Ahh yes the blanket shit on Americans post.
It’s timeless
A classic
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Make a joke about the British, they’re like “Yeah we do drink a lot of tea did a lot of imperialism, and our food sucks”
Make a joke about the French, and they’re like “ho ho, we are rude and love wine non?”
Make a joke about the Italians, and they’re like “Ay, we do love a pizza, and can’t fight a war!”
Make a joke about Americans, and there’s always the “WHY DO YOU GUYS MAKE FUN OF US! NO FAIR! WHY DO PEOPLE THINK ITS FUNNY TO HATE US?!?”
I’ve experienced only the opposite. Americans love self deprecating humor but Yuros will literally cry about you “abusing my country” if you say one negative thing.
Its infuriating…its like people arent a hive mind, init?
Make a joke about Americans being fucking idiots and don’t expect Americans to laugh along. I mean what do you expect? Yeah we drink a lot of coffee and did slavery and use little creamer cups and eat lots of fried food and spend too much on our military. Americans, right? This? No thanks.
its also as if you’re being disingenuous, because try to say that shit to some hardcore right wing patriots of any country and see how fast you get your faced caved in.
jokes are funnier when they’ve got a nugget of truth i think. if the joke was about americans being fat and putting cheese on everything, or about how we’re the richest country in the world but people die all the time because they can’t afford basic medicine, i doubt there’d by any complaints. but saying that we can’t speak any language feels less like poking fun at regional differences, and more like just, idk, lying for the sake of being cruel?
Only one of these four groups have been dunked on incessantly for years upon years with the same three jokes.
Yeah…it’s the French and capitulating to the Nazis, and they still take it better than Americans and any criticism
You mean the French with the white flag and baguette jokes? Spaniards with the lazy/siesta jokes? Italians with the pasta and pizza jokes? South europeans with the poor/debt jokes? Irish with the alcoholism jokes? British with their shitty food cuisine jokes? Swedish and their immigrant policy jokes?
Americans are not special. Each country has their joke topic, yours in a nutshell are about yall being very self centered, and it shows tbh.
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*they’re
*could have
That was the joke.
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According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 20 percent of Americans can converse in two or more languages, compared with 56 percent of Europeans.
I would of knew itd turn out this way
Blanket 🤔
Speak for yourselves. As a Latino born from Mexican immigrants, I speak English and Spanish poorly 😢
Lo siento amigo (o bróder )
My 3 favorite experiences with language as an American:
(1) My Jamaican coworker who I couldn’t understand for the life of me and my Ukrainian coworker who my Jamaican couldn’t understand at all, the Ukrainian coworker understood the Jamaican coworker just fine though and I understood my Ukrainian coworker just fine. Basically it turns into a fun game of telephone whenever we need to talk.
(2) My former coworker from Haiti who no one but the hiring manager and I could understand, the best part about this is that I didn’t know he had an accent. I just didn’t hear it somehow. He was a great guy, he went back home a few years ago when his mother passed. Got stuck due to the pandemic and never came back to the company. I hope he’s doing well.
(3) My former coworker from Guatemala insisting English wasn’t my first language as to him it sounded like English was my second language at best. I’ve been working on it since then. I still suck at it.
Um, plenty of Europeans speak 3 or more languages. Native language, language of the country you’re living in, and English.
German, Bavarian and English 😁
Bavarian
On that note, I also understand some Swabian, Franconian, and Austrian.
A bad rendition of Hochdeutsch, an incomprehensible dialect of bayrisch and hello and goodbye in English
This. I think european and asian should be swapped in this meme. I think its rarer to see asian speak 3 languages than seeing european speak 3 languages
Surely that depends on where in Asia you’re looking at as well? On average, the number of languages people speak is quite different between, say, India and Japan. Or Switzerland vs Romania in Europe.
Meh I only speak English and Norwegian. I can (with extreme difficulty) make myself understood in German, but I wouldn’t say I “speak German” . Although anyone who speaks Norwegian can also understand Swedish and Danish (not easily in the case of Danish unless it’s written).
As an asian, this has been my experience as well. Of course there are exceptions, but most asians I know (not just in my country) usually just speak 2 languages.
But which part of Asia are you from? Here in India, schools are required (at least on paper) to teach three languages, so most people are at least trilingual.
Well yes but many schools teach sanskrit and its a dead language?
