re: #384 ~Fianna

I know that the European education systems tend to be better at introducing early language study to kids than the American schools often are.

When we were in Portugal, almost everyone around my age and younger spoke English fairly well. And would apologize profusely for how badly they spoke it, even though their grasp of my language is light-years ahead of my grasp of theirs. Yes, they got some little things wrong, but they were 100% understandable and we could communicate just fine.

We teach foreign languages, but for the most part, have no intention of producing people who can speak those languages. It’s sort of a stupid use of resources.