Wojtek wrote:
> Pervasive foreign language illiteracy is a uniquely US phenomenon.
I'm not surprised that you hold this view, but you're wrong.
The problem is that native English-speakers from the US, in their travels, usually only come into contact with people who have had the educational and/or wealth advantages that allow them to learn foreign languages. So English-speakers then assume that "everybody speaks English", and accordingly engage in all kinds of hand-wringing about how Americans are supposedly so bad at foreign languages.
Don't get me wrong, I think if the US was not an arrogant superpower, it would have the decency to instruct its school students in Spanish from an early age. But this is hardly a unique US phenomenon.
The French are notoriously bad polyglots. French tourists who come to Germany are absolutely *shocked* to discover that most service sector workers do not speak French. And since they themselves often don't speak German or English (because why learn English if French is a "world language"), communication difficulties ensue.
And let's not even get started on all the Germans in Majorca who never bother to learn a word of Spanish. Majorca even has German-language daily newspapers!