Sanskrit is still spoken in some parts of Karnataka state. Also, only some schools run by the federal government teach Sanskrit. Usually it is (1) the official language of the state, (2) English and (3) Hindi. (If Hindi is the official language of the state, then any other Indian language, or a foreigh language, would be offered. For historical reasons most schools in Tamil Nadu state do not offer Hindi, but will have another third language such as French.)
Dutch, English (Traditional not simplified), and french, and I can understand german but not speak it myself.
Belgian spotted
Nah, Netherlands
Americans have trouble with any accent that isn’t the blandest, nails on chalkboard accent.
Once had one ask me if I was speaking English when I spoke to him (for context I am Irish, the north bit)
Lol yeah, it’s just the Americans that don’t understand you. Sure…
Well fucksake mate, when someone asks yous where you’re from, yous go “NornIrn”
Naecunt can unnerstaund thon
Right so don’t really know if this is bait… but that’s one kind of accent (and the tickest pronunciation at that) in ulster, specifically greater Belfast/co. Antrim and very few people speak that thick. For the most part they should be quite understandable from the perspective of anyone who consumes any English language media outside of only American or only London (RP) English. The number of times I have had people have trouble with my accent in Europe and then I ask them what they watched when learning English and the answer is American TV is astounding.
This is me getting on my wee podium now but I have a huge problem with the Americans and Brits for this, they marginalise the fuck out if our dialect, make fun of it for being unitelligible (after making no effort to understand it), and often deny it any legitimacy.
In reality Irish English is spoken by 5-7million people, as large as some dialects of European languages (eg. Austrian/swiss German, Belgian/Swiss French, etc) and if you learn French or German you still get some exposure to those dialects and if you out your mind to it understand it.
I have a huge problem with the Americans and Brits for this, they marginalise the fuck out if our dialect, make fun of it for being unitelligible
I mean I know you’re talking about the wider world and not just this thread, but you started the conversation by being disingenuous about Americans and their dialects. It’s kind of hard for people to take “I have a legitimate dialect” seriously when you just got done trashing half a continent’s worth of dialects
Maybe if we all broach the topic with a little more understanding, you and everyone will feel better about it. For example Appalachian English and Northern Ireland English are both dialects with their own rules of pronunciation and grammar. They’re both legitimate. But it’s not surprising they’d have trouble understanding each other because they have so little interaction. But with patience and mutual respect it can happen
Most German speakers make fun of how unintelligible the Austrian German dialect is. It’s so bad sometimes that translators are required.
As a native german speaker I have to say swiss german is unintelligible gibberish.
You just also seem to have a problem of marginalizing US English and UK English. They vary drastically. Just like how you just stated accents in your own country can vary.
asks yous
Before I read the rest of your comment, I thought you were going for a New York accent.
Bland and nails on chalkboard? That’s like the opposite of bland. Not great, but definitely not bland. Bland is blunt and flat. Nails on chalkboard is shrill, sharp, and grating. I just don’t understand how you can believe both at the same time.
Here, I mean more the reaction to it, I sometimes cringe at the pronunciation or intonation in the way one would to nails on a chalkboard (the idiom can have more than one meaning or reaction attached to it)
That doesn’t change the argument. Bland and cringe are also not like each other. I’m all for you criticizing something because it’s different than you, but at least use your language consistently and properly. How would anyone interpret a secondary analogy without knowing how you personally react? It already has a clear meaning on its surface. Occam’s razor would indicate that’s enough. Why would anyone invent a second possible scenario that’s only knowable if you have access to information that isn’t well known, and in this case, near certainty of being unknown? Just say hearing the accent from some other country makes you cringe. Communication doesn’t have to be difficult unless you make it so.
I am dating a man from England and it’s amazing how many people don’t understand his accent. It might just be me getting to know him, but I don’t find his accent (or even tough accents like Irish or Scottish) hard to understand anymore.
My god son, just how many marbles were you trying to eat while talking to those nice Americans? You do know that the untied states has around 30 dialects, and every accent from around the world, right? I’m sure you knew better than that when you generalized 300 million people into one anecdote.
You’ll probably hear more and more varied accents in an average US city than in all of Ireland.
Well, as an Indian with a love for anime, I speak 3 languages and am learning a 4th (Japanese).
मुळात माझी मातृभाषा मराठी आहे. आणि मी बरीच वर्ष महाराष्ट्रातच राहिलीय…
लेकिन school और दोस्तों के वजह से हिंदी भी बोल लेता है. और तो और, इन दोनो की लिपी एक जैसी ही होने के कारण पढणे मे भी दिक्कत नही आति.
