With today's anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, I feel like again reflecting on how English gives you an excellent base for learning not just one but two families of languages (Germanic + Romance), which makes it all more of a shame how few native English-speakers bother to learn other languages

“They all talk English” (Sic). My lifelong battle. Translation: Frank fights ignorance aided by Polyglot the parrot.

I had the year memorized, but not the day 😁🙌

This is one of those things that can and should be attacked in early education and is helped immensely by parental involvement. I learned some basic German and Spanish as a kid and I feel it gave me a foundation, not just for those languages, but for language-learning in general.

It's traditional to talk about how the Norman Conquest pushed English away from Germanic, but imo Danish and Norwegian are still the easiest languages to learn for native English speakers. (Compare English to German, which has considerably different grammar, and the difference seems far larger.)

I clicked on your profile to follow you based on this post and realized I was already following you 😃

English gives you an excellent base for learning. But the ubiquity of English, for Americans anyway, is a huge obstacle to learning.

I tried to learn Dutch when I lived in Rotterdam. It was quite frustrating, because every time I tried to speak more than a few words to someone, they would hear my English accent and reply in English.

This knowledge and sense of shame is part of what impels me to take language learning seriously