.
So it turns out the French guy was a surf promoter, who actually would often go to Ericeira in Portugal (were at a certain time in the year there are some of the largest tube waves in the World, so once it was “discovered” it became a bit of a Surf Meca) only he didnt spoke Portuguese, but he did spoke Spanish.
So what followed for a bit over an hour was a conversation floating from language to language, as we tended to go at it in French and Spanish but would switch to German to include the Austrian guy and if German wasn’t enough (my German is only passable) we would switch to English since the Austrian guy also spoke it, and then at one point we found out we could both speak some Italian so we both switched to it for a bit, just because we could.
For me, who am from a very peripheral country in Europe, this was the single greatest “multicultural Europe” experience I ever had.
That said, I lived in other European countries than just my homeland and in my experience this kind of thing seems to be likely in places which are in the middle of Europe near a couple of borders and not at all in countries which only border one or two other countries.
Speaking multiple languages is a thing because you need it.
Everyone needs to know English, because its the global Lingua Franca. Not only to speak with native English speakers but to speak with everyone. If as an Austrian I speak to someone from China, I will do so in English.
Everyone needs to know the local Lingua Franca, because it’s a massive career help and you will need it quite commonly. That’s why most people in Hungary learn German. They need that all the time, since the economies are tied so closely together.
Everyone needs to learn the language of the country they live in, because only if you know the language you can access the job market and all services without barrier.
Lastly, everyone needs to learn their mother tongue to be able to speak with their family.
If you are from Serbia and move to the Czech Republic, you will learn and frequently use four languages.
If you are from Germany and stay there, you will learn and frequently use two languages.
If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.
If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.
Well, sorta.
In my experience with British colleagues when living in The Netherlands (were you can definitelly get away with speaking only English), whilst some of them never really became fluent in Dutch, others would become fluent in it.
You see, even with English being a lingua franca, many if not most of the locals (how many depends on the country and even area of the country - for example you’re better of speaking broken German with the locals in Berlin than English) are actually more comfortable if you speak their language, which make your life easier. Also the authorities will often only communicated in the local language (in The Netherlands the central authorities would actually send you documents in English, but for example the local city hall did everything in Dutch).
That said, if you’re an English speaker you can definitelly get away with not learning another language even when living elsewhere in Europe plus I’ve observed that in the early stages of learning the local language often when a native English speaker tried to speak in the local language the locals would switch to English, which for me (a native Portuguse speaker) was less likely, probably because the locals could tell from a person’s accent if they came from an English-speaking country hence they for sure knew English whilst with me even if they recognized my accent they couldn’t be sure that I spoke English.
All this to say that whilst I think it is indeed much harder for native English-speakers to learn a second language to fluency levels even when living abroad, it’s not quite as bad as “likely never”, though they have to put some effort into it whilst non-English speakers are far more likely to naturally end up learning a bit of English in addition to their own language (but for any other language, they too have to “put some effort into it”).
That’s why I said, everyone needs (or has incentive to) learn the global lingua franca, the regional lingua franca, the language of the country they live in and their mother tongue.
As someone from the UK living in the Netherlands, these four languages are English, English, Dutch and English, so you’ll likely learn (at least to some degree) two languages.
If you are from the UK and stay in the UK, all four languages are English and thus you likely won’t have a need to ever get to fluency in a second language.
(Of course, there are some special circumstances, e.g. if you are from the UK and live in the UK but work as a French teacher, you do have a need to know French, but I’m talking about the general case.)
If you are an immigrant in a country with a low-tier language, e.g. a Rumanian living in Albania, the four languages will be English, Russian, Albanian, Romanian.
In Europe
yes for what I know, unless you are from the UK or Ireland, it’s quite common to speak at least two. Not per-se fluent, but at least conversational level. It’s usual the national language & English. I speak four and that rarely raises an eyebrow.
I studied French for six semesters. I kept failing.
Ah, ma petit chou… Voulez-vous couchez avec mois ce soir?
Pourquoi le crocodile a-t-il tué le macaron avec la pièce de vingt-cinq cents plaquée nickel?
I had a co-worker who took a few semesters of Spanish in high school, she got all As, and then went on a class trip to Mexico. At first, she couldn’t understand a thing, but she said as she listened and tried, “something snapped” and suddenly she got it.
I got out of the language requirement in college by taking computer science courses, which counted as “language” only because programming languages are called what they are. It is just the dumbest fucking shit. If they were called “paradigms” or “code instruction sets” or something like that (which would be just as or more accurate than “languages”) it never would have occurred to anyone to let us computer nerds – who are already not exactly well-rounded in general – to get out of learning a real fucking language.
That’s like taking greek class as math credit because of the symbols lmao.
My school taught Indonesian. It was a very popular complaint among students that we should be learning a more ubiquitous language like French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, or Spanish.
The only thing I know in Indonesian is ular besar (big snake)
Why ? Dutch ?
ular besar (big snake)
😉
Bahasa Indonesia is known for being relatively easy to learn, so perhaps you got lucky. At least it’s more interesting than, say, French.
Well, around 300 million people speaks Indonesian. Soo, if looking at raw speaker count, Indonesian can be categorized as ubiquitous.
300 didn’t seem like much tbh. Source: am Indonesian, or as we called it Komodos
Well, when you compare it to German, Japanese. Indonesian can have a lot of speakers when you’re comparing raw quantity of speakers.
Edit: IIRC German have around 200 million speakers.
Well, I tried to makes fun of you missing the million unit there, hah.
And to be honest there’s virtually no one actually speak formal Indonesian in daily life beside media/government stuff. Excluding the capital most city will speak their regional language especially older folks.
It’s always funny hearing newly learned non-native because the grammar is so easy and consistent but they sound like a rigid ancient soap drama to my ear.
US high schools will graduate students with missing elective credits. They won’t allow a falling grade from that rite of passage. Administrators have the power to change a grade in spite of a teacher’s documentation
