Daniel_

Oh boy. I can hold a simple conversation in French - ask directions, order food, that sort of thing. I certainly can't SPEAK FRENCH. I can puzzle my way through a Spanish menu or timetable, but can't have a talk to anyone about anything. I know a little technical German.

Most British people are hopeless at foreign languages. We need a phrasebook to visit another county, let alone going abroad.

The difference is that most people in my country have looked about and could tell you that the language people speak in Mexico is Spanish, not "Mexican".

You've taken what was a discussion of American being insular and inward looking and turned it into one about Europeans knowing other languages. The point isn't that Europeans speak each other's languages - many don't - the point is that my TV news tells me things about Greece, Belgium, Russia, and so on. Whenever I've been in the states, I watch your news coverage and I come out after each trip having to go on a news binge online to find out what happened in the world while I was gone.

All US news services I have been exposed to feel to me like the local paper from Aberdeen that (apocryphally) reported the loss of the Titanic with "Aberdeen Man Lost At Sea".

Well, the Sea that one crosses to get from the British east coast to Germany, Denmark, Scandinavia is called "The North Sea", and you can't cross it by train.

If I said "You can't call lakes "great" when they're full of ice and pollution" I'd probably be put on a TSA list and banned from entering the US.

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Overhead, the Albatross hangs motionless upon the air,
And deep beneath the rolling waves,
In labyrinths of Coral Caves,
The Echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand;
And everthing is Green and Submarine
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