| > 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... |