| > I agree with you in principle. In practice English is often all you need if you live in a big city 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. |
