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.
I would of knew itd turn out this way
Blanket 🤔
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.
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)
Lol yeah, it’s just the Americans that don’t understand you. Sure…
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.
I am dating a man from England and it’s amazing how many people don’t understand his accent. It might just be me getting to know him, but I don’t find his accent (or even tough accents like Irish or Scottish) hard to understand anymore.
I mean if you never leave the US (easy to do, it’s gigantic and travel is expensive), 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.
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German, Bavarian and English 😁
Bavarian
On that note, I also understand some Swabian, Franconian, and Austrian.
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.
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As an asian, this has been my experience as well. Of course there are exceptions, but most asians I know (not just in my country) usually just speak 2 languages.
But which part of Asia are you from? Here in India, schools are required (at least on paper) to teach three languages, so most people are at least trilingual.
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.
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)
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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.
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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.
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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 🧐
Americans: “I Don’t think about you guys at all.”
You are
Your
🤣
There, their, they’re.
American here, I’m going to challenge myself to remember as many as I can.
Set: A group of things that go together.
Set: Letting a dessert cool in the fridge
Set: A stage for a play or film
Set: A command to put something somewhere
Set: A part of Tennis
…
5/704 isn’t so bad, right?
Edit: looking up the definitions shows a lot of sub-definitions that essentially have the same meaning. I don’t think it’s appropriate to say that the word has 435 meanings when “set a course” and “set a fire” are basically “start a thing,” yet they’re listed as different definitions. The are many many of these cases even just on Google’s definition blurb.
But I’m no dictionary expert so…
Yeah some do seem the same, but thats possilbe also a bias from knowning the language.
Though through thought
have/of
of/off
to/too
ad/add
I today saw someone use “theirs” in place of “there is”, and I hope that they are a non-native speaker.
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.
Oh look, it’s the same old comment complaining about another comment that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
idk I’ve seen this first time, and its hilarious, though agreed I never used Reddit that much
This has been reposted on the dankmemes subreddit a countless amount of times.
Oh man, I’m so glad that hasn’t popped up here. That sub was hot garbage. I blocked it years ago, and forgot about it until now haha.
I’m sure it has, but not everyone lives (lived?) in Reddit like you.
The only good thing that the Americanization brought is, that, except the French, the world can communicate with each other in English.
I know you are joking but based on my purely anecdotal personal experience, the French (at least in Paris) can now speak and are willing to speak in English much more than a few decades back.
The first time I went to France, almost 25 years back, I had a rough time communicating at restaurants or even buying tickets at the Paris metro stations. Not sure if the latter was an ability or willingness issue because even holding up two fingers and saying “two tickets” was apparently indecipherable. Had to muster my school days French and say “deux billets” to produce instant results.
Edit: And no, the two fingers I was holding up were not the middle finger of each hand :P
it’s like the one upside(ish) of capitalism they had to start communicating in English, because tourism.
That is the one upside to capitalism and you don’t even consider it a full upside?
well because it’s kind of a forced adoption in an ideal world we would have developed a common tongue by slowly merging the languages, or at least would have taken one that’s pretty good and then improve on it. For example Hungarian is much better in the sense that what you write is what you pronounce, not the mess that is English, so in an ideal common tongue I feel like that aspect would be adopted.
Of course Hungarian also has stupid parts, ly (<- that’s supposed to be indeed one letter) and j is the same thing. x is just ks, y is pronounced the same as i and w is just v so there is some extra fat on it, but other than that the 44 letters cover all the sounds you make while pronouncing words.
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Oh I love the UK! I just hate the Trump-impression the people who’re too old that they should be allowed to vote have given power.
We also normalized porn
You’re welcome, degens.
Even if the French could communicate in English, would anyone want to have a conversation with a Frenchman?
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.
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 can’t talk to eagles 🦅 so they don’t count that as a language
Just a friendly reminder that bald eagles just sound like noisier seagulls. :)
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
Look up the racist “le 56% face” Nazi memes
Wow. I had no idea this was a thing.
Modern neo-nazis and white supremacists just don’t really understand that the Nazis from WWII would reject and enslave a majority of them… mainly for having Jewish, Slavic, Roma, or other ethnic groups’ blood.
Turns out post-WWI/WWII economic crises lead to a lot of migration and mixing of groups, who woulda thunk?
The “le 56% face” meme, on both sides of the coin, is just a precursor to the world’s greatest Leopards ate My Face meme.
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.
Include anglo Canadians in there too!
Complaining about bilingual (english + french) positions in the public service is a favorite hobby of anglo public servants, as if the french ones didn’t need to learn a second language to get the job… Heck, it’s not rare to see/hear one argue that french Canadians should just start speaking english and stop bothering them about their “unique culture”…
But hey, it’s not racism… Or so they say 🤷
I can confirm this, in high school (Québec) no one really gives a f**k about learning English as they don’t need it if they stay in Québec and don’t understand that knowing English is a valuable asset.
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
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?
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
German here, speaking english fluently, enough french to get everything done while on vacation in France or Wallony and learning Japanese atm.
I’m also learning Japanese! How do you feel about it so far?
I’m enjoying it, but the sheer number of Kanji are quite intimidating to think about…
Wait till you discover the wonderful world of the pitch accent!
I’m using duolingo and am almost done with the first big section. It is so different compared to germanic and latin languages! But that was one of the reasons to learn it, so kinda expected. I’m also enjoying it, I don’t worry so much about reading and writing and focus on speaking and understanding, like a child would do. Reading and writing is the next step and I hope that it comes somewhat naturally this way.
I’m also using that platform, and I’m learning the written languages along the way as they prompt them. I assumed it was helping me learn, but I have no idea haha. The Hiragana and Katakana are neat compared to English letters!
Is it a lot harder to learn compared to the others you know? Other than ASL, this is my first genuine attempt after flunking Italian many, many years ago in school. I assumed I’d never tackle another language ever again, but I’m loving this so far. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that the gamification aspect is motivating me.
