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)
I mean if you never leave the US (easy to do, it's gigantic and travel is expensive/people are poor), it's kinda understandable that you'd struggle with accents because you rarely hear any, let alone other languages. I know americans that have trouble with english accents lmao
You'll probably hear more and more varied accents in an average US city than in all of Ireland.
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.
Um, plenty of Europeans speak 3 or more languages. Native language, language of the country you're living in, and English.
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.
Meh I only speak English and Norwegian. I can (with extreme difficulty) make myself understood in German, but I wouldn't say I "speak German" . Although anyone who speaks Norwegian can also understand Swedish and Danish (not easily in the case of Danish unless it's written).
I think it also really depends where you are, which is why generalising entire continents maybe isn't very useful. Someone from Luxemburg or somewhere in the Netherlands with more recent immigrants is going to be a lot more likely to speak multiple languages than say someone from Russia or more rural France, just as someone from China is more often going to be monolingual compared to someone from India or Singapore
More likely to run into a Portuguese speaker in Luxembourg than Russia for sure.
"Hey let me just make a quick generalization about like three billion people".
Dutch, English (Traditional not simplified), and french, and I can understand german but not speak it myself.
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.
I've met two other americans that spoke german after leaving high school, and one of them was in Europe
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.
Please add a /s to your comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States#/media/File:Languages_cp-02.svg
There are even plenty of first language speakers of 30+ languages in the US with hundreds of thousands and millions of speakers. In addition to the people that immigrated.
Spanish – 41.3 million (13.2%) Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and all other varieties) – 3.40 million (1.1%) Tagalog (including Filipino) – 1.72 million (0.5%) Vietnamese – 1.52 million (0.5%) Arabic – 1.39 million French – 1.18 million Korean – 1.07 million Russian – 1.04 million Portuguese – 937 thousand Haitian Creole – 895 thousand Hindi – 865 thousand German – 857 thousand Polish – 533 thousand Italian – 513 thousand Urdu – 508 thousand Persian (including Farsi, Dari and Tajik) – 472 thousand Telugu – 460 thousand Japanese – 455 thousand Gujarati – 437 thousand Bengali – 403 thousand Tamil – 341 thousand Punjabi – 319 thousand Tai–Kadai (including Thai and Lao) – 284 thousand Serbo-Croatian (including Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian) – 266 thousand Armenian – 256 thousand Greek – 253 thousand Hmong – 240 thousand Hebrew – 215 thousand Khmer – 193 thousand Navajo – 155 thousand other Indo-European languages – 662 thousand Yoruba, Twi, Igbo and other languages of West Africa – 640 thousand Amharic, Somali, and other Afro-Asiatic languages – 596 thousand Yiddish, Pennsylvania Dutch, and other West Germanic languages – 574 thousand Ilocano, Samoan, Hawaiian, and other Austronesian languages – 486 thousand Other languages of Asia – 460 thousand Nepali, Marathi, and other Indic languages – 448 thousand Ukrainian and other Slavic languages – 385 thousand Swahili and other languages of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa – 288 thousand Malayalam, Kannada, and other other Dravidian languages – 280 thousand Other Native languages of North America – 169 thousand other and unspecified languages – 327 thousand
yeah we're not sorted by ethnicity/language, so unless you live in a big city with a china town or little italy, you'd have to know the local Thai family to learn their language.
Its a pet peeve of mine, which urban-rural area are you living in? Which language would you like to learn?
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.
Fun fact: Some places in Europe "bilingual" is used as an euphemism for students with middle eastern backgrounds. When used like this it carries lots of negative connotations and authorities try to limit the concentration of "bilingual" students at schools as they're seen as the source of all kinds of trouble.
Does anyone have that meme about how you drive four hours through Europe and discover twelve kinds of racism you didn't even suspect existed?
You can drive through twelve villages neighbouring villages and discover twelve kinds of xenophobia. They'll still gang up on you if you try to join in, though.
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
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.
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.
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.
My theory is they don't like constantly seeing us in their news and entertainment when we rarely see anything at all from their country.
Thing is, there's not much American news outside of the US. I live in Canada and have far less news about America than I'd thought there should be given how we are neighbors and partners. Most of the news I used to hear about the USA is from Reddit. And when I visit France (which I do regularly, bring born there), there's almost nothing about the US there.
