What languages do you know?

[faith]

hm. It sounds like the root issue isn't alglophones not learning other languages.
It is that no one is deciding to translate all of these things from english into swedish,etc.
This means that papers are either being written in or translated to English only, or the important breakthroughs you need were done by native English speakers...
As a native English speaker, I don't particularly feel responsible for that.

At any rate, the world needs a lingua franca. Before, I guess it was French and you'd all be scrambling to learn French while we sat at our cafes with our baguettes and went hon hon. Now, it's English.'s turn,
Whoever speaks the current global language as a native hasn't as much incentive to learn other languages.
Maybe it'll be Sweden's time to shine some day.

 

[MorganIvy]

I speak native portuguese and learned english and french in school. The thing is that what you learn in school cant be particularly useful if you don't put it to practice, or immerse yourself somehow.

The difference between portugal and most other southern european countries (spain, france, italy) is that we hardly dub anything.. so we watch tv or movies in their native language, and they're mostly in english (of course), which really helps with immersion.

The stuff taught in schools isnt great tho, so unless you actually take an interest in the language you cant really be fluent. I learned english mostly by myself (started in 5th grade in school but it sucked and didnt actually teach me much) because i was into stuff that had no info in portuguese. I wish i had stuck with that to learn japanese but translations and google were a thing and the different writing system was way too intimidating x)

I also had to stop my japanese classes because my teacher retired in 2020.

But anyway, native portuguese speakers always at least understand spanish and some french or italian. Hardly anyone can understand portuguese tho, unless they learned spanish as a second language, maybe x)

Oh also, most Brazilians, despite also speaking portuguese, cannot understand a speaker from Portugal because they're not used to our accents at all (portugal's portuguese sounds like russian xD)