[kwanbix]

Good for him.

Being bilingual myself (Spanish native, English learned) I always wonder why so many Americans/Brits do not speak Spanish as their second language, or any second language for that matter.

Now I live in Europe, and here it is very common for people to know 3 or 4 languages.

Being able to communicate on any other language is so great.

[bnralt]

Most people learn languages for a reason. English is the global language now, so a lot of people learn it, native English speakers already speak the global language. The U.S. has a sizeable amount of native Spanish speakers, so it also has a fairly sizeable amount of native-English speakers that can speak Spanish with some degree of proficiency. Probably more than most European’s learn minority languages in their countries. I don’t think I’ve met any people from Madrid that study Catalan or Basque just to speak with the minority of people there who speak those languages.

[quectophoton]

> I don’t think I’ve met any people from Madrid that study Catalan or Basque just to speak with the minority of people there who speak those languages.

Can confirm. I'm currently living in Catalonia. I don't speak Catalan, only English and Spanish.

My employer is based in Catalonia. They pay for English classes for any employees that want to take them. But also, they have zero interest in paying for Catalan classes for the few of us that don't speak it, and I have zero interest in learning it during my free time when I could be using that free time to learn a more useful language instead.

But the higher ups travel a lot between continents just "to meet people in person", so there's that.

[trust_bt_verify]

I think it really comes down to the proximity to areas that speak that language. I can travel 100s of miles in every direction from my home in the US and only find English speakers. If there was a town that spoke Spanish 50 miles away, I may consider picking it up. Not many Europeans speak Chinese, why do you think that is?

[jameshart]

A coding challenge for someone with more GIS knowledge than I have: use the dataset behind this map https://hub.arcgis.com/maps/847cabe2dfc64f92918f2c282e3cedfb (number of households where Spanish is the primary spoken language by census tract) and see if you can find a location in the United States where you can travel 100s of miles in any direction without encountering a Spanish speaker.

Might be somewhere in Alaska, maybe?

[LorenPechtel]

Yup, why should I learn it? I simply have too few occasions to interact with someone who speaks Spanish but not English that it would have been quite a waste of effort to learn.

[Tomis02]

And yet plenty of Americans travel to Europe. Wouldn't hurt to pick up a few words in a foreign language, no?

[zwieback]

I think part of it is that so many people around the world speak English so if English is your first language it's easier to get around.

[dopidopHN]

But you get the English treatment.

While being polite, lots of people will think of you as a retarded child.

If you travel to Mexico for instance, the difference is staggering between someone with a command of Spanish and someone that speaks English only.

[tayo42]

As an adult it's really hard to pick up a language to be conversational. I tried, it's alot of dedication.

Then I went to Mexico, no one understood me. I guess I have an accent or issues with pronunciation. If I did ask a question, I didn't understand the answer. Everyone just spoke English.

[zwieback]

Now you're making Mexicans sound like dicks, I don't want to believe that is true.

[meowtimemania]

I think it's for the same reason that you haven't learned a third language other than english.

[IshKebab]

> I always wonder why so many Americans/Brits do not speak Spanish as their second language

I don't know about America, but for Britain:

* Spanish is one language of many, rather than "the other language" like it is in America. It's not even the closest country. French is more popular by far (the standard languages in school are French and German).

* It's extremely unlikely that someone from the UK would spend any significant time in Spain while growing up. Maybe one or two family holidays, but those are expensive, and it's unlikely that you'd always go on holiday in the same country anyway. It's simply not enough to motivate learning the language. Imagine if you went to Russia for a week once when you were young. Would you learn Russian? Of course not.

I had never been to Spain until my 20s. It's not at all uncommon. In fact I had only been to the continent maybe 4 times before uni. Also not uncommon. It doesn't help that the government has criminalised term time holidays. A family holiday in Europe is a huge luxury for most people.

* Like it or not, English is the lingua franca of the modern world. If you're not a native English speaker and you are going to learn another language, it's pretty obvious that you're going to learn English in most circumstances. Think about programming - it's common for programs to be written in English even if all of the authors are native speakers of a different language. If you are a native English speaker which language should you learn? It's far less obvious. That has certainly led me to not be so motivated to learn another language.

I guess Chinese would probably be the obvious choice, but that's extremely difficult and I'm unlikely to ever actually go there...

[alexfoo]

Brit here, mid 40s.

Many Brits were taught a second language at school (11-16, some starting earlier) but there was very little opportunity to use it outside school, so most did the bare minimum and never continued with it.

