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That depends. UK, Ireland, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Canada (outside of Quebec anyway) don't do that well on second-language knowledge. Even in Europe, knowledge of second languages varies greatly.
For example, here are some stats for second language knowledge of English in Europe:
Places like France, Italy, Spain and Portugal don't rank that highly, when you consider they are located on a very linguistically diverse continent and how many English-speaking tourists they get.
What seems to have silently slipped between the boards is that this survey measures ENGLISH ONLY. I live in Portugal, and I think 30 percent of the population having a knowledge of English is very high.
The survey totally ignores all other languages.
I understood the topic to be about the knowledge of another language, not just English. So, I think that if the survey were not English biased the results would be far, far higher for all countries.
I lived in the U.S. for sixty-two years, I knew only a handful of native born Americans who had a working knowledge of any foreign language, and that was true both in NYC as well as less urban areas.
Sounds a bit optimistic to me. French is the most popular foreign language at school and always has been, but since it only became compulsory to study a foreign language for three years at school (was five in my day only ten years ago) and the level is pretty low at that, the % who can speak it is probably going to fall. I'd guess 20-25% or so might be able to read a menu or introduce themselves but as for the amount who can actually maintain a decent conversation, perhaps 5%? There's still some antipathy towards having to learn foreign languages in schools here.
I lived in Germany for 18 years. Many jobs in Germany require written and spoken fluency in English.
In the States it's not unusual to encounter Americans, born and raised in America, who have problems with their own language, much less to expect them to know a second language.
I find that a lot of people just don't want to travel outside the USA. They have this strange idea that they won't be able to get by with just English, or they won't know what they're doing, or they just don't care.
I've been to Europe on vacation 28 times in the past 9 years, and I love going there. I finally talked my parents into going back in 2003, talk about pulling teeth, and now they've been back 9 times.
Every time I tell people at work that I'm heading back to France or Germany or Spain for a 5 day trip, they just laugh and laugh and tell me how crazy I am. "I can't believe you just pick up and go". "I'm so jealous!!!!".
So I ask if they're so jealous, why don't they just book a trip themselves? They just laugh and say "yeah right".
Not sure what the big deal is if you can cough up the $1,500-$2,000 for a week trip.
I think there is a lot of truth in this.... I can get directions, order, say hello etc etc in Spanish, French ( Learnt them both at school) Italian and German. If someone asked me what languages I speak I say English. As a European I would not want to embarrass myself by saying a speak a language when I only know a hundred or so words.... and therefore clearly can't speak it !!.....
I think of this level of knowlege as "Desperation _______."
I spoke Desperation Greek, e.g. - "Please, where is the toilet?"
This does have its pitfalls, though. I had a new house and garden in a former wild meadow, and I was bothered by snakes and scorpions. I knew there was a hardware store in the local village, and that quite likely they would stock the proper repellent. I went there armed with a concise request, carefully prepared and memorized: "I have snakes and scorpions in the garden near my house. Do you have any poison?"
What could go wrong, right?
After a cheery good morning in Greek I launched my request, and the old man running the store beamed and immediately took me to a shelf, gesturing to a row of boxes - each labelled with the picture of some noxious creature. He pulled out a box, and talking volubly urged it on me.
I said, thank you in Greek, and we returned to the cash register. And at that point it all went pear-shaped. Evidently convinced that I had a conversational knowledge of Greek, the old gent attempted to chat.....I could only babble back in English that I did not speak Greek. He was undaunted and renewed his efforts. This went on and on, and finally I had to flee, leaving a much-chagrined Greek behind, whose mutterings by now were clearly not the verbal equivalent of little wet bunny kisses.
From that point on I wrote my requests in Greek, which got the point across that I was either mute or not fluent in Greek.
A sample is a sample. Any sample is statistically valid, if there is no characteristic within the sample that would select out certain responses or skew the data. You show us that female respondents to OKCupid are more or less likely than the general population to be multilingual, and I will regard your evidence as a legitimate cause for a wider margin for error.
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As for the reason Americans do not travel abroad, the main one, in my opinion, is that American do not get enough paid vacation time to get further than Orlando.
It is very rare to find an American who gets 4 weeks vacation, and very few get three weeks. Many don't even get two until they have been on the job for a couple of years. In most European countries, the minimum is four weeks, even in the first year of employment, and a lot of people of young traveling age already get 6 or 7 weeks with pay every year.
Also, American students can't afford to travel, because they have to work through the summer earning their $20K per year it takes to go to college, while in a lot of European countries, higher education is virtually free.
I lived in Antiqua, Guatemala, for nearly a year, which is a popular destination for international students to take an intensive course in Spanish. I saw hundreds, possibly thousands pass through. I would be very surprised if 10% of them were Americans, even though an American wanting to study Spanish could literally get there on a bus. Nearly all had flown over from Europe, to study Spanish as a 3rd or 4th or 5th language.
no Europeeans go 70 miles and go to a differant country, with a seperate language. in America & Canada you can go 2000 or 3,000 miles and everyone speaks english, and you are in only 2 countries.
no Europeeans go 70 miles and go to a differant country, with a seperate language. in America & Canada you can go 2000 or 3,000 miles and everyone speaks english, and you are in only 2 countries.
This ignores the large number of French speakers in Canada, and the huge number of Spanish speakers in the U.S. I think you would have to do a lot of detouring in 2,000 or 3,000 miles to avoid these millions of people.
But in the end, they are ignored, of course....and this, I think, illustrates the lengths that Americans will go to not to learn a foreign language.
My final few years in the U.S. I lived in a busy and changing neighborhood on the east side of midtown Manhattan. On the corner was a small 24/7 produce and grocery store run by Koreans. They spoke Korean and English....but lo and behold, after a couple of years they were speaking Spanish too. Now their step and fetchit help were Latino immigrants and not Korean family members, and they were attracting not only the Spanish-speaking minority in the neighborhood, but the Spanish-speaking workers who were present in the neighborhood during the day.
They had turned a fledgling operation into a money mill.
None of the non-immigrant owned businesses in the neighborhood bothered, except for a hardware store. This guy fired an American born employee and hired a Hispanic woman in his place.....and the Latino workers and bldg supers in the neighborhood flocked to the place to do business in their primary language.
I'm so done. Wow! It's a good thing my father was a well travelled person. That with the fact I'm a geography buff was the reason I learned about the world as much as possible.
To the guy that said that there's about 10 Eiffel towers in Paris, priceless.
it can be a life saver once you get lost in your humvee in the middle east after an invasion
Along with Chinese. In the next 10 years, you're going to at least speak conversational Spanish just to get your foot in the door in this worldwide global economy. In china, they prepare the kids to learn English around 3 years of age in most cases. We need to at least speak a second language.
I think it is very true. The number of Canadians I meet overseas dwarfs that of Americans. I've been to a fair number of places around the world and can say that there is a definite lack of other US folks.
I think part of it is financial ability and part is sheer disinterest. The average US household barely gets by. How is Joe Bob supposed to go to the Bahamas or Thailand when he is overloaded on debt, and lives paycheck to paycheck? Then a lot of US folks don't care all that much of the world outside their little bubble. Geographic isolation us one part. A lot though is lack of knowledge of what's out there.
The ratio goes up with more educated, wealthy folks I bet. A lot of people I worked with have traveled.
Another piece of this is that most average Americans can only take 1 to 2 weeks of vacation a year, and many lose even that time because of sick leave. As a working couple, we also spent many years unable to get more than a few days with overlapping vacation days. Most civilized countries have many weeks of vacation time available to their citizens, and often shut down businesses for an entire month.
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