The only good thing that the Americanization brought is, that, except the French, the world can communicate with each other in English.
Even if the French could communicate in English, would anyone want to have a conversation with a Frenchman?
Non
As an island monkey, I’m hurt by this comment. Y U no love UK?
Oh I love the UK! I just hate the Trump-impression the people who’re too old that they should be allowed to vote have given power.
I know you are joking but based on my purely anecdotal personal experience, the French (at least in Paris) can now speak and are willing to speak in English much more than a few decades back.
The first time I went to France, almost 25 years back, I had a rough time communicating at restaurants or even buying tickets at the Paris metro stations. Not sure if the latter was an ability or willingness issue because even holding up two fingers and saying “two tickets” was apparently indecipherable. Had to muster my school days French and say “deux billets” to produce instant results.
Edit: And no, the two fingers I was holding up were not the middle finger of each hand :P
it’s like the one upside(ish) of capitalism they had to start communicating in English, because tourism.
That is the one upside to capitalism and you don’t even consider it a full upside?
well because it’s kind of a forced adoption in an ideal world we would have developed a common tongue by slowly merging the languages, or at least would have taken one that’s pretty good and then improve on it. For example Hungarian is much better in the sense that what you write is what you pronounce, not the mess that is English, so in an ideal common tongue I feel like that aspect would be adopted.
Of course Hungarian also has stupid parts, ly (<- that’s supposed to be indeed one letter) and j is the same thing. x is just ks, y is pronounced the same as i and w is just v so there is some extra fat on it, but other than that the 44 letters cover all the sounds you make while pronouncing words.
Hungarian is like Chinese to most romanic / germanic languages.
While being excellent in describing every little thing pretty efficiently and short, the problem I see with highly advanced languages is imho that they are pretty complicated to learn.
We also normalized porn
You’re welcome, degens.
Porn was legalized for the first time in Denmark 1967, so not really.
Good thing that’s a different word then
Excuse me, but as an American I take offense to this meme. I speak 4 languages, English, Southern, Bostonian, and Spanish /s
Spanish
I refuse to believe any
American can speak Spanish well.(this is a joke)
Americans: “I Don’t think about you guys at all.”
Speak for yourselves. As a Latino born from Mexican immigrants, I speak English and Spanish poorly 😢
Lo siento amigo (o bróder )
Oh look, it’s the same old reposted garbage meme that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
That’s how you can tell Lemmy is growing.
Oh look, it’s the same old reposted garbage comment that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Oh look, it’s the same old comment complaining about another comment that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Oh look, it’s the same old reposted comment chain that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Something something pls give upvotes
I would never upvote chain-comments, they are so cringe after the first two
Came here to say this!
this
idk I’ve seen this first time, and its hilarious, though agreed I never used Reddit that much
This has been reposted on the dankmemes subreddit a countless amount of times.
Oh man, I’m so glad that hasn’t popped up here. That sub was hot garbage. I blocked it years ago, and forgot about it until now haha.
I’m sure it has, but not everyone lives (lived?) in Reddit like you.
同志们，我们现在加入了 Lemmy 党。打到 Reddit 邪党！Lemmy 万岁 万岁 万万岁！
这句子绝对不是用 Google翻译 翻译出来的。
Oh wow can’t believe I actually remember learning words from 2nd grade. Like long long ago, haven’t used that language in over a decade. Somehow I can remember a decade old language I don’t even use anymore, but not my Bitwarden password.
Please, keep that simplified bull shit out of Lemmy.
Sorry I’m a former Mainland Chinese (now US Citizen), can’t keep that habit out of me 😅
Do you even speak Chinese yourself lol? Only an asshole would gatekeep simplified Chinese.
What exactly is wrong with simplified? The only beef I have with it is it makes it harder for me to transfer my Japanese Kanji to Hanzi.
Simplified Chinese to a traditional Chinese reader is like spelling English phonetically: objectively better (in certain areas), but wrong.
I’m guessing the person is a Taiwanese and have a beef with simplified users.
To be fair, it’s hard to “master” a language that changes every generation.
