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Comment by tayo42 | Hacker News Reader

> yet I always seem to fizzle out because in the end, why bother?

This has frequently been my problem. I think maybe I'll learn enough to know it's not relevant or helpful outside some curiosity.

Languages are really hard. As an American speaking English I really get no use from knowing another language. Over my life I've learned, Spanish, Hebrew, French and Japanese. Enough to make sentences, and I forgot them all and never used them except for a trip. Everyone in foreign countries speaks English anyway.

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> Everyone in foreign countries speaks English anyway.

Maybe you'll find an interesting travel destination where that's not the case by sorting this list by percent English speakers, ascending: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

Its an interesting idea, ive actually been to two in that top 20, morocco and costa rica. I did know a little bit of spanish for the costa rica trip, my high school spanish came back slightly and google translate was helpful enough. Moroccan arabic is really a niche language and found english took me pretty far, i actually didn't bother to learn any arabic for that trip.

Not everyone speaks English, far from it, but I totally understand the sentiment. In any case, even if you're visiting a place and you're awful at a language, it still means a LOT to the native speakers.

Yeah that's true it might be appreciated, though i'll add on and say i think its unreasonable to expect Americans to learn the local language when they travel. If i wanted to visit europe and go to 3 countries in 10 days, (i dont think thats an unreasonable trip) It would be crazy to do dedicated months of learning for that. Anything beyond, hello, good bye, excuse me and thank you is really too much and not a real good use of time.

There is a the real problem. There are too many languages in the world. All are nice in their own way, but nobody knows even 1% of all languages that are currently spoken. When I was in Germany nobody tried to talk to me in Spanish, if I met somebody who didn't speak English I just assumed communication was impossible even though Spain was only a couple hours drive away. I probably came off as a mono-lingual American even though I knew some Spanish.

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