Memes

Whoever made this needs to LEAN the language they're using first.

Next they lern to spel

The short story by Ted Chiang is really sad

Isn't the girl from Québec in the movie? They go get her from a university in Montreal, if I remember correctly...

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.

In our defense, most of us can't even speak English.

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.

Hard to learn a language when there's nobody fluent to talk to in that 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.

If we are throwing shade at American education, I like to start with statistics and basic logical fallacies.

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

Oh the irony...

Given that this completely ignores that there are thousands of people who can speak English and their native tribal language I’d say it’s both harsh and ignorant, putting aside that a foreign language was a required class in my high school.

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.

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).