French has entered the chat
My 3 favorite experiences with language as an American:
(1) My Jamaican coworker who I couldn’t understand for the life of me and my Ukrainian coworker who my Jamaican couldn’t understand at all, the Ukrainian coworker understood the Jamaican coworker just fine though and I understood my Ukrainian coworker just fine. Basically it turns into a fun game of telephone whenever we need to talk.
(2) My former coworker from Haiti who no one but the hiring manager and I could understand, the best part about this is that I didn’t know he had an accent. I just didn’t hear it somehow. He was a great guy, he went back home a few years ago when his mother passed. Got stuck due to the pandemic and never came back to the company. I hope he’s doing well.
(3) My former coworker from Guatemala insisting English wasn’t my first language as to him it sounded like English was my second language at best. I’ve been working on it since then. I still suck at it.
Many indians speak 4+ languages easily , and we dont even notice that 😅
How well do you speak those languages? For example, can you order pizza with pineapple and olives in any of those languages? What if the pizza you get is cold, there’s only one olive on it and the crust is soggy, could you get your complaints through in any language?
Or perhaps will the explanation be more like: “Pizza bad, no good. Want money back.”
I’m not from India but as another Asian, yes, we can have fluent conversations in several languages. (I grew up speaking English, Mandarin, Malay, Cantonese and a bit of Hakka)
Found the Malaysian
Hello! 👋 We’re mostly on monyet.cc on Lemmy.
That’s pretty cool. Took a quick look at the relationships those languages have, and it seems that Malay is the odd one out, all the others are in the sinitic family. I would expect that if you learn one, your mind isn’t going to explode if you try to learn the other two. However, Malay is completely different, so jumping into that world may require some extra effort.
To give a European example, if you already know Norwegian, learning Swedish it’s only one step away. Jumping into Danish or German at that point can be done, but it will require some extra effort. A similar situation exists between Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
It’s more to do with my multicultural upbringing - Malay is the national language here in Malaysia, so it’s pretty much compulsory to learn & speak. My parents are Cantonese & Hakka Chinese, I learnt to speak Malay & Mandarin in school (where ethnic Chinese kids from different dialect groups as well as ppl from other ethnicities mingle), and spoke mostly English in college & work. We also have Indians and other minorities who speak even more dialects/languages than I do.
Well most of us speak a mother tongue , and english ( since ex britt colony ) very fluently , but there are times when both parents speak a different language and the city /state you live in has a different language and hence they speak it very close to native fluency !
My bf and his family for instance speaks 6 languages for the reasons listed above !
Isn’t India in Asia
Clearly, this dude voted to become mr. worldwide
India and Pakistan are considered to be in Asia but more accurately they are considered to be in the Indian Subcontinent. The same way Iran, Saudi Arabia and the rest are also considered to be in Asia but they are more accurately considered to be on the Middle East.
Last I checked.
Fun fact: when you say “Asian” to an American, their first thought is East or Southeast Asia, but a British person’s primary association with “Asianness”, for lack of a better term, is India and Pakistan.
Do they refer to East Asians as “oriental” then?
Only the very old and/or racist ones do afaik
Wait why? They’re literally in the Orient
We don’t call it that anymore. Haven’t for decades.
As for the why, the time when that term was in regular use was a time with a lot of anti-asian bigotry and most of the people who refuse to stop using it are the same ones who use other outdated terms/slurs for non-white and non-western people, so it has tons of negative connotations…
My mom complained that the ramen she likes isn’t called Oriental anymore.
SIGH
I did not know that, interesting.
SEA PROBABLY , however India , pakistan , sri lanka and bangladesh are considered a subcontinent coz similar cultures , and are different from rest of asia !
Geographically it is a subcontinent that slammed into Asia to form the Himalayas, so you could make the argument it is its own thing.
That’s like arguing nothing is its own thing cause they used to be one continent.
its not about continent its about himalayas that saparated india and china .
Not to take away from this but often these 4 are very similar languages that could be easily interpreted as dialects if not the identity politics.
