Well Americans would probably do best to learn Spanish. The problem is it’s not so clear-cut in the UK, in theory we should learn French, except the French don’t appreciate it and speak English anyway. The Spanish and Germans also speak English so again there doesn’t seem to be an obvious language to learn.
If you’re going to learn a language that want to give you the maximum ability to communicate with new people it’d probably be Japanese but realistically no one in the UK is going to learn Japanese.
Back in the eighties my parents (British) bought a villa in Spain, all on it’s own on a mountainside. Over the following ten years fifty - yes, fifty - other villas were built, all independently, all by Brits, all on top of each other, most without planning permission. A group of busybodies formed a HOA-style association and took over the area, building an English Shoppe with a red phone box outside where you could buy the Daily Mail and Tetley Tea, an English pub, replacing the road signs with English ones, even an English radio station. The last time we visited and decided to sell, we arrived to find they’d illegally installed a gate across the road - the PUBLIC road - and were only giving the remotes to certain worthy residents, which apparently we weren’t.
But it’s okay. Because they weren’t dirty migrants forcing their culture on others and refusing the integrate; they were expats just looking for a little bit of sun.
Once I was in a country where people spoke multiple languages. One of them was English another was Spanish. I can speak Spanish, but I’m better in English.
My friend and I went into a shop and spoke in English as most people in the city could. He just yelled at us and told us that we have to leave if we speak English.
It was weird, because, like I said, most people speak English there and he wasn’t incapable of speaking English or even ask us to speak another language.
We decided to leave and then he changed his tone completely and said English is OK.
It was so weird of him to pick a fight about that. Over Oreos.
This always makes me laugh when American and UK tourists go abroad and expect people to speak English. Integrate muthafuckas!
Well Americans would probably do best to learn Spanish. The problem is it’s not so clear-cut in the UK, in theory we should learn French, except the French don’t appreciate it and speak English anyway. The Spanish and Germans also speak English so again there doesn’t seem to be an obvious language to learn.
If you’re going to learn a language that want to give you the maximum ability to communicate with new people it’d probably be Japanese but realistically no one in the UK is going to learn Japanese.
malay/Indonesian may be easier to learn, same alphabet.
Call yourself an “expat” and apparently you never have to integrate.
Back in the eighties my parents (British) bought a villa in Spain, all on it’s own on a mountainside. Over the following ten years fifty - yes, fifty - other villas were built, all independently, all by Brits, all on top of each other, most without planning permission. A group of busybodies formed a HOA-style association and took over the area, building an English Shoppe with a red phone box outside where you could buy the Daily Mail and Tetley Tea, an English pub, replacing the road signs with English ones, even an English radio station. The last time we visited and decided to sell, we arrived to find they’d illegally installed a gate across the road - the PUBLIC road - and were only giving the remotes to certain worthy residents, which apparently we weren’t.
But it’s okay. Because they weren’t dirty migrants forcing their culture on others and refusing the integrate; they were expats just looking for a little bit of sun.
Gonna go dark on this: in South East Asia the “expats” are notoriously known as sexpats because they are sex tourists.
So fucking many of those in Portugal. It’s so embarrassing.
Once I was in a country where people spoke multiple languages. One of them was English another was Spanish. I can speak Spanish, but I’m better in English.
My friend and I went into a shop and spoke in English as most people in the city could. He just yelled at us and told us that we have to leave if we speak English.
It was weird, because, like I said, most people speak English there and he wasn’t incapable of speaking English or even ask us to speak another language.
We decided to leave and then he changed his tone completely and said English is OK.
It was so weird of him to pick a fight about that. Over Oreos.