Nonsense. I live in Latin America and English is a second language for me. I'm not sure if there are even any land routes I could take to reach an English-speaking country, as I believe the Colombian jungle interrupts the road. Learning a language is about four things: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. With the Internet you can do three of those four things right from home. Hell, I've been learning English for 24 years and for the first 20 I had maybe one or two conversations with native speakers.
The question is not how far you need to travel to speak to a native, but whether there's anything in that language that interests you. Language after all is just a tool to move ideas between people's brains. If there's not then yeah, you would have no reason to learn a language. And I'm sorry to say that does make you provincial. Please don't take it the wrong way; I don't mean it as an insult, just as a statement of fact. You were born into your culture and you're satisfied with ignoring everything else. You've never thought "oh, I wish I could read this, but it's not in English" or "I love this book/show/movie/etc.; I wish I could experience it as a native would", or at least not to the point that it inspired you to learn.
I remember at one point, when I was a still trying to keep up my French, I spent a fair amount of time trying to track down some equivalent to what Friends has been (so I gather, anyway) for English-language learners—every option seemed much worse (far shorter, lower quality—which, Friends isn't even that high a bar) and even those were nearly impossible to get ahold of, because the rights holders just didn't care about foreign markets (since no-one who can speak English well is going to care much about a mediocre French sitcom, unless they're like me and trying to learn the language). Music's a little easier, but hell, even there half the time they sing in English. Maybe it's improved since about a decade ago, but at the time, there was just nothing.
Meanwhile there are dozens of shows with many, many episodes that could help provide daily exposure to colloquial, conversational English, that are relatively easy to come by (just don't pick The Wire—even Americans have trouble with that, between the authentic Baltimore accents and slang and the pervasive cop-talk).
I actually think another language that's got a huge advantage here, for foreign learners, is Japanese. It was hard not to be envious of the Japanese resources and media readily available, even back in the '00s (let alone now), compared with even a language as important and heavily-studied as French. Which is really surprising and impressive when you consider that Japanese is probably the most insular of the major world languages—one might expect French, German, and Spanish, at least, to do at least as well on that front, given that they're read and spoken widely on multiple continents by far more people than live in Japan, but no. I think it's in part because they've been able to resist the shift to preferring English media that other countries have experienced—you look at French TV schedules and there's a lot of translated English media on there, for instance, while I don't think the same is so broadly true in Japan, with the result that they have a stronger domestic media market than many other states.
Like I said, language is a tool. I have to wonder why you were learning French if you had no use for it. Can you imagine, say, picking a computer before you know if it will be able to run the software you need?
That said, you don't have to limit yourself to professional productions. I'm sure there are French-speaking YouTubers or streamers out there nowadays. That's even better exposure than high-budget productions because you'll hear a variety of local accents. And again, oral is only part of the story. You can get a lot of grammar practice by talking to people on forums and such.
>I actually think another language that's got a huge advantage here, for foreign learners, is Japanese. [...]
Japanese is actually my next language, and I've been half-seriously considering Korean because some of the artists I've been following lately happen to be Korean. Right now it's probably the best time in history to learn either of the two.
I don't think it's accurate to say that the Japanese have been "able to resist" English-language media. Like you said, Japanese culture is insular; xenophobic, to put it bluntly. It's a combination of Japan being hesitant to embrace culturally foreign media and thus producing more locally, and western cultures being more willing to embrace foreign things.
Right, that's... how they've been able to resist it. Even the French, probably the most infamously-jealous and protective of their culture and language in Europe (and against whom accusations of xenophobia are leveled pretty regularly!), haven't been anywhere near as successful, because they don't take it nearly as far as the Japanese. For all its other downsides, a strong culture of xenophobia seems to be the only way to resist this aspect of globalization—even top-down heavy-handed laws don't work, historically speaking, even before the Internet. A genuine (if somewhat cultivated) culture of reflexively dismissing the foreign seems to work, and not much else.
I do agree that Youtube has probably closed the gap somewhat, though that became a usefully-well-populated resource long after I gave up. Even with dedicated instructional material on Youtube, it's goddamn hard to maintain motivation when all the media you genuinely want to read/watch are "high" art and come with language/complexity barriers to match (Proust, Racine, Molière, Renoir, Godard, et c.), with little material to provide the sugary-sweet, approachable appeal of sprawling, crappy anime series, or American sitcoms. Best the French language has for that is comic books, and even that's got nowhere near the volume and selection of, say, manga.
About the only media I still consume in French is the occasional French news article, just because their slant on things or selection of what to cover is sometimes interesting—no coincidence that the ability to stumble through reading a French news article is currently where my French tops out, much reduced from where it once was.
