It’s great seeing that only people living in developed countries with universal access to an education that offers second language courses count as human. Because otherwise that number is kind of off.
My second-hand experience of developing countries is that almost everyone there at least wants to know English. I think Americans are actually the least likely to want to learn a second language, though non-Anglo developed countries probably have higher rates of successful bilingualism.
My experience concurs. I live in China, where nearly every student (starting in first grade!) studies English. A great take private English lessons as well.
I’m not sure how well this extends to rural areas. In the few villages I have visited, I saw several private English schools; however, those villages were not far from larger population centers.
That said, most of the people to whom I have spoken are not close to fluent. Even by high school, they cannot carry on a basic conversation.
Probably not as off as you think. (And “education that offers second language courses” isn’t the only way to learn another language. I’d guess there are lots of (say) people living in mixed-ethnicities zones, or people who live in places other than they grew up in, who pick up other languages without formal study. You know, outside North America it’s not that common to travel a thousand miles and find that everyone still speaks the same language.)
ETA: and “education that offers second language courses” is way overrated anyway. In Italy and Ireland at least, most people made to study a second language during compulsory schooling don’t attain anything remotely resembling usable fluency (I mean, they can’t even get the gist of news on TV), and those who do usually have exposed themselves to lots of second-language media for non-school-related reasons.
Yup; Irish-language education in Ireland is pretty terrible. This is largely, in my opinion, due to how the subject is taught. The curricula are terrible.
I’m reasonably good at languages and I often struggle to hold a conversation. Outside of the gaeltachts anyone with fluency usually has it for social or non-educational reasons.
Yup. English teaching in Italy is nearly that bad. (Slightly less bad per-hour, but the smaller total number of hours a student in Italy studies English than a student in Ireland studies Irish compensates that, so the English of the median Italian right after high school is about as bad as the Irish of the median Irish person right after high school.)
People in the rest of mainland Europe (excl. France and Spain) are much better at English, but I don’t know how much of that is due to schools and how much to the fact that they watch English films with subtitles there whereas we dub the crap out of¹ everything here in Italy.
Or should I say “into”, given the quality of translations. ;-)
No, humans living in very poor countries or in remote past also always tried to have at least basic understanding of neighbouring tribe’s language. It’s hard to come with hard data but modern nation states might probably be about the only large monolingual societies in history, other than small and very isolated places.
In modern Africa it’s entirely normal for people to speak 3+ languages. (not necessarily to a very high standard, just to get by)
It’s great seeing that only people living in developed countries with universal access to an education that offers second language courses count as human. Because otherwise that number is kind of off.
My second-hand experience of developing countries is that almost everyone there at least wants to know English. I think Americans are actually the least likely to want to learn a second language, though non-Anglo developed countries probably have higher rates of successful bilingualism.
My experience concurs. I live in China, where nearly every student (starting in first grade!) studies English. A great take private English lessons as well.
I’m not sure how well this extends to rural areas. In the few villages I have visited, I saw several private English schools; however, those villages were not far from larger population centers.
That said, most of the people to whom I have spoken are not close to fluent. Even by high school, they cannot carry on a basic conversation.
Probably not as off as you think. (And “education that offers second language courses” isn’t the only way to learn another language. I’d guess there are lots of (say) people living in mixed-ethnicities zones, or people who live in places other than they grew up in, who pick up other languages without formal study. You know, outside North America it’s not that common to travel a thousand miles and find that everyone still speaks the same language.)
ETA: and “education that offers second language courses” is way overrated anyway. In Italy and Ireland at least, most people made to study a second language during compulsory schooling don’t attain anything remotely resembling usable fluency (I mean, they can’t even get the gist of news on TV), and those who do usually have exposed themselves to lots of second-language media for non-school-related reasons.
Yup; Irish-language education in Ireland is pretty terrible. This is largely, in my opinion, due to how the subject is taught. The curricula are terrible.
I’m reasonably good at languages and I often struggle to hold a conversation. Outside of the gaeltachts anyone with fluency usually has it for social or non-educational reasons.
Yup. English teaching in Italy is nearly that bad. (Slightly less bad per-hour, but the smaller total number of hours a student in Italy studies English than a student in Ireland studies Irish compensates that, so the English of the median Italian right after high school is about as bad as the Irish of the median Irish person right after high school.)
People in the rest of mainland Europe (excl. France and Spain) are much better at English, but I don’t know how much of that is due to schools and how much to the fact that they watch English films with subtitles there whereas we dub the crap out of¹ everything here in Italy.
Or should I say “into”, given the quality of translations. ;-)
No, humans living in very poor countries or in remote past also always tried to have at least basic understanding of neighbouring tribe’s language. It’s hard to come with hard data but modern nation states might probably be about the only large monolingual societies in history, other than small and very isolated places.
In modern Africa it’s entirely normal for people to speak 3+ languages. (not necessarily to a very high standard, just to get by)