Whoever made this needs to LEAN the language they’re using first.
Next they lern to spel
In our defense, most of us can’t even speak English.
Removed by mod
Isn’t the girl from Québec in the movie? They go get her from a university in Montreal, if I remember correctly…
The short story by Ted Chiang is really sad
Hard to learn a language when there’s nobody fluent to talk to in that language
One of the things Discord is actually good for! I learned Welsh and found a community specifically for practicing talking the language mentored by more experienced people.
I don’t want to talk to people online in a different language they’re mean.
Depends where you are in the country or how wealthy you are, on whether learning a foreign language is a meaningful thing to do. People who live towards the middle and up north can easily go their entire lives without knowing another language. People who live towards the southern border could get a lot out of knowing Spanish. Towards either coast and knowing another language maybe useful. It’s a massive country that primarily speaks English, so it shouldn’t be a shocker to see that many wouldn’t need to learn a second language. I, myself barely know part of another language. And part of that is, it just isn’t really useful to me since almost no one here speaks another language.
Yeah, I mean fuck us and all we do suck, but I don’t think people outside the US and Canada really grasp how big this place is. A few years ago I drove to Montreal. It’s a 12 hour drive going 100km/h the whole way, and that’s to get to the nearest city that doesn’t speak English by default, a 24 hour drive in any other direction and I would still be surrounded by people speaking English.
For me it’d be a minimum of a 18 hour drive just to go somewhere where English isn’t always the default. Can be over a day’s journey to the other side of country. It’s just not like Europe where it’s an hour’s of a few hours trip to another country where they speak another language. Instead it’s a several hour trip just to go to the next state over who speaks the same language as me.
There is a lot of fair criticisms to make of our countries, but this isn’t really one of them. Instead you have to look a little deeper to understand the why people here don’t always know a second language.
I’m a citizen of the United States.
I speak 4, besides American English, at various levels of proficiency, but I’m an American-born son of immigrants who splits time between the US and EU (my wife is Dutch). I also enjoy linguistics and etymology.
Even though this is anecdotal, every daughter and son of an immigrant diaspora that I personally know, like me in the US, speaks multiple or at least 2 languages.
I argue this meme refers to an issue largely for Americans of European descent. Since a very young age, I noticed “white” people in America seem to be scared of “new” or “foreign” things. One of them is learning a language, trying to speak it in public with a native-speaker, and getting corrected for mistakes which will happen, including self-styled “leftists” and “liberals” (the American definition).
I categorize this specific phenomenon, this fear of embarrassment, as another facet or aspect of what some of my black colleagues back in the States refer to as “white fragility”.
Those people who look down on “Americans” should talk to more of us who aren’t of European descent. Perhaps, that may give some depth to your perception of us, or of what our capacity for a global perspective and living as part of a global community is.
I mean I don’t think most black Americans know a foreign language either, because most of them aren’t part of an immigrant diaspora. And IIRC, this phenomenon happens to some extent in most predominantly English speaking countries. Most foreign language learning is a matter of practicality more than a desire to expand knowledge or something, and most non-immigrant Americans don’t have any particular reason to learn one.
Congratulations on erasing the 15% of black Americans, clearly a group that’s too privileged to even be mentioned
If we are throwing shade at American education, I like to start with statistics and basic logical fallacies.
Yeah, I met americans on the internet too.