わたしはあにめがすきですから、にほんごをべんきょうおします。今は、にほんごのうりょうくしけんのN5できました。今年の１２月にN4できますよ。
And I plan on learning more soon 🙃.
That’s just one language - the language of funny symbols.
idk they look pretty nice, nicer than English i’d say. they both are different languages but use the same transcript or something?
OPs comment contains four languages, my reply was a joke.
No u.
El Psy Kongroo! Nice name 😉
Hello fellow Indian. This is very similar to my linguistic capabilities if you substitute Japanese for the bit of French I learnt in school / college 30 years ago. Ok, I can’t really follow someone when they speak French, but I can read it well enough even now.
AYEEEEE wassup bruh.
Does a namaste, then raises hand for high five
Nice. I know every language is pretty difficult mostly, but as someone who’s had a hard time learning Hindi after realising it uses the same script and yet is a different language from Marathi, French just blows my fucking mind.
French just blows my fucking mind.
In my experience, it was reasonably simple to learn how to read / write French. We had it in school for 3 years and then college for a couple of years. The emphasis was on reading / writing and not so much on speaking / listening, though I remember we had to recite some French poetry once. The teacher’s ears must have fallen of hearing our impeccable accents :D
Bonjour, aimez-vous les croissants?
Bonjour, aimez-vous les croissants?
Un peu, mais je prefere les baguettes
(and also I just realized I totally don’t know how to make acute / grave accents on my keyboard, if that’s possible at all with an en-US layout)
Here, you can copy-paste: é è ê ë à â ï î ô ù û ç 😉
This feels like I’m playing No Man’s Sky. Just a bunch of symbols I don’t recognize and then the word “school” in the middle without context hahaha.
In all seriousness, good for you. That’s very impressive. I’m only bilingual with a basic understanding of a third language.
lmao. I feel you.
Thanks man. I’m barely able to read at present…
Also, that’s pretty cool dude! Nice.
Please use more kanji lol, it feels weird seeing words that are commonly written in kanji in hiragana.
Perfectly acceptable for beginners to write in kana. Many of my students here primarily write in kana until up to 6th grade.
Definitely is. I forgot the actual name of the writing style, but for children’s books it is also not uncommon to have kanji with their hiragana transliteration above/beside it. Requiring someone to immediately write kanji when they learn japanese, especially as a secondary+ language is insane
Furigana I believe
Yoo i kinda can understand the jp one lol.
試験を合格しておめでとうございます!🎉N４に頑張って!
ありがとうございます。
日本語のうりょうくしけんがんばってね！ぼくはそのしけんのためにぜんぜんべんきょうしないので、むずかしさわかりません。 もし、日本へりょこうしたいなら、外来語はとっても大切だと思ういますよ。かたかなをよめなければ、何も分かりませんでした。
あ。。。どうもね。 そうですね。。。たいへんですね。。。 ぼくはごいとぶんぽうがとてもへたですよ。。。 かたかなきらいですから、あまりしらないよ。。。
You are
Your
🤣
There, their, they’re.
Though through thought
have/of
of/off
to/too
ad/add
I today saw someone use “theirs” in place of “there is”, and I hope that they are a non-native speaker.
American here, I’m going to challenge myself to remember as many as I can.
Set: A group of things that go together.
Set: Letting a dessert cool in the fridge
Set: A stage for a play or film
Set: A command to put something somewhere
Set: A part of Tennis
…
5/704 isn’t so bad, right?
Edit: looking up the definitions shows a lot of sub-definitions that essentially have the same meaning. I don’t think it’s appropriate to say that the word has 435 meanings when “set a course” and “set a fire” are basically “start a thing,” yet they’re listed as different definitions. The are many many of these cases even just on Google’s definition blurb.
But I’m no dictionary expert so…
Yeah some do seem the same, but thats possilbe also a bias from knowning the language.
You mean y’all. Don’t embarrass us.
y’all’d’nt’ve’d’d’i’d’nt’ve’d’y’all’t’ve’d
Here’s one: it’s/its
Now tell me which is possessive.
Oh look, it’s the same old reposted garbage meme that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Oh look, it’s the same old reposted garbage comment that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Oh look, it’s the same old comment complaining about another comment that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Oh look, it’s the same old reposted comment chain that I have seen on Reddit hundreds of times.
