You can imagine my surprise when I learned today during our conversation with an American that he speaks Russian. So I switched to Russian to test his skills, and was quite shocked to hear that he actually speaks Russian very well!
My surprise increased when he told me in Russian that he hasn’t spoken Russian for some time because he has been living in Tbilisi for several months, where he started learning Georgian and has been practicing his Georgian language skills ever since. How many Americans do you know who speak Russian and Georgian?
I’ve known several Americans who spoke Russian. I’ve never knowingly met anyone who spoke Georgian.
The US has a number of universities that offer degrees in Russian. Probably most universities and even a lot of two-year community colleges have classes in Russian. They would not have those degrees and classes if a reasonable number of people were not taking them. You can pretty much assume that at any given time there are thousands of Americans learning at least the basics of Russian.
Yes, I know that there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Americans who are learning Russian, but still, the percentage of Americans who speak Russian is very small compared to the percentage of Dutch people who speak English, for example.
As for me, I have met quite a few Americans in person over the last 30 years or so, but Kevin was the first with whom I had a meaningful conversation in Russian. Interestingly enough, my very first encounter with Americans took place in Moscow, of all places, when the Iron Curtain still existed.
Yea, as a percent it’s not many. There is not a compelling reason for people to learn Russian. I’m guessing that the most common language for people to learn by far is Spanish since there are such large numbers of Spanish speaking people in the US.
When I was in middle and high school, the languages offered were Spanish, French, German and Latin. In hind sight I wish I would have taken Latin.
As I recall, the number of Americans learning Mandarin has increased greatly in the last 10 years, and the trend doesn’t seem to be stopping. Maybe @SarahChau can tell us more about this question?
Thanks for inviting me to discuss this question.
I think the main reason is that the China’s economy is growing in a tremendous speed in the pass 40 years. People around the worldgradually aware that China has a lot of things worth to learn.
In addition, More and more people want to do business with Chinese. There are large number of Chinese are residential in other countries as Chinese has been migrating around the world since the early 17 centuries. especially in the Southeast Asia countries. So people can find Chinese business man everywhere. Within China, we have a heap of dialect, if people are going to meet a business partner who was born in the same place as them, they would probably communicate in dialect because it will make their partner feel accommondative. Similarly, if foreigners speak Chinese while doing business with Chinese, their negotiation might go smoothier and they probably will achieve their goal easier.
Several years back my company needed to translate a document from Georgian into English. We had to do it in 2 steps, first translating it into Russian and then into English.
BTW , the Georgian alphabet is quite pretty.
Of course, there is the old saying:
People who speak many languages are multi-lingual.
People who speak two languages are bi-lingual.
People who speak one language are Americans.
Oh, it’s a difficult task to learn Russian . My native language is not English, but it is much easier to learn it than Russian, I tried. I remember that for one event, I had to make a simple invitation document in Russian. I must say, I suffered a lot while I did it. I don’t know how Russians speak it )
I’ve just remembered that a couple of years ago I met @RyanBell, an American who has been learning Russian too. Ryan, how have you been? Where are you?
