I figured out a while ago that learning multiple languages is really easy. You just pronounce things in an accent and add different endings sometimes. Other than that it’s pretty much the same.
I told this to my Puerto Rican friend and he didn’t believe me, so I picked up some Marx and flawlessly translated it into Spanish. You should have seen his face. He was so embarazada.
I'm not sure what this meme wants. Would you like to see americans confidently overestimating their foreign language skills and pulling the meaning straight from their... ideology? Because I'm sure that can be arranged.
I was just making an excuse to make the only multilingual pun I know
That's one fine looking organised proletarian movement.
Why doesn't mine look like that?!
Lmao same except mine was like literally 22-24. She’s come to school hungover sometimes and just let us chill if we’d be quiet
This seems like the weirdest thing to dunk on Americans for. Like, yeah, Americans can't read things in a language they're not fluent in, and... neither can anyone else?
People should at least know some basic vocabulary and conversational sentences. That should get you by for nuanced and often deeply contextual political analysis from 100 years ago, right?
Why? Basic skills would absolutely not get you through an old French text from 100 years ago. There'd be so many archaic forms of words to bog you down. Translations exist these days. Learning a language is absolutely not paramount for learning revolutionary skills.
EDIT: i think you may have been being sarcastic but I'm leaving it anyway
Yeah, that's my point. The meme is criticizing americans for needing theory to be translated into english. Which seems to be adjacent to some valid criticisms, but dosen't make sense as is.
I'll admit I was making fun of the meme for using vague, unfocused sarcasm against its target, and I did it by using slightly more pointed sarcasm, so it's fair you misunderstood me.
This is only useful if you are likely to run into people that speak another language. Without that you just lose any fluency or phrases even ignoring their lack of utility at that point.
Be me, be socially uncomfortable, learning tourist German while in Germany, panics every time I tried to talk to a German and only high school Spanish would come out.
What do you call someone who can understand two languages?
spoiler
A bilingual
What do you call someone who can understand one language?
spoiler
An anglophone
3, which is 3.8 times the amount of languages the average American speaks :tito-laugh:
Yes the meme is silly, but also :farquaad-point: American
Good for you, but sneering at the masses of American people for shit that's out of their control is :LIB: bullshit
edit: not to mention the blatant erasure of millions of working Americans who actually are multi-lingual, particularly in English and Spanish.
Yes, but you're funny people
A McDonald's flying their M flag half mast because of a mass shooting close by? Accidental absurdist comedy. I'm not laughing at classist "fly-over states" jokes, I am laughing at this shit
I hate America but that has nothing to do with laughing at poor people for not being taught languages in their crumbling education system.
OK, restating
:tito-laugh: lmao those able-bodied neurotypical cisgender heterosexual upper middle class white suburban American nuclear families who, due to immediate material conditions created from two centuries of lingual-cultural oppression, have only been taught a single language, inadequately, thanks to their deteriorating educational system caused by racist tax systems which crumble under global economic duress.
As much as I’d love to, I cannot take credit for Trump’s hilarity. The McDonald’s flag was me though. That was a fun bit
i'm sorry, but a lot (most tbh) people who speak multiple languages live in worse conditions than the average american. the main reason americans are monolingual is cultural, not due to their own immediate material conditions.
he main reason americans are monolingual
The nearest city where English is not the majority language by a large margin is about 600 miles away from me, or about the distance between Paris and Vienna. My immediate material condition is that since I can't afford to travel, I don't do international business, and I will likely never be in a city that isn't majority English speaking for the rest of my life, there is no pressing material need to learn any other languages. Many if not most Americans are in the same position; The international lingua franca is their native language, they cannot afford to travel to places where other languages are spoken, and unless they live in the Southwest they will probably not interact with populations that speak another language for most of their lives.
i think the lingua franca argument is pretty strong. i was gonna add it to my initial comment but i had some stuff to do and opted not to. americans still have a reputation of only knowing English even when compared to other anglophone countries though. i know Europeans make fun of the English for the exact same reason, but i feel like on a global level America is still the worst when it comes to this.
and i feel like in your comment it also shows how it's a bit cultural, you only pointed out utilitarian reasons for learning a language, which is a bit like pointing out utilitarian reasons for looking at art.
please don't take this personally because i don't mean to be rude to americans personally, it's just an observation and a critique of the idea that America is somehow an uniquely awful country for the working class.
So your logic here is that the more poor you are, the more languages you automatically speak?
that isn't really a charitable interpretation of what i said lol
what i meant to convey is that trying to explain the fact that americans don't speak other languages solely with the fact that they don't have the means to doesn't really stick when it's objectively one of the better countries in the world to live in, despite how god awful it still is. it's not like the rest of the world live more comfortable lives.
This will be the greatest struggle session in the history of the site, I can feel it
Spanish is better cause burgués is so much easier to spell than bourgueise
I did read a french science article which was comprehensible due to nearly every significant word being of fairly obvious latin etymology.
If you speak more than one language you're either a colonizer or colonized, either of which is a fucked up thing to happen to a person.