Something something pls give upvotes
I would never upvote chain-comments, they are so cringe after the first two
Came here to say this!
idk I’ve seen this first time, and its hilarious, though agreed I never used Reddit that much
This has been reposted on the dankmemes subreddit a countless amount of times.
Oh man, I’m so glad that hasn’t popped up here. That sub was hot garbage. I blocked it years ago, and forgot about it until now haha.
I’m sure it has, but not everyone lives (lived?) in Reddit like you.
That’s how you can tell Lemmy is growing.
Excuse me, but as an American I take offense to this meme. I speak 4 languages, English, Southern, Bostonian, and Spanish /s
The only good thing that the Americanization brought is, that, except the French, the world can communicate with each other in English.
Even if the French could communicate in English, would anyone want to have a conversation with a Frenchman?
Non
I know you are joking but based on my purely anecdotal personal experience, the French (at least in Paris) can now speak and are willing to speak in English much more than a few decades back.
The first time I went to France, almost 25 years back, I had a rough time communicating at restaurants or even buying tickets at the Paris metro stations. Not sure if the latter was an ability or willingness issue because even holding up two fingers and saying “two tickets” was apparently indecipherable. Had to muster my school days French and say “deux billets” to produce instant results.
Edit: And no, the two fingers I was holding up were not the middle finger of each hand :P
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That is the one upside to capitalism and you don’t even consider it a full upside?
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Hungarian is like Chinese to most romanic / germanic languages.
While being excellent in describing every little thing pretty efficiently and short, the problem I see with highly advanced languages is imho that they are pretty complicated to learn.
As an island monkey, I’m hurt by this comment. Y U no love UK?
Oh I love the UK! I just hate the Trump-impression the people who’re too old that they should be allowed to vote have given power.
We also normalized porn
You’re welcome, degens.
Porn was legalized for the first time in Denmark 1967, so not really.
Good thing that’s a different word then
Legalisation and normalisation go hand in hand
It’s legal to lick all the doorknobs you want, but something tells me you’re already on that ball.
Many indians speak 4+ languages easily , and we dont even notice that 😅
Isn’t India in Asia
Last I checked.
Fun fact: when you say “Asian” to an American, their first thought is East or Southeast Asia, but a British person’s primary association with “Asianness”, for lack of a better term, is India and Pakistan.
I did not know that, interesting.
Do they refer to East Asians as “oriental” then?
Only the very old and/or racist ones do afaik
Wait why? They’re literally in the Orient
We don’t call it that anymore. Haven’t for decades.
As for the why, the time when that term was in regular use was a time with a lot of anti-asian bigotry and most of the people who refuse to stop using it are the same ones who use other outdated terms/slurs for non-white and non-western people, so it has tons of negative connotations…
My mom complained that the ramen she likes isn’t called Oriental anymore.
SIGH
Geographically it is a subcontinent that slammed into Asia to form the Himalayas, so you could make the argument it is its own thing.
That’s like arguing nothing is its own thing cause they used to be one continent.
its not about continent its about himalayas that saparated india and china .
Clearly, this dude voted to become mr. worldwide
India and Pakistan are considered to be in Asia but more accurately they are considered to be in the Indian Subcontinent. The same way Iran, Saudi Arabia and the rest are also considered to be in Asia but they are more accurately considered to be on the Middle East.
SEA PROBABLY , however India , pakistan , sri lanka and bangladesh are considered a subcontinent coz similar cultures , and are different from rest of asia !
Not to take away from this but often these 4 are very similar languages that could be easily interpreted as dialects if not the identity politics.
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Well most indian languages are not even mutually intelligible so idk if its about identity politics or what not !
It is complicated. India has at least four language families - Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan. So Hindi (I-E) is closer related to English or Greek than to Tamil (Dra), Santali (AA) or Zeme (S-T). While it is rare for people to speak languages belonging to all four families, I know at least three people who can passably speak six languages from two or three families.
How well do you speak those languages? For example, can you order pizza with pineapple and olives in any of those languages? What if the pizza you get is cold, there’s only one olive on it and the crust is soggy, could you get your complaints through in any language?
Or perhaps will the explanation be more like: “Pizza bad, no good. Want money back.”
I’m not from India but as another Asian, yes, we can have fluent conversations in several languages. (I grew up speaking English, Mandarin, Malay, Cantonese and a bit of Hakka)
Found the Malaysian
Hello! 👋 We’re mostly on monyet.cc on Lemmy.