Recently though, Trump was also over and it wasn't pretty. Also when going on Reddit, it's 80% about US News and content, but not necessarily the best news.
Overall, what bothers me and others is how much patriotic a lot of the Americans seem to be and how great they seem to think they are, even when you hear how bad the society is in terms of healthcare, pension, divided politics, crimes, conspiracy theory, etc.
But everytime I've been to the US, I've only met great and friendly people and have always appreciated it. You usually hear about the bad parts in the news.
We are only friends because the other big guys look way because out of the big guys the usa look the least scary.
where i grew up in burger land, back in the 80s, the public schools were teaching us all spanish in from age 5 to 10. not like true bilingual education, but we had a spanish class once a week. it last about 2 years before the white nationalists--who panic at the idea of working class people easily communicating with each other--got it shut down. between that and some years working with seasonal agricultural workers practicing their english, i am at the comprehension level of an inebriated toddler. i wish i had more opportunities to practice. honestly, the US should have all its signs in english and spanish anyway, but you know the reactionaries would go info a full blown pogrom over even a whiff of that being proposed.
i remember some small business tyrant in florida in the 2000s called up my work one time and wanted me to pass along his complaint to my boss that our phone system had an option to "press ocho for espanol". he said that our company even offering the option to "those people" was wrong... in FLORIDA... the state with the name that means "land of flowers" in spanish.
Are foreign languages classes in general not mandatory in US schools ?
Here in
every kid will have classes for at least two languages (one for four years, one for two IIRC), sometimes three. Depending on where they go to school the kids will sometimes have a lot of choices (Chinese, Polish, regional languages, etc.) or sometimes only either English, Italian, German, or Spanish.Learning sign language sounds pretty cool but I'd be afraid to lose it even faster than an unused spoken-language if not actively using it
Also you'd be able to communicate semi-secretly like a fucking Bene Gesserit so there is also that incentive
in secondary school (ages 14-18) it was highly encouraged to take at least 2 years of a foreign language, though american sign language counted. and kids on the "not college" pipeline didn't have to do that. j'ai trois ans de les cours de francais, but i haven't had much opportunity to practice or use it conversationally in like the 25 years since.
edit: secondary school offered french, spanish, german or ASL. the private $$$ schools offered mandarin and others.
I think a lot of people don't realize that America is almost 12% as racist as Europe.
Go easy on us, our 1% needs to keep us stupid for myriad reasons, mostly to stay in power. Don't worry though, they'll come for you next, wherever you are. Likely selling you on some other enemy or distraction.
Gives some perspective on american culture and problems compared to the rest of the world doesn't it?
Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1). This translates into 43.0 million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills
Source: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
I've heard nothing but bad things about American schools and they're said to revoltingly underfunded especially in poor and non-white communities. Seen from an outside perspective it seems like all American schools do is multiple choice tests, bullying, pledge of allegiance, school shootings, eat hot chip and lie.
Austerity and culture war has consequences, one of them is that students are not given then education they need.
The school shootings are statistically insignificant but magnified to enormous size by the media, but other than that yes.
I'm all for american self-depreciation but:
"34% of adults who lack proficiency in literacy were born outside the US."
https://www.thinkimpact.com/literacy-statistics/
I hate to extrapolate data as an idiotic internetter but being born in the US and being illiterate could also be because we have so many immigrants that aren't set up for success right away and aren't as concerned with education as they are with meeting their most basic needs.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigration-by-country
Even if you excluded them (which seems like a very
approach) these people are only illiterate because they're from brown countries", you still have an education system where 13.9% of people are coming out illiterate.I'm all for american self-depreciation
I am not american
because we have so many immigrants
Nice of you to edit in the part that confirms you're not just a nationalist, but a racist too.
Lol damn you don't have to call me racist. I'm not, and just saw someone using a pretty general statistic to imply American education is terrible or something. I'm just someone who sees appropriation of incomplete information to create a half baked idea that makes people feel like they understand something complex when in reality we are all probably wrong in this thread. Such is the internet though.
And I was talking about my own opportunity to self depreciate, and wasn't assuming anyone elses nationality.
Yes I did edit my comment lol. We do have a lot of immigrants that may come from poorer countries in search of a better life. Whats wrong with that? How do you know I'm not specifically proud of that for my country? You are the one implying Americans are less-than because of some statistic.
