Lean
Oh, the irony.
Bit oblivious, more like.
What value does a foreign language have for Bob, who lives in the middle of the country?
I learned two languages in school, have never used either one with a native speaker of that language.
Sense of wonder from discovering how different people from different places think similarly or differently of the same experiences, or different experiences you never thought about.
Otherwise, maybe trying to interact with the immigrants probably covering the essential jobs in his small town that nobody else wants to do.Sense of wonder from discovering how different people from different places think similarly or differently of the same experiences, or different experiences you never thought about.
I mean, I’m sure some percentage of people who learn a language do so for that reason. But the vast, vast majority of time someone learns another language it’s going to be because they expect to use it, I imagine.
Yeah, I was giving another idea in case there is no expected use.
immigrants probably covering the essential jobs in his small town that nobody else wants to do.
I heard from others say “they’re not your tutor” and they just switch back to English with me 😭
It will depend on the people and how you approach them, some will be happy to learn your interest, some will expect that it goes both ways and some will not want to be bothered. That’s just normal human things.
I don’t understand this post or why you said “Lean”. Can someone explain? :(
You might notice the word “lean” somewhere up there. That’s a typo that OOP unintentionally & ironically made while mocking people for their perceived linguistics shortcomings.
In our defense, most of us can’t even speak English.
Hard to learn a language when there’s nobody fluent to talk to in that language
One of the things Discord is actually good for! I learned Welsh and found a community specifically for practicing talking the language mentored by more experienced people.
I don’t want to talk to people online in a different language they’re mean.
Literally people are so smug and judgemental online.
Especially when an american joins a server in their language and starts speaking in it very poorly.
Interesting choice! Why did you decide to learn welsh? Don’t tell me you made a DNA ancestry test and want to follow your heritage…
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to follow your heritage.
I do have Welsh ancestry it’s helped me dig into, but I mostly did it because of my love for Arthurian legend. Wanted to learn more about it and in the process came across stuff in Welsh and just went down a rabbit hole and never stopped.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely respect following your interests for whatever reason. It’s nice you found something that inspires you! It’s just that as a European it’s kind of a stereotype that US Americans try to find their roots via DNA genealogy tests to find out they are 15% Irish and claim they have a deep connection to Guiness beer. These tests are mostly bullshit, but somehow it’s kind of a trend in the US for whatever reason. Again, I appreciate people being enthusiastic about things, sorry if I came over too harsh.
Yeah, the topic comes up quite often in the Welsh learners server I’m in (obviously full of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh people). It gets pretty heated going both ways, some annoyed by “culture thieves”, others glad people are learning.
I wouldn’t say the tests are bullshit. Some of the marketing for sure but the science behind them is sound. The problem is most people don’t really take the time to understand it at all and what it really means.
The reasons behind it being a trend are quite complex, probably beyond the scope of a Lemmy comment lol.
On the surface the DNA tests seem to be useful but if you look deeper into it, you will see that they are absolutely unscientific. It is just that the companies behind them, that are interested in getting your DNA, are just very good at marketing.
In the US there is a very widespread trend of wanting to know your ancestry. Your modern history starts in the late 18th century, Europe seems to be so old and diverse, and I absolutely get the fascination. In fact, I am a hobby genealogist myself. I have researched almost 1,000 ancestors (not direct, also brothers and sisters). Some lines go as far as 1680, many are dead end around 1800, others are still waiting to be researched. For these results I have looked through thousands of church book pages, I visited smaller and bigger archives, I traveled through the country and paid money for census copies; as my approach is to have a primary source for each and every life event a person had.
Similar to your motivation it started out in an interest of where I come from. But I soon noticed that beyond my greats grandparents the people become really irrelevant and I feel no connection to them. For my identity, it doesn’t really matter where these people came from. However, I use them to dig into the historical contexts they lived in. You get to know a lot about small villages and unimportant events in history you would have never heard of before. This is what actually fascinates me, similar to how some welsh myths or whatever fascinate you.
But let’s get back to the DNA tests - why do I call them bullshit? Because they mostly are. It’s not the molecular biology that is not far enough, it is the reference DNA these tests are using. It is possible to identity your ancestry on a continental level with these tests. In rare cases it might be even possible to say something like “eastern European”, but most of the time this will be insignificant. Most importantly though, reading that you are 15% welsh is just bullshit. Even if we had the reference DNA of these populations - what are these populations even? What is an ethnicity? If you look at European history from the middle ages to the modern age, you will see that it is almost impossible to make out an “ethnicity”. Just look at how the European population changed between 1618 and 1648 during the 30 year war, or how the Holy Roman Empire changed it borders throughout the centuries. In modern historic research, scientists are much more careful with the term “ethnicity”, as the populations that are talked about were mostly made up in the 18th and 19the century during the development of national states in Europe.