That’s pretty cool. Took a quick look at the relationships those languages have, and it seems that Malay is the odd one out, all the others are in the sinitic family. I would expect that if you learn one, your mind isn’t going to explode if you try to learn the other two. However, Malay is completely different, so jumping into that world may require some extra effort.
To give a European example, if you already know Norwegian, learning Swedish it’s only one step away. Jumping into Danish or German at that point can be done, but it will require some extra effort. A similar situation exists between Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
It’s more to do with my multicultural upbringing - Malay is the national language here in Malaysia, so it’s pretty much compulsory to learn & speak. My parents are Cantonese & Hakka Chinese, I learnt to speak Malay & Mandarin in school (where ethnic Chinese kids from different dialect groups as well as ppl from other ethnicities mingle), and spoke mostly English in college & work. We also have Indians and other minorities who speak even more dialects/languages than I do.
Well most of us speak a mother tongue , and english ( since ex britt colony ) very fluently , but there are times when both parents speak a different language and the city /state you live in has a different language and hence they speak it very close to native fluency !
My bf and his family for instance speaks 6 languages for the reasons listed above !
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So, exactly how it works in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesian.
They sepak native local language from their city, other two from other islands, English for international language, sometimes Chinese, Malay, Arabic, Korean, or Chinese. Not to forget the national language, Indonesian.
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They don’t think it’s normal, it’s all that’s necessary. English is the lingua franca
The incentive to learn a language is in software, not human.
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Learning 3+ languages sounds like a lot of work. Colonizing the entire world so that you never have to learn a second language seems like the smarter move if you ask me 🧐
I’ll never understand this attitude that Europeans have towards Americans. I thought we were friends.
North Americans and Europeans are only friends when someone from a different continent is in the room.
I’m franco-american, living in france, and I regularly get people telling me they’re sorry for insulting me for being american. It’s so ingrained in the culture here to shit on americans it’s something of a knee-jerk reaction. I get it, america’s the hegemon, we’re the big baddy, I just wish that didn’t spill over into a kind of xenophobia that people are so comfortable with they regularly catch themselves being openly insulting to people they call their friends.
They can’t talk to eagles 🦅 so they don’t count that as a language
Just a friendly reminder that bald eagles just sound like noisier seagulls. :)
They believe themselves superior in every way, including racially. Look up the racist “le 56% face” Nazi memes to see what they think about that.
look up racist memes intentionally
I think I won’t thanks
Look up the racist “le 56% face” Nazi memes
Wow. I had no idea this was a thing.
Modern neo-nazis and white supremacists just don’t really understand that the Nazis from WWII would reject and enslave a majority of them… mainly for having Jewish, Slavic, Roma, or other ethnic groups’ blood.
Turns out post-WWI/WWII economic crises lead to a lot of migration and mixing of groups, who woulda thunk?
The “le 56% face” meme, on both sides of the coin, is just a precursor to the world’s greatest Leopards ate My Face meme.
My theory is they don’t like constantly seeing us in their news and entertainment when we rarely see anything at all from their country.
Thing is, there’s not much American news outside of the US. I live in Canada and have far less news about America than I’d thought there should be given how we are neighbors and partners. Most of the news I used to hear about the USA is from Reddit. And when I visit France (which I do regularly, bring born there), there’s almost nothing about the US there.
Recently though, Trump was also over and it wasn’t pretty. Also when going on Reddit, it’s 80% about US News and content, but not necessarily the best news.
Overall, what bothers me and others is how much patriotic a lot of the Americans seem to be and how great they seem to think they are, even when you hear how bad the society is in terms of healthcare, pension, divided politics, crimes, conspiracy theory, etc.
But everytime I’ve been to the US, I’ve only met great and friendly people and have always appreciated it. You usually hear about the bad parts in the news.
I remember back in high school there was this Danish foreign exchange student one year, and she would not shut up about how this or that was better in Denmark.
Those kind of people exist anywhere, that isn’t tied to any nationality. Guess it stemms from insecurities and chasing some weird need to feel superior about something.
We are only friends because the other big guys look way because out of the big guys the usa look the least scary.
Some of my collegemates know 6 languages(India)
South and Southeast Asians really put all their xp into languages
They will speak hindi, their native and 3 neighboring states’ languages fluently and then complain about north Indian hindi oppression
(which is definitely a thing but I have my own different views on it not expressed in this comment or comparison)
India is basically a language generator
Haha
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Many Americans actually are bilingual or are studying another language to become bilingual.
But Americans be like duhhhhh hahaha stereotypes
