I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
Speaking more than one language. Being from Switzerland, we’re required to study 2 languages (+ our native one) at school. So it’s not infrequent to encounter swiss people who speak 4+ languages
In Germany it’s also mandatory - but learning the language at school unfortunately doesn’t necessarily mean you can speak it. LucasArts adventures contributed more to my language skills than my first English teacher. I’m always shocked about the lack of English skills in a lot of Germans when I’m back visiting. Rather surprisingly one of my uncles born in the 30s spoke pretty good English, though.
We’re now living in Finland - me German, wife Russian, we each speak to the kids in our native language, between each other English. So they’re growing up with 4 languages.
It’s quite interesting to watch them grow up in that situation. When learning about a new historical figure my daughter always asks which languages they spoke - and few weeks ago she was surprised someone only spoke two languages. So I explained that some people only speak one language - she gave me a very weird look, and it took a while to convince her that I’m not just making a bad joke.
Also Germany.
I learned english in school but only enough to be able to read it.
Once I started reading user submitted short stories (lile fan fics but different) my grammar really improved.
Nowadays the content I consume is basically 90% english based.
Just my capitalization and grammar structure sucks. Also my vocal skills as I have no one to talk to.
But: I really have to thank my last Grundschul and Realschul english teachers. Without those two I may have never got into english that well.
FTFY. Not a dig, just correcting your already very good English.
For me it was mainly watching films and tv shows in english. I’ve always preferred the original audio on anything, really. So it motivated me a good bit to become more fluent.
The only german dub I didn’t hate was Breaking Bads’, and even then I wasn’t overly fond of it.
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Of course I know people that only speak one language.
It’s me.
That’s a point current generation children are actively working on by following English-speaking streamers, communicating in predominantly English Discords, etc. The worst: my kid chose to prefer American English. Where did I go wrong?
In the UK I was given the option of German or French, but I wasn’t taught very well, and could barely speak a few basic sentences after 5 years of schooling. If this is a common experience, as I believe it is, it results in a populace who speaks english only. (Obviously an issue exacerbated by the commonality of English on the internet and popular media)
It blows my mind how inefficient my school must have been. Right now, I can’t imagine learning something for 5 years and retaining nothing.
I don’t know that it’s necessarily that it’s “inefficient”. Moreso that it’s difficult for a language to actually stick and be useful if you’re not immersing yourself in that language. You can go to class all you want, but if you’re not trying to actively immerse yourself in it beyond class, you’re not going to learn the language no matter how good the teacher is.
It’s relatively “easy” to immerse yourself in English language content because English has sort of become the “lingua Franca” of the modern world. Something like Polish, for example, isn’t.
I’m still not multilingual, but this concept made a lot more sense to me as to why I never retained my Spanish classes when I started learning programming. There’s a huge difference between say, reading a book / watching guides / reading tutorials on a programming language (which by itself generally won’t get you anywhere) vs actually following along, trying to make your own projects, etc.
How would a child do that, if no one in their community speaks the target language, outside of the ~90 minute class?
Well that’s exactly my point. It’s pretty “easy” to do it with English because there is so much English media to consume out there. A lot of shows and movies they want to watch are probably already in English. Their parents might speak English for work, etc. Less so with many other languages.
Same with French here in Canada. I took French for six years and I still don’t speak it at all, and I actually did really well in my French classes.
I spent more time conjugating verbs than actually speaking it.
I took Spanish for three years here in the States. Most of the Spanish I know now I learned after high school. This seems to be a pretty common problem in nations with English as the official language…
Damned be my pervasive mother tongue! I want immersion! Immersion I say!!
Thanks to events earlier last century pretty much everybody at least in Europe/Russia can speak a few basic sentences, and is often more than willing to demonstrate: “Haende hoch!” (hands up), “Nicht schiessen!” (don’t shoot) and a few others.
Oddly it’s actually very common (and required in some areas) in the US to study more than one language also. What is extremely uncommon are opportunities to use a second language, so very few people actually ever become fluent. It’s a shame really.
I can speak a few languages, but only the one I speak right now is useful.
Growing up in Australia I was required to learn a second language in years 7 and 8. All I can remember is how to say “and now cumshot” thanks to my friend and I finding his dad’s porn collection.