Speak for yourself. You’re probably a native English speaker and have it easy.
I can speak English quite well.
I speak three languages. My native, one learned at school and another self taught.
In my experience, the inability to learn languages is mainly English speaking people problem.
That’s because of the “language tiers”.
People don’t usually learn languages for fun, at least not to a point where they can actually speak it fluently. They learn it because they have an use for it. If you learn a language without having an use for it, you lose it quite quickly.
The highest tier language is the worldwide lingua franca: English. You learn English to talk to anyone, not to talk to English native speakers. For example, my company (a central European one) uses English as the work language. We don’t have a single English native speaker on the team. But if I want to talk to a colleague from Rumania, Egypt, Spain or the Netherlands I will talk English with them.
The next tier is the regional lingua franca. That’s e.g. Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Russian or Arabic (and likely a few others, I don’t know the whole world). These languages are spoken in certain regions and can be used to communicate with people from neighbouring countries. You can get around with e.g. German in Hungary, because most Hungarians learn German. It’s also sometimes necessary since TV, books or other media might not be available in the local language. For example, a lot of Albanians speak Italian, because TV shows and movies are rarely translated into Albanian and instead broadcast in Italian. (Also, since Italy was so close, many people watched Italian TV while Albania had communism.)
The lowest tier are local languages. These are languages that are only spoken in their own country. For example: Rumanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch and so on. People speak these languages because they live in that country. For someone who doesn’t live in that country, there’s rarely any major benefit to learning these languages.
In general, people only really learn to speak languages that are on the same tier or higher.
If you live in Albania, you learn Albanian as a child, then probably add Italian to understand TV. In school you will learn English and once you go online you will use it. You might also learn Russian to be able to communicate with people in nearby countries and if you are from the muslim part of Albania you might also learn Arabic.
If you live in Germany, you’d just learn German and English. No need for any other languages. If you spend some significant time in France, Spain or Italy, you might pick up one of these languages.
If you live in the US or GB, you start with English, and there’s hardly any point to learn anything else. By default you can already communicate with everyone, read everything on the internet and watch all TV shows and movies (pretty much everything is translated into English, if it isn’t even refilmed in English). If you try to learn another language and try to use it with native speakers of said language, chances are pretty high they just switch over to English.
It is still very good brain exercise to learn new languages. It’s a way of keeping your brain muscle in Shape. Just like math exercises and reading books.
I am the world’s shittiest polyglot. I lost a lot of my native language, turkish. I can get by. I speak english, but my accent is getting worse. I studied german in school for 5 years and forgot most of it. I live in the river plate, so the shitty amount of intermediate spanish I can speak has one of the worst accents for spanish, just behind tied first of caribbean and chilean. I can READ cyrillic, but not understand it, except few words whichever language has in common with languages I know. I can recognize some chinese glyphs, and understand some words.
I have no idea about any grammar words except the obvious ones (verb, noun) and get as much use of IPAs as I do IPAs (the pronunciation guide/the beer)
I have seen the vowel chart a billion times and still don’t understand it.
Don’t forget that you can also understand beginner level Azerbaijani and Gagauz but not speak either of them.
mən çox eyi Azərbaycanca konuşorum. /s
I probably speak better portugese than azerbaijani. / Eu problamenche falo melor portugues que azerbaijani.
Ah, ma petit chou… Voulez-vous couchez avec mois ce soir?
Pourquoi le crocodile a-t-il tué le macaron avec la pièce de vingt-cinq cents plaquée nickel?
Most people who take a language in school don’t keep at it. We’re just doing it because it’s required, and to pass the class. I took French in high school. The only person I’ve ever met who spoke French fluently was my teacher. I really should have taken Spanish, but I wanted to be “different”.
In Europe, also, because of the open borders, and being packed so close together, people encounter foreign languages far more frequently. It makes sense they’d all want to, and benefit from, knowing multiple languages. And, they’d have more opportunities to practice. Not many Japanese speak a second language, compared to Europeans, for instance.
Speaking multiple languages is a thing because you need it.
Everyone needs to know English, because its the global Lingua Franca. Not only to speak with native English speakers but to speak with everyone. If as an Austrian I speak to someone from China, I will do so in English.
Everyone needs to know the local Lingua Franca, because it’s a massive career help and you will need it quite commonly. That’s why most people in Hungary learn German. They need that all the time, since the economies are tied so closely together.
Everyone needs to learn the language of the country they live in, because only if you know the language you can access the job market and all services without barrier.
Lastly, everyone needs to learn their mother tongue to be able to speak with their family.
If you are from Serbia and move to the Czech Republic, you will learn and frequently use four languages.
If you are from Germany and stay there, you will learn and frequently use two languages.
If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.
In Europe
yes for what I know, unless you are from the UK or Ireland, it’s quite common to speak at least two. Not per-se fluent, but at least conversational level. It’s usual the national language & English. I speak four and that rarely raises an eyebrow.
US high schools will graduate students with missing elective credits. They won’t allow a falling grade from that rite of passage. Administrators have the power to change a grade in spite of a teacher’s documentation
I got out of the language requirement in college by taking computer science courses, which counted as “language” only because programming languages are called what they are. It is just the dumbest fucking shit. If they were called “paradigms” or “code instruction sets” or something like that (which would be just as or more accurate than “languages”) it never would have occurred to anyone to let us computer nerds – who are already not exactly well-rounded in general – to get out of learning a real fucking language.
That’s like taking greek class as math credit because of the symbols lmao.
I had a co-worker who took a few semesters of Spanish in high school, she got all As, and then went on a class trip to Mexico. At first, she couldn’t understand a thing, but she said as she listened and tried, “something snapped” and suddenly she got it.
I took Spanish from age 12-22 and German from 18-23 and 29-31.
I speak both those languages, though my Spanish is rusty, because I moved to Germany and don’t have much contact with Spanish speakers.
Et bien vous savez quoi, on peut s’entraîner un peu. Pourquoi pas s’entraider? Je vous parle en français et vous me répondez en espagnol ?
Que linda idéa. Siempre estoy feliz cuando tengo la opportunidad de practicar los dos con alguien! ☺️
Ah merci. Ravi de vous parler en Français.
¿Que?
Joke’s on you. I can do both those accents.
I did but I had after-school classes because I sucked at taekwondo and football, lol. So I learned French and ended up moving to France, eventually becoming a national, and also learned English and ended up marrying a Brit. 🤷
I studied a book going over “chagatai tili” in highschool.
I remember absolutely 0 words or grammar.
