I'm not too surprised that Americans and Brits don't speak other languages. I doubt people here (Denmark) would speak more than one language if Danish were the lingua franca of international commerce. As it is, the vast majority of Danes are fluent in two languages, English and Danish, because they are both necessities to function in modern Denmark (Danish is the national language, and English is the commercial/business language and language of travel).

People do learn other languages, but at about the level Americans learn other languages: a few years in school, rarely able to carry on a conversation. Older people are more likely to be able to carry on a German conversation, but among younger people it's uncommon. If anything there's increasingly a little bit of nationalist suspicion about people who speak third languages, especially third languages natively. It's normal to be fluent in English and Danish, but if you're raised speaking another language at home, that smells of the dreaded "multiculturalism", and people may actually criticize you for raising your kids speaking a foreign language at home instead of fully assimilating into Danish culture and raising them in Danish. (Goes doubly if the foreign language is Arabic or Turkish.)

At least Swedes seem to be ridiculously good at speaking German after having just a few years of German in school. Language learning has lots to do with similarity.

The other important point is how much you use a language. Americans simply don't have contact with languages other than English most of the time. You also see this effect in Germany where the English level is fairly low for speakers of a language that is so similar to English. And this because tv and movies get dubbed in Germany.

Unfortunately languages other than English are not pushed very hard in American (public) education. It's really quite sad compared to the rest of the world. My first exposure to another language in school was 8th grade, which was the choice of an elective Spanish or French class. To prevent having to take a class at the college level, the minimum requirement (if i remember correctly) was only 2 years of a foreign language in high school.

I'm probably biased, or maybe it's because i went to a smaller school system (graduating class of only 120), but there's not nearly enough available with regards to programming, statistics, finance (you should learn how to at least do your taxes while in high school), language development (foreign and speech), and writing (we really only learn boiler plate stuff). Instead we get more 'teaching the test' so schools can keep what little funding they have.

In (non-Quebec) Canada, there's often an option to do French Immersion, even though the primary language is English. My parents put me in this program for elementary (K-8) school, and gave me the choice for high school, which I opted out of. There's a few positives and negatives that I found watching myself and my peers:

Pros:

- The 9 years that I spoke French in the classroom for every class except for English was enough to make the language stick. I'm 31 now, and I can still speak, read, and write French. My vocabulary is weak since I don't use French on a regular basis, but when I was in Paris, I had no problem understanding what was going on, ordering food, taking a cab, etc.

- I feel like having the 2nd language has made it easier to pick up other languages. I'm by no means fluent in Spanish, but when I was regularly doing DuoLingo Spanish lessons, I felt like things stuck very quickly.

- I also feel like some kind of structures in my brain from this help me pick up different programming languages. It seems like, compared to most of my peers, switching between new languages and learning new languages is generally a straightforward task for me, including weird ones like Erlang and Haskell. The majority of the effort goes into learning the concepts, not learning the syntax.

Cons:

- After graduating high school doing full immersion all the way through, many of my peers struggled with writing in University. I distinctly remember my first roommate getting an essay back and he was freaking out about the terrible mark he got. He asked me to look over it to see if I could see what was wrong with it. I read through it and just told him "Well... the problem is that you used English words, but you wrote it in French."

- Likewise, many of them had difficulties in math and science, where they understood the concepts very well from high school, but didn't have the English vocabulary to describe what they were doing.

All in all, I'm super happy that my parents made the choices they did, and that I dropped out of immersion before high school. I think, too, it helped a lot that I read a pile of English books growing up, both fiction and non-fiction, which hopefully helped supplement my English vocabulary while I was learning French at school every day. I was the 10 year old who held on tightly to his copy of the Peter Norton pink shirt book :)

I found the same thing. In the bit of rural Canada where I grew up, it was pretty standard for french elementary students to go on to english high school (with 1-2 classes/year in french, usually french & history or geography). We can all still speak french (with weaker vocab if we don't practice) but we didn't have issues with math/science jargon or having enough practice in english. A handful of students went to french high school but generally because they intended to go to a french university.

I followed a similar line to you, and what I do find about learning new languages is how easy it is to think in those languages once you grasp them; I've always thought this was due to the years of French Immersion.

I spent 9 years of my teenage life trying to learn languages in US schools. It was a complete waste and I remember none of it. The approach was ineffective.

This is interesting. It must depend on the school districts, but I live in central Iowa and my children attend public school where they started learning Spanish since Kindergarten. It is odd for me since I can not speak the language myself.

One thing many people in Europe don't realize is how huge the United States is. (This ends up often causing some hilarious confusion when they come visit and realize you can't do a road trip tour of the country in one weekend.)

Let's do some comparison. For kicks, and because I work with some Danes, we'll use Copenhagen. Denmark has about 5 million people. The state I live in, Washington, has more than 7 million.

