I've always found it frustrating whenever I meet people who don't try to integrate with the country they're living in - both when I've lived at home and in foreign countries...

I think a journalist writing about a country is a special case though, that doesn’t get affordancee.

Countries where people are multilingual from a young age clearly have some major differences to those where they are not, and even in those countries many people are not multilingual.

The countries where everybody is multi-lingual this almost assuredly happens in middle to early childhood.

The fact is any adult can learn any language, they just either don’t have to or don’t want to. I’m not saying it’s easy or it’s the best decision for every situation, but it’s definitely possible. This is true even more so if it’s a popular language with a lot of resources to learn it, and you live in the country where practice is virtually free.

I don't want to be too presumptuous here but my understanding is there are a lot of desperate broke African immigrants finding their way into Italy.

In such a situation you would be forced to rapidly acquire the language to survive, move on somewhere else, or possibly resort to crime because you are unable to communicate to secure a job (which <should> rapidly leads to expulsion from the country).

Probably, but I don't think it challenges the legitimacy of the original point at all.

> Comparatively if white American hacker guy shows up flush with tech cash [...] not much chance I'm going to find myself on police radar or starve not learning the language

True, but you might not have a very good time.

However, I believe many people overestimate the advantage children have in learning a language. For example, a four-year-old can have a basic conversation and communicate their needs, but they are not yet able to have a complex conversation. Their vocabulary and pronunciation may not be fully developed yet.

It's important to note that this child has spent a significant portion of their life learning the language and is exposed to it daily, and likely has parents or others to practice their language skills with. Despite this, their language level is not yet perfect.

The point I am trying to make is that it takes a significant amount of time and effort to learn a language, and there is no shortcut or "hack." Most adults would likely do comparably well if they dedicated the same time and effort to learning a language as children do.

Children don't have any special ability to pick up languages, but they do have certain advantages: they aren't afraid to make mistakes, they are fully immersed in the language from the moment they wake up, they have no responsibilities like jobs and other adult stuff and they have people (parents, school, teachers, family) constantly talking to them at a level they can comprehend while gently pointing out their mistakes. If you put that barber in the same environment he will be fluent in no time.

They do. One example I recall from a neurology class is that the auditory cortex of a young child is able to differentiate more sounds than that of an adult. As a child ages, they lose the ability to distinguish sounds not common in their native language. The inability to distinguish the sounds also applies to the inability to tell the sounds apart when speaking it which decreases their ability to produce the correct sound. There is some research showing it is possible to relearn the ability to differentiate, but this requires training specifically in identifying sounds, not training in learning a language.

This doesn't mean fluency as an adult is impossible, and there are many actions that an adult could take to better align their learning environment to that of a child's which would improve their learning, but we should recognize there are some difference that cannot be replicated in adults.

I don’t think Denmark is the best example here. English competency is _extremely_ high and Danish is quite a difficult language to grasp (as far as I know as an A2/B1 Swedish learner).

Pronunciation is a very difficult ballgame as Danish has sounds not in any of those languages. E.g. stød: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stød

But then how much insight has that person into how other people think (they can’t hold a conversation with the vast majority of non english speaking people), or access to local news and studies...

I think many Spanish speaking countries are in the same boat: not speaking the local language means you end up in a foreign friendly bubble with limited access to anything that didn’t get picked up by that english speaking sphere, which will often include the really interesting stuff.

that might be true in Europe (not everywhere though) or in the US, it is certainly not true in Japan.

There is also a fatigue associated to speaking English for non native speakers that often leads to being identified as the "foreigner" and in practice you end up hanging out only with other English speaking "foreigners".

You also miss a lot about the local culture, because the language barrier forces you to only visit places where people speak English.

It is like living in Poland and never eat pierogi.

> When I look at my country (Poland), I can see that a person can live in Warsaw (capital city) or any of the biggest 5 cities without knowing any Polish

Poland is good (but not great) in that sense, a lot of people speak English, many of them don't speak it well enough to actually hold a meaningful conversation with a native speaker. I understand them as a non native speaker, but I also recognize many of the mistakes in the construction of the sentences they make (and that I make as well).

But that's not true in general, not even in rich and well educated Europe

See

https://cache.eupedia.com/images/content/English_speakers_Eu...

Now the real advantage of speaking some local language is knowing a lingua franca.

It's not uncommon here in Italy to witness a conversation between immigrants coming from wildly different backgrounds (say, for example, North Africa and Eastern Europe) happening in Italian. Their version of Italian, of course, but it's good enough to communicate and they also can practice the language they actually need to interact with Italians.

Of course it takes a lot of time to learn a new language, especially if the language doesn't even have the same alphabet you already know, but after 10 years I would expect to actually have learned at least the basics of it.

I've managed to travel to 30+ countries and never felt out of place because most places will somehow accommodate English speakers.

The only place I felt a little bit of language hostility was in Russia. Moscow was probably the least English-friendly major city I've ever been to - but that makes sense from a historical perspective.