I don't think it's a good thing overall, though. They get to maintain a very strong national identity, but when they do end up interacting with people from other places they appear disconnected. For example, if you've ever tried to interoperate with Japanese software, it's like going back to the '90s. They just do their own thing over there.
> For example, if you've ever tried to interoperate with Japanese software, it's like going back to the '90s.
Hey, I thought you wrote that it wasn't a good thing! ;-)
Indeed, and not only because of monolingualism.
During my time abroad, one thing frequently caught my attention: when I first met someone, they'd always said "I'm from country A"... except people from US. They introduced by mentioning their cities instead.
I always wondered why is that so? Do they assume people around the world know their geography? Do they don't learn at least a little about other countries at school?
And on monolingualism: granted, English is currently the de facto international language, so the economic incentive for them to learn a second language might be lower. But don't they generally feel curious about other cultures, reading foreign original works, or simply getting a grasp on how other languages express ideas?
> I always wondered why is that so? Do they assume people around the world know their geography? Do they don't learn at least a little about other countries at school?
It's habit. It's how we talk to one another about where we're from—major city, or nearest major city. Aside from a few states where people like to lead with that (mostly Texas and California—meanwhile, if someone says "New York", they probably mean the city; there's a little easy-to-miss comic jab about this in the show Archer, where Archer a couple times corrects someone who says "New York City" with "you can just say New York", as the latter usage reads "higher" in a social-class sense). It's a consequence of our largely-homogenous culture being spread over such a huge land area, I think.
Recall, again, that we generally have way less experience talking to people who live in other countries, on account of how very far we have to travel to encounter many such people—and even then it's mainly Canadians, who can and do sometimes pass for American pretty well (we're much worse at passing as Canadian) and Mexicans, those being the only two countries that share a land border with us. 99.9% of the time when we're telling someone where we're from, it's someone who is familiar with US geography.
Besides, "American" doesn't narrow things down very much. It'd be like someone from Germany leading with "Europe" when describing where they're from. Right, I guessed that already—but where? Germany? Austria? Switzerland? Belgium? Our nationality is far less specific, geographically, than those in Europe.
> But don't they generally feel curious about other cultures, reading foreign original works, or simply getting a grasp on how other languages express ideas?
Sure, but it's a big commitment to both learn a language and keep up that skill, and it mostly has to be maintained kind-of "artificially", for Americans. Conversational skills and accent in particular can be very difficult to maintain.
Americans remain strong aspirational speakers of second languages, it should be noted—Spanish and sometimes a few other languages (French is common, Chinese increasingly so, others like German or Italian sometimes) are taught, to some degree, to nearly all our kids, but it's hard to even find good teachers because there's just no culture in which to keep up those skills, so a lot of the time those classes are taught by people who aren't good speakers (let alone native) themselves. The kids, for their part, promptly forget everything except a phrase or two, since they never use the language outside class, and even the ones who try to go farther find it both practically difficult and, lacking much extrinsic motivation or a kind of natural need, discouraging.
> reading foreign original works
I mean... very little reading happens these days, period, aside from trash-tier online reading, romance novels, and self-help books. At least in America. We're far removed from a time when "author" could practically be counted a blue-collar profession, there was so much demand for fiction. Among the same groups of people in which reading remains semi-common, you're likely to find folks trying desperately to hold onto their grasp of one or more major literary foreign languages (and mostly failing at it).
[EDIT] Actually, now that I think about it, you may also be seeing some class bias—Americans who can travel abroad are more likely to have at least some of their culture and norms influenced by the set of people who think in cities (if not more specific!) everywhere—they don't visit France, they visit Nice, they don't visit Italy, they visit Milan, they don't have a modest apartment in America or even New York (City) but Manhattan, and so on.
Why? And how you do that? I believe it's not from the looks, right? I met a guy in Berlin who was from New York. When I first saw him I even thought he was Brazilian, because his hair and skin color were exactly like mine.
> It's habit. It's how we talk to one another about where we're from—major city, or nearest major city
I believe this is everybody's habit, as long as they are in their own country.
I live in a large country too, and we don't have a lot of contact with people from neighboring countries (so the fact we share borders with many countries is irrelevant), but I don't know, when I go abroad something just switches in my mind, it feel just too obvious that I'm talking to people with perspectives other than what I find in my own country. And I notice the same behavior in people from other nations too. That's why this habit from US nationals calls my attention.
