I know it’s a joke about Americans not speaking a second language, but they aren’t too bad at it. They land at about 23% and seeing how the EU average is 25% that’s rather good. https://www.americathebilingual.com/the-surprising-truth-about-american-bilingualism-what-the-data-tells-us/
That site is so weird. And whoever wrote that article is also mathematically illiterate. Not to mention they didn’t link to any sources. So here is one they claim to have used:
This source says that 65% of 25-64 year old spoke at least a second language in 2016. The much lower number of 24% is when asked about proficiency, which can’t be compared with the US given Americans’ notorious overestimation of their own qualifications.
Most of the 25% of Americans (I couldn’t find a source for this) claiming to speak a second language is immigrants. I guess it needs to be said, but when people comment on the monolongualism of Americans, it’s about those who are not immigrants or first generation born in the US.
In my experience, most non Hispanics claiming to speak Spanish in the US struggle to hold even a basic conversation. And I have been to 35+ states, including door to door canvassing, etc.
It’s worth noting that the lack of second language proficiency isn’t a result of laziness or ignorance
In Europe, most people are a short train ride from another country. There is also a lot of cultural exchange between countries within Europe.
Most Americans are multiple days of driving from the nearest non English speaking country, and that’s just to arrive in an area of Mexico where the people they will interact with overwhelmingly speak English.
In that context, there is little utility for most people in learning a second language. It’s also very difficult to achieve true proficiency when you are so rarely exposed to native speakers of a language.
Also it dosent help that english is the new lingua franca. Those 60% europans usualy speak their own native language and english, sometimes also a second europan language ( In poland for example we learn english and than depending on the school usualy either german or french )
It is easy to find many other sources with the same statistics. These as I understand them are people who speak 2 languages and not people who have simply learned some of a second language. There are a lot of American people speaking Spanish in the US, of course there are also for example, 1.5 million who speak vietnamese.
This is broadly true with white Americans when their immigrant background is there already for generations… but a huge part of america does not even speak English at home. America is a melting pot of people from everywhere in the world and they naturally bring their languages, food, and culture with them. It is easy to forget, especially when only looking at specific demographics of a diverse country.
Dear americans,
having a great great grandmother who lived in sicily doesn’t make you Italian.
With contempt,
The World
I know this is anecdotal. As an American, when I mention knowing a second language, I will occasionally get “oh, I know that language too!” from someone. And… They don’t. They know a couple phrases at best.
“oh, I know that language too!” from someone. And… They don’t.
Prime example: according to numerous surveys more Dutch people speak French well than Belgians.
Belgian is half French speaking, French is taught in Flemish schools from an early age, and many Dutch/Flemish speakers work in predominantly French speaking Brussels, and/or have French speaking friends/relatives.
But it’s understandable: a Dutch person thinks their French is great if they manage to order something in a French restaurant while on holiday and have the waiter understand them. That’s more than enough for their purposes. A Flemish Belgian thinks their French is bad, if they’re unable to write a letter in French which respects rules like those about accord COD/COI (Elle a pris des photos. Les photos qu’elle a prises. Elle est allée prendre des photos. - Hope that’s correct)
That and Dunning Kruger. If you have little competence in foreign languages, you don’t know enough to know that you don’t know enough.
“Well, I speak the most Italian, so I’ll be your escort. Donowitz speaks the second most, so he’ll be your Italian cameraman. Omar speaks third most, so he’ll be Donny’s assistant.”
“I don’t speak Italian.”
“Like I said, third best.”
This is broadly true with white Americans that their immigrant background is there already for generations… but a huge part of america does not even speak English at home. America is a melting pot of people from everywhere in the world.
This is Lemmy. The Europeans love to paint Americans with the same brush our media paints us with.
I’m convinced many of them are just completely misinformed. As an American, I’m offended by this because that’s OUR thing. Get your own thing, Europe!
Yet overall, only about 60% of Swedes use a second language every day.
So not at all a second language, but people using a second language every day…
Bet 90%+ of adult swedes speak at least 2 languages… I have never met an adult swede not being at least quite okay with the language of shakespeare, and I’m swedish & grew up there.
!cunkposting@lemmy.world is leaking
I’ve owned property in WoD, and been a vagrant that never goes hungry in GURPs. Truly the male fantasy.
And pretending imperial measurements are better than metric!
As a non-American who didn’t grow up with imperial, I still prefer it for fantasy. Metric sounds too modern and scientific. Also I feel like I have more room to fudge distances because it already sounds imprecise.
Would be a fun bit to make the players use metric in a magitech world though.
Most of them I guess, I only just learned there’s 2 types, one for Americans and one for whoever else is dumb enough to not use metric. Imperial units are dumb, inconsistent, arbitrary increments that make little sense. Metric is uniform, even increments of ten/hundred/thousand no matter how far up/down in scale you go.
Measuring distance, the smallest increment imperial has is the inch. 12 inches make a foot, and 3 feet make a yard. The next increment up is a mile, which is 1780 yards, why the giant leap?
Meanwhile with metric, no matter what you’re measuring, the next step up is just a multiple or factor of 100 or 1000 of whatever you’re measuring. 100cm = 1m, and 1000m = 1km.
And don’t even get me started on Ferenheit vs Celsius, nevermind the fact that Kelvin is better than both.
I say all this as an American who grew up struggling with our dumb ways of doing things.
The imperial vs metric thing doesn’t really bother me as an imperial user, since it’s all I’ve ever known and is ingrained. However, fahrenheit is the superior temperature unit. Celsius is too narrow, for effectively portraying temps, at least with weather and cooking, IMO.
I mean, I’m European, on metric and fully agree with you.
But you’re not right about the units. They’re just the most well known, and used ones.
An inch is 3 barleycorns. A barleycorn is 4 poppyseeds. A poppyseed (2.11mm) is six points. A point, 0.35mm is twenty twips. A twip is 17 micrometers. 0.0176mm, roughly the width of a human hair.
Which makes it even dumber, because it shows it’s from a time in people could measure things in twips, yet those people still chose to make a unit called “a twip” instead of just saying “fuck this we’re going metric”. Nevermind I checked and point and twip are both typographical measurements, so it’s less unreasonable.
With most common and best known ones, the same things still exist in metric, but they’re just minimally confusing, as people know it’s prefix+unit. A milliliter is very common. Deciliter as well, but probably less so (someone once told me their country don’t use it as much despite being on metric, can’t remember the country), but something like a decimeter or a decigram would sound pretty weird. Hectogram however, isn’t too unfamiliar, pretty used in the drug world. I’m sure a lot of people would be confused by the prefix “yotta” or “ronna”, which I was too. Yonna is above zetta, above exa, above peta. I’m sure a lot of people on Lemmy know at least “peta” and probably exa.
Discounting those amazingly big prefixes, even if I use a less used combo like, say, “megasecond”, you don’t need additional information to figure out how long that is. But with seconds it’s annoying to transform them into days and hours and minutes, because you have to also use base 60, but still doable. Here’s a tangentially related example: a nice comparison between millionaires and billionaires; if you earned a dollar a second, you’d be a millionaire in a megasecond, a billionaire in a gigasecond. A megasecond is is 11.57 days. A gigasecond is 32 years.
Yeah I just came back from Lowe’s after cutting a bunch of 2x6s into feet, inches, and 1/4 of an inch… wish I could’ve just said cm
I’ve used Celsius for decades in America, I just look up the weather every day in Celsius and figured it out pretty quickly (although I have to use F for all my kitchen appliances for cooking at least my climate control systems in car/home all work with C)
And getting 8 hours of sleep a day