It is complicated. India has at least four language families - Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan. So Hindi (I-E) is closer related to English or Greek than to Tamil (Dra), Santali (AA) or Zeme (S-T). While it is rare for people to speak languages belonging to all four families, I know at least three people who can passably speak six languages from two or three families.
you could say the same about italian-spanish-french-romanian they still counts as separate languages
Many Americans actually are bilingual or are studying another language to become bilingual.
But Americans be like duhhhhh hahaha stereotypes
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Some perspective is worthwhile here. It’s 21% of americans vs 65% of Europeans.
True, but, for most Americans, the “need” to become bilingual simply wasn’t a thing until recently. (It became a thing mainly because US Spanish-speaking communities are slowly moving northward from where they began in the southernmost states.)
In Europe, it’s much easier to run into someone who speaks a different language than you simply by driving to another town.
For the most part, the only two languages Americans have to worry about learning if they want to communicate with neighboring countries is French (because of Canada, although they also speak English) and Spanish (because of the countries to the US’s south, including Mexico and others).
the only two languages Americans have to worry about learning if they want to communicate with neighboring countries is French
Why would anyone want to communicate with the Quebecois?
Bingo. This is exactly it.
Americans almost never even hear other languages, let alone need to understand them. There’s has been a culture here for over a century for immigrants to integrate and learn the language and culture of America as a replacement for their own. Three generations ago my relatives did this - they literally abandoned their last name in the process.
The right isn’t big on education, and it really shows.
Bruv the left ain’t either. Destroying the US education system was a bipartisan reach-across-the-aisle operation all the way up and down. The fascists wanted education destroyed and the polite fascists wanted education privatized and for profit, which is the same thing as destroyed.
Hmm look at a map of education by state. Then pull up a map of red vs blue states. Notice something strange there? This isn’t a BoTh SiDeS thing, this is a right thing. They want you dumb so you fall for their lies, get in line, and vote for them, it’s simple.
Internet user tries not to make everything political challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
Include anglo Canadians in there too!
Complaining about bilingual (english + french) positions in the public service is a favorite hobby of anglo public servants, as if the french ones didn’t need to learn a second language to get the job… Heck, it’s not rare to see/hear one argue that french Canadians should just start speaking english and stop bothering them about their “unique culture”…
But hey, it’s not racism… Or so they say 🤷
I can confirm this, in high school (Québec) no one really gives a f**k about learning English as they don’t need it if they stay in Québec and don’t understand that knowing English is a valuable asset.
Speaking French isn’t a race.
Racism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
Racism is discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity.
Ethnicity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnicity
An ethnicity or ethnic group is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, society, nation, religion, or social treatment within their residing area
Guess that answers the question, you’re wrong :)
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21% illiteracy is shockingly bad tbh.
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Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1). This translates into 43.0 million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills
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If you didn’t look at this list and ask “Why did they pick these countries and leave out others?” you’re not doing critical thinking. The countries with the highest literacy in the world are almost all either socialist or formerly socialist countries.
It’s an OECD report. They’re comparing to OECD countries and I’d take the Polish numbers with a grain of salt as they have quite a couple fewer refugees, modulo Ukrainians (Ukraine has an education system ballpark Greece or Italy).
Public school and universal literacy was literally invented in Germany (Luther was lobbying princes for it so people could read the bible).
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Hexbear blocks externally hosted images so I can’t see that. Can you edit it and put it in the instance properly with copy paste?
because it only uses oecd member countries
Ahh yes, the “international community”.
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This can’t be true… 21% of Americans can’t read?
Gives some perspective on american culture and problems compared to the rest of the world doesn’t it?
Four in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences—literacy skills at level 2 or above in PIAAC (OECD 2013). In contrast, one in five U.S. adults (21 percent) has difficulty completing these tasks (figure 1). This translates into 43.0 million U.S. adults who possess low literacy skills
I’m all for american self-depreciation but:
“34% of adults who lack proficiency in literacy were born outside the US.”
https://www.thinkimpact.com/literacy-statistics/
I hate to extrapolate data as an idiotic internetter but being born in the US and being illiterate could also be because we have so many immigrants that aren’t set up for success right away and aren’t as concerned with education as they are with meeting their most basic needs.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigration-by-country
Which illustrates her point well. 2/3 were born inside the US then.
