fallon wrote:yep, you're absolutely right
"size does matter"
to many people in the world, for example germans, "the americans" are arrogant imperialists because they exactly don't know nothing about any other country in the world and most of them have never been abroad (ok, iraq, vietnam and afghanistan don't count).
but if you ask "our" small neighbors, the swiss or the austrians, about german people, the germans are the arrogant bigheads, because we don't know anything about these countries except that they are excellent skiing locations.
so it's only a size of matter. the bigger your country is, the more the people focus on their own issues. the smaller your country is, they focus on the world outside, especially the "leading countries" of the world.
Well i don't think it's strictly a matter of size (or imperial arrogance). Yes, Americans are notoriously bad with foreign languages, as most Europeans who've encountered American tourists know well. On the other hand, there is little incentive for the American tourist to learn the major European languages since most of the time the Europeans will still speak much better English, at least north of the Alps. And here in the States, while most people get study a foreign language in school for a few years, there is not much opportunity or practical incentive for actually using, and therefore learning it (with the major exception of Spanish). Europe, at least the EU, is now a fully multi-linguistic society, where everyone needs at least some English as a
lingua franca. But how many French or Germans bother to learn say Dutch or Hungarian?
And oh yes, despite how much we all love spending time in exotic locals like Iraq etc, few Americans are fluent in Iraqi Arabic, Vietnamese or Pashto/Dari, unless they happen to be refugees/immigrants from such unfortunate counties. A similar situation obtains with the British, French, Dutch & Germans when it comes to Indian languages, Maghrebi Arabic, Indonesian or Turkish...
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