> Besides, "American" doesn't narrow things down very much. It'd be like someone from Germany leading with "Europe" when describing where they're from. Right, I guessed that already—but where? Germany? Austria? Switzerland? Belgium? Our nationality is far less specific, geographically, than those in Europe.
"American" really don't narrow things down to the city level. Not even to the country level. But this is what I find strange: why would you narrow things down to people who are not aware of your geography? When you visit another state and introduce yourself, would it make sense to tell them your street name, number and apartment instead of your state or city, to narrow things down?
Mostly because of Europeans constantly telling us that we stick out like a sore thumb, when traveling—it seems to feature in most every discussion of Americans and international travel. It makes some of us really self-conscious about not "seeming American" abroad, which I guess maybe we do semi-successfully if you're in-fact having trouble picking us out, more often than not. Hell, what is leading with a city when asked "where are you from" if not exactly one of those boorish (they always are boorish, aren't they—that's why some of us are self-conscious about it) tells? This current exchange is about, exactly, one of these things!
> "American" really don't narrow things down to the city level. Not even to the country level. But this is what I find strange: why would you narrow things down to people who are not aware of your geography? When you visit another state and introduce yourself, would it make sense to tell them your street name, number and apartment instead of your state or city, to narrow things down?
This is not a great application of reductio.
> I live in a large country too, and we don't have a lot of contact with people from neighboring countries (so the fact we share borders with many countries is irrelevant), but I don't know, when I go abroad something just switches in my mind, it feel just too obvious that I'm talking to people with perspectives other than what I find in my own country. And I notice the same behavior in people from other nations too. That's why this habit from US nationals calls my attention.
The US is really isolated. Americans who travel outside the US, Canada (where the people largely are semi-familiar with our geography, on account of most of them living very close to the US and the strong media ties between the two countries) and (maybe) Mexico more than a countable-on-one-hand number of times in their whole lives is a major outlier. A very high proportion of our population never, ever does. Mexico might manage to counter our cultural isolation a bit, but it's regarded as unsafe, so travel there outside of well-tended resorts isn't common (see e.g. Wikipedia's list of global military conflicts for why we might have that perception—yes, yes, I know, our own drug war policies probably contribute, et c., but the why hardly matters for someone who's just trying to plan a family vacation)
Reasons Americans rarely travel abroad include:
1) Long flights are necessary to reach almost anywhere else. 6+ hours (best likely case) on a plane is really unpleasant, bordering on impossible for people with health issues (this will matter in another point).
2) Most Americans don't get much time off in a year, and often struggle to take even what they have as a large block of time. Short trips overseas suck (see: point 1 about how long the flights are)
3) We do have time off in retirement, for those of us who manage to retire—but by then, the difficulty of long flights is much-amplified (see point #1 re: health) for many.
4) The cost of flights makes such travel way more expensive than a road trip—and we're not short of interesting places to drive (especially natural attractions). It becomes hard to justify several hundred dollars per person for a flight when you still have a list of dozens of great places in the US you've yet to visit... so, travel abroad competes with some very-good, cheaper alternatives.
The result is you see basically two types of American abroad: seasoned, usually pretty-rich travelers (if not committed ex-pats), and people for whom this is one of maybe two or three trips beyond North America they'll ever take. Those latter aren't likely to develop much in the way of overseas-travel habits. And, see my edit on the prior comment for why some of those richer travelers might tend to lead with a city—it's a class-cultural thing, they also tend to name cities when talking about other countries (they don't even go to "the Alps", or Switzerland, it's always somewhere more specific like "St. Moritz"; the same set don't go to Colorado, like the rest of us would tend to say in the US when visiting Colorado, they go to Vale or whatever)
Yeah—I know I can do it, and even know that I enjoy learning another language, but also know from experience that I don't have enough natural reasons to use anything but English, that I'll have any hope of keeping it up without committing to permanently spending 10+ hours a week doing nothing but practicing the language for the sake of it, all for the occasional few minutes a year (optimistically) in which it's actually useful, or for the once-a-decade trip I might take to somewhere it's widely spoken.
Au revoir my once-somewhat-decent French.
Europeans sometimes imply Americans are dumb or hopelessly provincial for being so persistently monolingual, but it's hard as fuck to keep up a second language when you can travel 1,000 miles and the locals are all still speaking English (at least, mostly). European learners of other European languages are doing it on easy mode, compared to us. It's hard to find a route anywhere in Europe that long that doesn't pass through at least three different languages, as primarily spoken by the locals, and even finding one with that few takes some effort.
So I'm both aware that I can learn another language, and aware that I in-fact won't short of some huge shake-up in my life circumstances, which may as well be the same thing as "can't".