Could first/second generation immigrants born in the US be more likely to be illiterate? Is the American education system simply bad at teaching kids to read? No idea.
I just have a compulsive personal issue with people using data like they are justified to say they know what causes the statistic they quote. I realize social media is more of a way for people to get a little dopamine instead of trying to understand the world but I’m okay getting downvoted to add context lol.
Were you adding context though? Does it justify the situation if a percentage of people are migrants (who often are fluent in a language above the given literacy btw.)?
For real literacy skills in the US are a huge problem, it is a systemic problem of which the burden is heavily placed on individuals that are marginalized. Neolibs might quote:
It is estimated that these negative social and economic outcomes cost the United States $362.49 billion annually.
I say watch the whole Parenti lecture if you can: https://twitter.com/a_lutacontinua/status/936363027502391298?lang=de
Parenti’s questions:
- What happens to the people that can’t read in the US?
- What happens to the children (who don’t have food) in the US?
- What happens to the people without houses in the US?
Edit The fascists mentioned for example were the right wing Nicaraguan death squads, you can find more about them in the Jakarta method
So first of all, thank you for the civil discussion because that is the biggest lacking quality of scored comment sections like this site. It seems like discussion always brings details that are helpful when we are condemning an entire country with little information provided. This is why I like discussion and not militant downvoting and personal attacks.
I truly have no narrative here but I just searched for immigrant literacy and the first thing I found:
“41 percent of immigrants score at or below the lowest level of English literacy — a level variously described as “below basic” or “functional illiteracy”.”
https://cis.org/Immigrant-Literacy-Self-Assessment-vs-Reality
Thank you for the info and sources. I do have time to watch the lecture, and will.
So? Takes like six months to teach an adult to read, that’s not an excuse.
Even if you excluded them (which seems like a very
approach) these people are only illiterate because they’re from brown countries", you still have an education system where 13.9% of people are coming out illiterate.I’m all for american self-depreciation
I am not american
because we have so many immigrants
Nice of you to edit in the part that confirms you’re not just a nationalist, but a racist too.
Lol damn you don’t have to call me racist. I’m not, and just saw someone using a pretty general statistic to imply American education is terrible or something. I’m just someone who sees appropriation of incomplete information to create a half baked idea that makes people feel like they understand something complex when in reality we are all probably wrong in this thread. Such is the internet though.
And I was talking about my own opportunity to self depreciate, and wasn’t assuming anyone elses nationality.
Yes I did edit my comment lol. We do have a lot of immigrants that may come from poorer countries in search of a better life. Whats wrong with that? How do you know I’m not specifically proud of that for my country? You are the one implying Americans are less-than because of some statistic.
When you are so militant with discussions, how will you ever come to an understanding? Why be so mean?
I’ve heard nothing but bad things about American schools and they’re said to revoltingly underfunded especially in poor and non-white communities. Seen from an outside perspective it seems like all American schools do is multiple choice tests, bullying, pledge of allegiance, school shootings, eat hot chip and lie.
Austerity and culture war has consequences, one of them is that students are not given then education they need.
Hey!! That’s just NOT TRUE!!
…we call them french fries
The school shootings are statistically insignificant but magnified to enormous size by the media, but other than that yes.
damn, bro. It’s almost like America is bigger than all of Europe and shares one language, and it’s hard to become fluent in a language when there’s no one to speak it with. If you are asian or european you can hop in the car or on a train to practice your french or vietnamese, but unless you’re practicing Spanish or some specific language kept in your area(Polish in Chicago, Pennsylvania Dutch, German in some parts of Wisconsin) you have no way to practice.
Not only this, but I’ve met one German speaker irl since german class about 15yr ago. Many times “bilingual” in europe means “X and English,” do German people oft go 15 years without meeting another English speaker? Seems like there’d be one on every corner.
