Comment on Bit harsh?
oxysis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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.
drcobaltjedi@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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.
oxysis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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.