this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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damn, bro. It's almost like America is bigger than all of Europe and shares one language, and it's hard to become fluent in a language when there's no one to speak it with. If you are asian or european you can hop in the car or on a train to practice your french or vietnamese, but unless you're practicing Spanish or some specific language kept in your area(Polish in Chicago, Pennsylvania Dutch, German in some parts of Wisconsin) you have no way to practice.
Not only this, but I've met one German speaker irl since german class about 15yr ago. Many times "bilingual" in europe means "X and English," do German people oft go 15 years without meeting another English speaker? Seems like there'd be one on every corner.
I have never been in an English speaking country. We learn it because of cultural hegemony
That's what I'm saying, that is pretty common over there whereas here the only other useful language is spanish (or maybe mandarin depending on location), and that is only to help people who come over and only speak spanish, it isn't like english which can be necessary for business or culturally just normal due to british occupation. I do think spanish should be a bit bigger of a focus in school but also you'd be 100% fine not knowing it.
There's tons of Germans who don't go a year without being exposed to Catalan so there's that. Given that the mandatory third language tends to be Romanic (usually French or Latin) it's not terribly difficult to pick up, either.
What's true though for pretty much all of Europe is that multilingualism still tends to be solely within the Indo-European family, unless your native language isn't that is which is quite the minority.
I've met two other americans that spoke german after leaving high school, and one of them was in Europe