I have never been in an English speaking country. We learn it because of cultural hegemony
That’s what I’m saying, that is pretty common over there whereas here the only other useful language is spanish (or maybe mandarin depending on location), and that is only to help people who come over and only speak spanish, it isn’t like english which can be necessary for business or culturally just normal due to british occupation. I do think spanish should be a bit bigger of a focus in school but also you’d be 100% fine not knowing it.
I’ve met two other americans that spoke german after leaving high school, and one of them was in Europe
There’s tons of Germans who don’t go a year without being exposed to Catalan so there’s that. Given that the mandatory third language tends to be Romanic (usually French or Latin) it’s not terribly difficult to pick up, either.
What’s true though for pretty much all of Europe is that multilingualism still tends to be solely within the Indo-European family, unless your native language isn’t that is which is quite the minority.
Please add a /s to your comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States#/media/File:Languages_cp-02.svg
There are even plenty of first language speakers of 30+ languages in the US with hundreds of thousands and millions of speakers. In addition to the people that immigrated.
Spanish – 41.3 million (13.2%) Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and all other varieties) – 3.40 million (1.1%) Tagalog (including Filipino) – 1.72 million (0.5%) Vietnamese – 1.52 million (0.5%) Arabic – 1.39 million French – 1.18 million Korean – 1.07 million Russian – 1.04 million Portuguese – 937 thousand Haitian Creole – 895 thousand Hindi – 865 thousand German – 857 thousand Polish – 533 thousand Italian – 513 thousand Urdu – 508 thousand Persian (including Farsi, Dari and Tajik) – 472 thousand Telugu – 460 thousand Japanese – 455 thousand Gujarati – 437 thousand Bengali – 403 thousand Tamil – 341 thousand Punjabi – 319 thousand Tai–Kadai (including Thai and Lao) – 284 thousand Serbo-Croatian (including Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian) – 266 thousand Armenian – 256 thousand Greek – 253 thousand Hmong – 240 thousand Hebrew – 215 thousand Khmer – 193 thousand Navajo – 155 thousand other Indo-European languages – 662 thousand Yoruba, Twi, Igbo and other languages of West Africa – 640 thousand Amharic, Somali, and other Afro-Asiatic languages – 596 thousand Yiddish, Pennsylvania Dutch, and other West Germanic languages – 574 thousand Ilocano, Samoan, Hawaiian, and other Austronesian languages – 486 thousand Other languages of Asia – 460 thousand Nepali, Marathi, and other Indic languages – 448 thousand Ukrainian and other Slavic languages – 385 thousand Swahili and other languages of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa – 288 thousand Malayalam, Kannada, and other other Dravidian languages – 280 thousand Other Native languages of North America – 169 thousand other and unspecified languages – 327 thousand
yeah we’re not sorted by ethnicity/language, so unless you live in a big city with a china town or little italy, you’d have to know the local Thai family to learn their language.
Its a pet peeve of mine, which urban-rural area are you living in? Which language would you like to learn?
You are
Your
🤣
Here’s one: it’s/its
Now tell me which is possessive.
You mean y’all. Don’t embarrass us.
y’all’d’nt’ve’d’d’i’d’nt’ve’d’y’all’t’ve’d
There, their, they’re.
Though through thought
have/of
of/off
to/too
ad/add
I today saw someone use “theirs” in place of “there is”, and I hope that they are a non-native speaker.
American here, I’m going to challenge myself to remember as many as I can.
Set: A group of things that go together.
Set: Letting a dessert cool in the fridge
Set: A stage for a play or film
Set: A command to put something somewhere
Set: A part of Tennis
…
5/704 isn’t so bad, right?
Edit: looking up the definitions shows a lot of sub-definitions that essentially have the same meaning. I don’t think it’s appropriate to say that the word has 435 meanings when “set a course” and “set a fire” are basically “start a thing,” yet they’re listed as different definitions. The are many many of these cases even just on Google’s definition blurb.
But I’m no dictionary expert so…
Yeah some do seem the same, but thats possilbe also a bias from knowning the language.
