Most Americans don’t have passports because they can’t afford to travel to another continent, and the number is rising now that passports are required to visit other countries in North America. Getting a passport in the US is a fairly annoying, expensive process, so I’m not surprised most people haven’t bothered.
Getting a passport is a bother everywhere, the point is that Americans don’t really need a passport because their country is huge, rich and powerful and they can take a vacation in whatever climate they like without ever leaving their borders. People in other developed nations would have to make much greater sacrifices to never travel abroad.
Ditto with the foreign languages—most Americans don’t meet or talk to people who don’t speak American.
That’s exactly my point! They can do that without missing all that much, unlike most of the planet.
do most Chinese people speak foreign languages
IIRC compulsory foreign language instruction (mostly in English) starts in third grade, and many educated Chinese learn a third/fourth language later. For many Chinese Mandarin is effectively a L2 language so they know their native dialect, Mandarin and some English. The state of English learning is mostly horrible and only a minority can communicate effectively, but I’d think that Chinese on average speak better English than non-native-speaker Americans speak Spanish and the difficulty is much greater.
I’m not all that clear about the passport situation/foreign travel and China is a bad example anyway because it is itself an enormous country and very “nation-centric”, but a huge number of Chinese study abroad, while there is no comparable reason for Americans to do so because they already have many of the most prestigious universities.
Getting a passport is a bother everywhere, the point is that Americans don’t really need a passport because their country is huge, rich and powerful and they can take a vacation in whatever climate they like without ever leaving their borders. People in other developed nations would have to make much greater sacrifices to never travel abroad.
That’s exactly my point! They can do that without missing all that much, unlike most of the planet.
IIRC compulsory foreign language instruction (mostly in English) starts in third grade, and many educated Chinese learn a third/fourth language later. For many Chinese Mandarin is effectively a L2 language so they know their native dialect, Mandarin and some English. The state of English learning is mostly horrible and only a minority can communicate effectively, but I’d think that Chinese on average speak better English than non-native-speaker Americans speak Spanish and the difficulty is much greater.
I’m not all that clear about the passport situation/foreign travel and China is a bad example anyway because it is itself an enormous country and very “nation-centric”, but a huge number of Chinese study abroad, while there is no comparable reason for Americans to do so because they already have many of the most prestigious universities.