I really, really recommend to read this blog article about DNA genealogy and what you can expect from it, to get an idea of how useful the results are you are getting. It’s a very comprehensive summary of what is wrong with DNA testing in the US.
https://dna-explained.com/2016/02/10/ethnicity-testing-a-conundrum/
Depends where you are in the country or how wealthy you are, on whether learning a foreign language is a meaningful thing to do. People who live towards the middle and up north can easily go their entire lives without knowing another language. People who live towards the southern border could get a lot out of knowing Spanish. Towards either coast and knowing another language maybe useful. It’s a massive country that primarily speaks English, so it shouldn’t be a shocker to see that many wouldn’t need to learn a second language. I, myself barely know part of another language. And part of that is, it just isn’t really useful to me since almost no one here speaks another language.
Yeah, I mean fuck us and all we do suck, but I don’t think people outside the US and Canada really grasp how big this place is. A few years ago I drove to Montreal. It’s a 12 hour drive going 100km/h the whole way, and that’s to get to the nearest city that doesn’t speak English by default, a 24 hour drive in any other direction and I would still be surrounded by people speaking English.
For me it’d be a minimum of a 18 hour drive just to go somewhere where English isn’t always the default. Can be over a day’s journey to the other side of country. It’s just not like Europe where it’s an hour’s of a few hours trip to another country where they speak another language. Instead it’s a several hour trip just to go to the next state over who speaks the same language as me.
There is a lot of fair criticisms to make of our countries, but this isn’t really one of them. Instead you have to look a little deeper to understand the why people here don’t always know a second language.
It’s a shame there isn’t more language education in the US. We had one class on a foreign language starting in sixth grade, which is pretty late.
Most things here are mono lingual. I visited Montreal and I feel like if I was there for a few months, my rudimentary French would really develop. Unfortunately, the one time I tried to speak to someone there who didn’t speak English, it didn’t go super well. She was patient, but we weren’t really understanding each other. All my French is reading and writing, so I have an incredibly bad accent.
I mean learning Spanish for the southwest would be super valueable, I took 2 years Spanish but they suck at teaching. I learned nothing tbh. I learned a little while working retail mostly
USA you mean. (America covers Canada and Mexico and Brazil and… Well you get the picture).
As with anything in the US it’s more complex than that. Most of my friends speak a second language to some degree. German, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and I myself am working on Welsh.
Sure you get plenty of ignorant folk who call it useless, like most of my relatives, but plenty want to learn. US is not really one homogenous culture despite how it might seem at times.
US is not really one homogenous culture despite how it might seem at times.
You can thank first-past-the-post for the false majorities creating that perception.
That and Hollywood and pop culture (which would be what I expect other countries interact with the most) likes to homogenize and play to the most common elements.
I’m a citizen of the United States.
I speak 4, besides American English, at various levels of proficiency, but I’m an American-born son of immigrants who splits time between the US and EU (my wife is Dutch). I also enjoy linguistics and etymology.
Even though this is anecdotal, every daughter and son of an immigrant diaspora that I personally know, like me in the US, speaks multiple or at least 2 languages.
I argue this meme refers to an issue largely for Americans of European descent. Since a very young age, I noticed “white” people in America seem to be scared of “new” or “foreign” things. One of them is learning a language, trying to speak it in public with a native-speaker, and getting corrected for mistakes which will happen, including self-styled “leftists” and “liberals” (the American definition).
I categorize this specific phenomenon, this fear of embarrassment, as another facet or aspect of what some of my black colleagues back in the States refer to as “white fragility”.
Those people who look down on “Americans” should talk to more of us who aren’t of European descent. Perhaps, that may give some depth to your perception of us, or of what our capacity for a global perspective and living as part of a global community is.
I mean I don’t think most black Americans know a foreign language either, because most of them aren’t part of an immigrant diaspora. And IIRC, this phenomenon happens to some extent in most predominantly English speaking countries. Most foreign language learning is a matter of practicality more than a desire to expand knowledge or something, and most non-immigrant Americans don’t have any particular reason to learn one.
Congratulations on erasing the 15% of black Americans, clearly a group that’s too privileged to even be mentioned
Black Americans clearly speak two languages:
?
I think it’s less about being afraid of speaking a different language, and more about not wanting to put in the effort to learn it.
Part of being powerful is a reduction in cognitive load. You don’t have to worry about what those strange foreign language speakers think or want because you have the guns and money. They have to worry about what you want. Being asked to learn another land’s language places them equal or higher in the hierarchy.
You just can’t allow that kind of thinking. I mean, what next, calling foreigners human? /s
I’ve never had use for one.
But I did spend some time learning German and was able to hold conversations to an extent. Was interesting and fun and made some friends (they wanted me to stop trying so hard and just speak English lol).
They should encourage you to speak Germany. It can suck being a native speaker of the lingua Franca.
Oh the irony…
T R I G G E R E D
¿Qué?
Isn’t the girl from Québec in the movie? They go get her from a university in Montreal, if I remember correctly…
