Well, I'll tell you even as an American who's lived in a relatively similar country, culturally, in northwestern Europe (Belgium/Netherlands), where they spoke a related language, good luck trying to learn the local language, especially in the Netherlands, as locals will immediately switch to English rather than having the patience to deal with you. I'd imagine this phenomonon is probably the same in lots of other countries, like the Scandinavian ones and others. So it's not even always that Americans and other English speakers don't want to attempt to learn another language, they're just not really enabled to do so in many places. I'm guessing the situation would be much worse with a language like Japanese, which has fairly isolated usage and a much more difficult structure and writing form, for an English speaker, or a speaker of any European language, for that matter.
Spain might be a good place to learn Spanish, as a lot of Spaniards won't speak English to you, since a number of them simply don't speak it. At least, that was my experience when I was there. I had to speak Spanish in order to get my needs met.
Agree. Most Spanish speaking countries would probably be good choices. Probably Brazil too, for Portuguese. Northern European countries, not so much for the most part.
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u/SnooPears5432 ILLINOIS 🏙️💨 2d ago
Well, I'll tell you even as an American who's lived in a relatively similar country, culturally, in northwestern Europe (Belgium/Netherlands), where they spoke a related language, good luck trying to learn the local language, especially in the Netherlands, as locals will immediately switch to English rather than having the patience to deal with you. I'd imagine this phenomonon is probably the same in lots of other countries, like the Scandinavian ones and others. So it's not even always that Americans and other English speakers don't want to attempt to learn another language, they're just not really enabled to do so in many places. I'm guessing the situation would be much worse with a language like Japanese, which has fairly isolated usage and a much more difficult structure and writing form, for an English speaker, or a speaker of any European language, for that matter.