As an aside, I am surprised how hostile US Americans can be when it is suggested to learn another language.
Personally, I find most suggestions and discussion of Americans learning other languages to be highly irritating. They have not considered all of the relevant factors (continent sized country with 310m+ people speaking English, another 500m+ English-speakers worldwide, standard language of all aviation / commerce / diplomacy / science / technology, & many other skills to learn with extremely high returns like programming), don’t seem to care even when it is pointed out that the measured returns are razor-thin and near-zero and the true returns plausibly negative, and it serves as an excuse for classism, anti-Americanism, mood affiliation with cosmopolitanism/liberalism, and all-around snootiness.
It doesn’t take too many encounters with someone who is convinced that learning another language is a good use of time which will make one wealthier, morally superior, and more open-minded to start to lose one’s patience and become more than a little hostile.
It’s a bit like people who justify video-gaming with respect to terrible studies about irrelevant cognitive benefits (FPSes make me faster at reaction-time? how useful! not) - I want to grab them, shake them a little bit, and say ‘look at yourself from the outside! can’t you see that you’re transparently grabbing at flimsy justifications for something which you do for completely different reasons? You didn’t start playing Halo because you read and meta-analyzed a bunch of psych studies and decided that the lifetime reduction in risk from a 3% fall in simple reaction-time was worth 20 hours a week of work. And we both know you didn’t learn French because it’s going to pay off in future salary increases—you learned it because you had to learn something in high school and French has better cultural prejudices associated with it than Spanish!’
True. I come from the other side growing up in Germany and having met with a lot of foreign knowledge workers unwilling to learn even a lick of German. I actually know of several people that are unable to say “No, thank you” or “One beer please” and unwilling to learn. Personally I see this as highly disrespectful of the host country. After stating this opinion the unwillingness is then justified with the international status of English.
Anyhow, we are delving off into politics and thus I’d like to end this debate at this point with your understanding. I hope the downvote is not from you and moreso that is not because of that line only.
Yes, living in a foreign country is a substantially different proposition (and I’d guess that the correlated increases in income would be much higher). But comparing to Germany highlights part of why it’s such a bad idea for Americans: the population of America alone is 3.78x that of Germany, never mind the entire Anglophone world.
Personally, I find most suggestions and discussion of Americans learning other languages to be highly irritating. They have not considered all of the relevant factors (continent sized country with 310m+ people speaking English, another 500m+ English-speakers worldwide, standard language of all aviation / commerce / diplomacy / science / technology, & many other skills to learn with extremely high returns like programming), don’t seem to care even when it is pointed out that the measured returns are razor-thin and near-zero and the true returns plausibly negative, and it serves as an excuse for classism, anti-Americanism, mood affiliation with cosmopolitanism/liberalism, and all-around snootiness.
It doesn’t take too many encounters with someone who is convinced that learning another language is a good use of time which will make one wealthier, morally superior, and more open-minded to start to lose one’s patience and become more than a little hostile.
It’s a bit like people who justify video-gaming with respect to terrible studies about irrelevant cognitive benefits (FPSes make me faster at reaction-time? how useful! not) - I want to grab them, shake them a little bit, and say ‘look at yourself from the outside! can’t you see that you’re transparently grabbing at flimsy justifications for something which you do for completely different reasons? You didn’t start playing Halo because you read and meta-analyzed a bunch of psych studies and decided that the lifetime reduction in risk from a 3% fall in simple reaction-time was worth 20 hours a week of work. And we both know you didn’t learn French because it’s going to pay off in future salary increases—you learned it because you had to learn something in high school and French has better cultural prejudices associated with it than Spanish!’
True. I come from the other side growing up in Germany and having met with a lot of foreign knowledge workers unwilling to learn even a lick of German. I actually know of several people that are unable to say “No, thank you” or “One beer please” and unwilling to learn. Personally I see this as highly disrespectful of the host country. After stating this opinion the unwillingness is then justified with the international status of English.
Anyhow, we are delving off into politics and thus I’d like to end this debate at this point with your understanding. I hope the downvote is not from you and moreso that is not because of that line only.
Yes, living in a foreign country is a substantially different proposition (and I’d guess that the correlated increases in income would be much higher). But comparing to Germany highlights part of why it’s such a bad idea for Americans: the population of America alone is 3.78x that of Germany, never mind the entire Anglophone world.