When you are so militant with discussions, how will you ever come to an understanding? Why be so mean?
So? Takes like six months to teach an adult to read, that's not an excuse.
Which illustrates her point well. 2/3 were born inside the US then.
Could first/second generation immigrants born in the US be more likely to be illiterate? Is the American education system simply bad at teaching kids to read? No idea.
I just have a compulsive personal issue with people using data like they are justified to say they know what causes the statistic they quote. I realize social media is more of a way for people to get a little dopamine instead of trying to understand the world but I'm okay getting downvoted to add context lol.
Were you adding context though? Does it justify the situation if a percentage of people are migrants (who often are fluent in a language above the given literacy btw.)?
For real literacy skills in the US are a huge problem, it is a systemic problem of which the burden is heavily placed on individuals that are marginalized. Neolibs might quote:
It is estimated that these negative social and economic outcomes cost the United States $362.49 billion annually.
I say watch the whole Parenti lecture if you can: https://twitter.com/a_lutacontinua/status/936363027502391298?lang=de
Parenti's questions:
- What happens to the people that can't read in the US?
- What happens to the children (who don't have food) in the US?
- What happens to the people without houses in the US?
Edit The fascists mentioned for example were the right wing Nicaraguan death squads, you can find more about them in the Jakarta method
So first of all, thank you for the civil discussion because that is the biggest lacking quality of scored comment sections like this site. It seems like discussion always brings details that are helpful when we are condemning an entire country with little information provided. This is why I like discussion and not militant downvoting and personal attacks.
I truly have no narrative here but I just searched for immigrant literacy and the first thing I found:
"41 percent of immigrants score at or below the lowest level of English literacy — a level variously described as "below basic" or "functional illiteracy"."
https://cis.org/Immigrant-Literacy-Self-Assessment-vs-Reality
Thank you for the info and sources. I do have time to watch the lecture, and will.
Where’d you get that figure? World Population Reveiw puts it at 99%. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/literacy-rate-by-country
Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1). This translates into 43.0 million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills
Source: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/Country%20note%20-%20United%20States.pdf
The chart on page 4 seems to put the US literacy rate at about the same as Germany and the UK.
If you didn't look at this list and ask "Why did they pick these countries and leave out others?" you're not doing critical thinking. The countries with the highest literacy in the world are almost all either socialist or formerly socialist countries.
Not sure what that has to do with the American literacy rate? Also the reason those countries are on the list is because it only uses oecd member countries (the dark blue ones).
https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/406e3430-fc99-408a-8bc8-59297c1525fa.webp
Hexbear blocks externally hosted images so I can't see that. Can you edit it and put it in the instance properly with copy paste?
because it only uses oecd member countries
Ahh yes, the "international community".
I’ve edited the comment. The OECD seems to be the only source that breaks down literacy rate into levels. Otherwise every country that is kinda rich has a 99% literacy rate because everyone knows how to read.
It's an OECD report. They're comparing to OECD countries and I'd take the Polish numbers with a grain of salt as they have quite a couple fewer refugees, modulo Ukrainians (Ukraine has an education system ballpark Greece or Italy).
Public school and universal literacy was literally invented in Germany (Luther was lobbying princes for it so people could read the bible).
同志们，我们现在加入了 Lemmy 党。打到 Reddit 邪党！Lemmy 万岁 万岁 万万岁！
这句子绝对不是用 Google翻译 翻译出来的。
Oh wow can't believe I actually remember learning words from 2nd grade. Like long long ago, haven't used that language in over a decade. Somehow I can remember a decade old language I don't even use anymore, but not my Bitwarden password.
German here, speaking english fluently, enough french to get everything done while on vacation in France or Wallony and learning Japanese atm.
Internet user tries not to make everything political challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
Bruv the left ain't either. Destroying the US education system was a bipartisan reach-across-the-aisle operation all the way up and down. The fascists wanted education destroyed and the polite fascists wanted education privatized and for profit, which is the same thing as destroyed.
Hmm look at a map of education by state. Then pull up a map of red vs blue states. Notice something strange there? This isn't a BoTh SiDeS thing, this is a right thing. They want you dumb so you fall for their lies, get in line, and vote for them, it's simple.