From Copehagan, you can travel 28km and be in Malmö Sweden. Hope you know Swedish! Meanwhile, I'll still be in the metro area of the city I live in, Seattle.

Go 151km out and you can reach Stralsund in Germany. I'll be able to just reach the tip of Canada, since Seattle happens to be near the corner of the state. But if I go East, I'm still less than a quarter of the way out of Washington. And, of course, even taking Canada into account, I'm still surrounded by only English speakers.

Up to 251km, and now we've reached Kolobrzeg in Poland. Still mostly in Washington, though I can just reach the edge of Oregon. Everyone there speaks English.

At 392km, we can get to Kristiansand, Norway. Meanwhile, I can still be in Washington.

A 530km jaunt across the Baltic gets us into Lithuania or Latvia. That just gets me to Oregon, Idaho, and a bit of Montana because Idaho is so narrow.

Going the other way, a 784km paddle across the North Sea gets us to the UK. That gets me a little bit of the way into Nevada and California. 44 states are still out of reach.

804km will make it to France. That gets me to... still just Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and California.

To get to a place where English isn't the main language, I have to go about 1,700km to Mexico. That distance will take a Dane well past Moscow.

To get to Florida, the last place I lived, I have to go about 4,000km. That distance will take our Danish friend to Sudan, Saudia Arabia, Novosibirsk, or well past the North pole. In fact, it will take them just about over the Atlantic all the way to Canada.

So, yes, I do wish I was multi-lingual. But I don't think it should come as a shock or be considered a failure that most Americans are when it lets us converse with all of the more than 300 million people that are in a several thousand kilometer radius around us.

That babies can learn multiple languages with ease is a surprise to no one in the world.

Only surprise is that education systems around the world continue to waste so many years of people's lives trying to teach them additional languages when they're teenagers, instead of having done the bulk of the work when they were babies, the way that nature's been doing it successfully for tens of thousands (or more) years.

What works for babies does not necessarily for adults. L1 and L2 acquisition are quite different.

This is actually a somewhat controversial claim, academically. There's pretty strong evidence for a "critical period" for acquiring a native-sounding accent, and some evidence that certain adult learners still occasionally mess up minor grammatical details after decades of immersion. But other studies suggest that language-learning ability trails off gradually with age in much the same way that, say, physical ability does. A 35-year-old can still get in pretty good shape if they work at it.

I know plenty of people whose language-learning strategy is basically, "Put myself in situations where I need to use the language and I can puzzle things out. If I get curious, maybe look something up once in a while." It's not quite like childhood acquisition, but neither is it a completely different process.

I strongly disagree, and the education system approach is provably a massive failure in this regard. That's all I'll say for now.

"Provably" how? Many people learn through a class and go on to speak a second language, so what's the proof?

Sure, eventually you just have to use it. But as an adult learner, you can get going a lot faster by using your knowledge of other languages, understanding of rules, and so on, before jumping in, and it's not always practical for people to just take off and spend months or years in a foreign country in the hopes they'll learn a language while they're there.

The grandparent's point is correct, although he didn't say anything about formalized education. You inserted that yourself.

You can't just "disagree". This is a matter which science (linguistics specifically) has lots of research on.

If you're just saying that they're not perfectly identical, then that's obvious, you've said nothing. What I'm replying to is your implication that they're vastly different. Science shows that they're not as vastly different as the education system assumes.

> teach them additional languages when they're teenagers, instead of having done the bulk of the work when they were babies

My (semi-related) reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9226046

My instructor chose to go full immersion, basically what children are subjected to. The other instructors took the grammar/vocab workbook route.

  > Being fluent in three languages never seemed like a big deal 

So the joke goes: three languages = trilingual, two languages = bilingual, one language = American

It's a cute joke, but I feel that the US gets an unfair rap around languages. I know for a fact that plenty of people the UK (where I'm from) declare their hopelessness with foreign languages with a good deal of ... I don't know ... pride? humour? There's always going to be a number of talented bilingual folks there, but they're in the minority. I'd be interested to see how the UK and the US compare, I wouldn't be surprised if the US had a greater proportion of bilingual people.

It's so strange that people often lump US & UK into the same group. They're vastly culturally different in many ways, opposite even.

I don't disagree, but in the context of this joke I was just wanting to say "Hey America, us too!" :D

I tested myself to see if I fit the stereotype by trying to explain this joke to a Japanese friend, in Japanese. After a collective effort which determined that there isn't a concise noun phrase in Japanese that's equivalent to "bilingual"/"trilingual" etc (anyone else know if that's actually the case?), I think the point was communicated, which I hope implies graduation to at least some limbo between "American" and "bilingual".

What about ２言語併用、３言語併用？