Sunday, June 2, 2013
Cultural Learnings of Europe for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of United States
One of the more interesting observations that I've made during our trqvels of the last few weeks was the impressive amount of languages that the average person here speaks. While being bilingual in the states puts you ahead of the curve, over here it's not unusual to run into people who speak many more. One day when we went to lunch in a Brussels sanwhich shop the man behind the counter quickly cycled through 4 or 5 languages to see which one we were most comfortable speaking in with him. This really is quite astounding to me. Also, France doesn't use the standard qwerty keyboard setup, which made this take much longer to type than it should have taken.
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The amount of languages that are grasped here is impressive. Yet it seems like that it can be explained by the close proximity these languages are located. Though with that logic the both and south in the states would know some more French and Spanish.
ReplyDeleteSeeing how fast they switch is pretty amazing, but here in Paris I do see a lot more people that don't speak english so it has made for some conversations. I notice here that people seem to switch a little slower too, and I sometimes have a kinda rough time understanding.
ReplyDeleteI have a sneeking suspicion that they understand quite well, but just prefer to speak French.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking that many languages could be quite useful. I feel like that is definitely something that the US could improve upon.
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