I learned French and German at school but they are both very rusty. I’ve since picked up very rusty Spanish. All 3 enough to survive in bars/restaurants and find my way around a new place (eventually) but getting better is on my big long list of things to do.

[m00x]

You could just jump on a train for 35 euros and be in France in a few hours, and a bit more to go to Germany/Spain.

Imagine being in Canada/US where you don't have any other language outside of a 6h plane ride.

[rcarr]

> You could just jump on a train for 35 euros and be in France in a few hours

So first off, you're assuming that they live in London, as that is the only place with a direct train link to France. Second, the Eurostar website has ticket prices "from £39" which equates to €45. But that's the "from" price. Looking at all availability up to the end of October, there is one day where you can get a £63 ticket, another day where you can get an £86 ticket and all other days are £97 or over. So just "jumping on the train" isn't the cheap carefree jaunt you're making it out to be. The average full time salary in London is £37,000[1] and average rent in London is a staggering £31,524[2]. Those numbers only work because a lot of people are house sharing - it is impossible to live in the UK on £5476, especially in London. That one way ticket to France is approximately 1/7 of the average Londoner's weekly wage.

[1] https://upthegains.co.uk/blog/what-is-a-good-salary-in-londo....

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/rightmove-reveals-average-rents-i...

[laurencerowe]

Living in London is horribly expensive, but being so close, European travel from the UK is often similar in price to travel within the UK. As well as Eurostar there are many cheap flights and both can be similar to the costs of train travel within the UK.

Brexit has sunk the pound so the costs of holidays abroad will be relatively more expensive now, but as kids we often took summer holidays in France because it cost less than going somewhere in the UK.

[rcarr]

I get that but, unless you're earning £100k+/year, hopping on the train to France every weekend to go practice your French is prohibitively expensive and not realistic

[laurencerowe]

Doing it every weekend would be prohibitively expensive, but then so would taking the train to Manchester or anywhere else a similar distance within the UK.

Now living in the west coast of the US I really miss the freedom to visit so many different places for so little, whether that be cheap Eurostar fares or cheap budget airline flights.

[alexfoo]

No need for a train. I could find conversational French/Spanish/German really easily where I live now in London. I have at least 5 native speakers of each of those languages who are friends and live within a mile of me. Right now it is just laziness.

Finding local language communities locally might be harder in less cosmopolitan areas but it just takes a bit of effort.

As an 11-16 year old learning those languages at school it was a lot harder to do so.

[prmoustache]

OTOH you guys take the car when we take a walk to do our groceries and fly as easily as we take a city bus to go to another neighborhood.

[sho_hn]

I call this the "I don't understand why Europeans don't go for lunch in Paris" puzzlement. I've had variations of this conversation with many American friends over the years ... :)

[dopidopHN]

I’m French but lives in the US since a while.

Distances just hit differently on their side of the Atlantic.

It’s considerably less tiresome and costly to cover long distance in cars.

I noticed that a 500km ride in France is very long distance. A once in a summer thing. While a 350miles trajectory in the us is something I can do with less friction.

[laurencerowe]

This is a big factor, but living in the US I do miss the cheap flights that made weekend city breaks within Europe cheap and easy. From San Francisco it seems like the only place you can get a similarly cheap flight to is Las Vegas and I've never understood the attraction of gambling...

[rjsw]

It seems sensible for Americans to learn Spanish as their second language. British schools used to teach French or German as the main foreign language.

[hotpotamus]

American here - I'm still working on English and it's been a few decades, so I think I might have trouble with another language. I live in South Texas so there are sometimes situations where Spanish is the only language spoken and I can get by well enough with it I suppose. But English gets you pretty far the world over, so we can afford to be lazy about it.

[dopidopHN]

Absolutely, but it’s a rewarding experience to exchange with a foreign culture in there own language. Not some pivot language like English.

[jncfhnb]

As an American they taught us Spanish since grade 4. I would like to say I’m decent. Unusually good grammar. Bad, small vocabulary.

It’s never been needed. It’s been a bit useful about 5 times.

[mazugrin2]

Maybe it depends on where in the US one lives, but speaking decent Spanish has come to be really useful to me pretty frequently. And it's always been very rewarding in those moments when it has. It's not an every day thing, but at least once a week I find myself in a situation where having Spanish was definitely useful, if not required. That is far less frequent, maybe once a year or so does it feel "required", but then it's been especially rewarding to have it.

[jncfhnb]

Certainly. I would wager about 80% of the US has little need for it.

I like using Spanish where I can. But it’s irrelevant.

[_tik_]

In South East Asia is common to speak multiple language too. All my family member can speak at least 4 languages. Most of SEAs can speak at least 2 languages.