I imagine people in the US would too, if different states spoke different languages. According to Google, all of europe is only double the population of just USA.
Yeah. I'm not saying that Americans being able to speak more languages would be bad, but it's not the same at all. There are only 5M Norwegian speakers worldwide. Of course you will want to learn another language (probably English) if you want to be successful and communicate with the rest of the world.
Foreign language was required for two years in high school. People in Europe seem to forget that I can literally drive for days and not leave my country nor have any use for a language other than English. If I were to become fluent in anything other than Spanish, as a second language, I'd rarely get to speak it unless I sought at some kind of language group.
There is some important difference, because the current lingua franca is English, so anyone that is not an English native speaker must study English sooner or later. [Hi from Argentina!]
It would be interesting to compare the rate of the US with the rate of the UK to have a comparison of the social interest in learning another language that is not overshadowed by the effect of the native language.
Here in Slovenia (Europe), we start with the first foreign language in the second/third grade and then by the end of primary and high school, one more is added. English as lingua franca is sure on the first place, but many take also German or Russian, Spanish, mostly because of their job ambitions in the future.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 18.0 ms ] threadIt would be interesting to compare the rate of the US with the rate of the UK to have a comparison of the social interest in learning another language that is not overshadowed by the effect of the native language.