Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages
squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 days agoThat’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.)
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Yeah, ok, that makes sense.
I suppose the only part that my post adds is that in my experience for native English-speakers the tendency to learn the language of the country they live in is less than for non-native English speakers who are also not locals, because - thanks to English being the global lingua franca, almost everybody finds it easy to switch to English when confronted with a person who doesn’t speak their local language well but does speak English well, which makes it a lot harder in the early stage to learn the language of the locals (you need to be really assertive about wanting to try to speak the local language).
Certainly that was my experience in most of Europe.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah, that’s totally true. If you speak Serbian and you move to the Netherlands, nobody would (or could) switch to Serbian for you.