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.
Winter driving and shoulder season driving. Snow, ice, black ice, freezing rain, slush, hydroplaning, driveway clearing, walkway maintenance, windshield scraping, and keeping an emergency kit for breakdowns. Stuff like that.
Or driving in general. As an American who didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 21 (gasp! so old) due to some reasons, I can attest that many, many people here simply can’t comprehend the idea of someone over 17 or so not having one. I got turned away from a hotel once because they didn’t know how to use a passport as an ID.
The only other people I’ve met with this problem were immigrants. And we were always able to bond over lamentations of how difficult it is to solve this problem… the entire system to get a license here is built around the assumption that everyone does it in high school, so every step of the way is some roadblock like “simply drive to your driving test appointment”…
As an American who didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 21 (gasp! so old)
I’m now 41, never made a license - there wasn’t really much of a need until now. I can get anywhere I want with a combination of bicycle and public transport.
Guessing you live in or close-ish some kind of urban center? I got my license at 18 cause the closest bus stop from my parents’ place was a 30 minute walk from the closest bus stop, getting literally anywhere useful was at the very minimum another 30 minutes on top of this, and getting downtown was another 45-50 minutes of bus+metro over those last two stretches, assuming no traffic. I currently live 60km outside of town, it’s the exact same story. 20 minute walk to the bus, 30 minute bus ride to the train station, and 45 minutes of train to get downtown. North America was built for cars, for better or (especially) for worse, our public transit infrastructure is terrible, things are so far from each other, nothing was built for it…
When I moved out of my parents’ place and got an apartment in the city with my wife though, we managed without a car. Bus/metro/walking got us everywhere we needed for every day life, and we used car sharing services when we needed to go out of town. I wouldn’t mind going back to this, but living in town would be literally twice as expensive, and we’re deeply priced out of that area if we ever want to buy, despite me making a solid 6 figures lol
I moved to the USA and then Canada as an adult. I had never needed to learn to drive in my home country because there were decent buses and trains. But you really can’t function easily in North America without driving a car, so I had to learn and start polluting like everyone else. It’s not a good setup.
This right here is a big one. I live in a college town in Minnesota and the students from out of state are absolute mennaces on the road in winter. My dad used to plow snow for one of the local universities. He had multiple students drive directly head on into his plow because they never cleared off any of their windshield before they started driving down the road. Luckily the snow plow tends to handily win in those situations and the plow trucks all had dash cams for exactly that reason.
You also get the people who think they’re invincible in the snow because they’re driving a 4 wheel drive truck. Newsflash, 4 wheel drive doesn’t mean you stop any better and it doesn’t do much when you’re on glare ice.
Similarly people who haven’t dealt with snow have no idea what to do when they do start sliding. So many people will just hit the brakes when they start to slide, which anyone who is familiar with winter driving should know that is the exact thing you never want to do.
Snow tires are another big one. I drive a tiny crappy rear wheel drive pickup but as long as I have a good set of snow tires on it and a few sand bags in the bed of the truck, then it still out performs any other vehicle with all weather tires in the snow.
I live in a ski town that caters to the Los Angeles crowd, and I feel you on all that. 4 wheel drive does not mean 4 wheel stop lol. We are lucky in that we don’t get that permafrost y’all get up north, usually the roads dry out a few days after a snow storm so snow tires aren’t mandatory up here. But the number of overconfident goofballs in the winter is way too high.
The big one I can think of are snow rated tires, most people have plain old radials that don’t do squat in snow. And then you have people that don’t know which axle is their drive axle and that’s always fun to watch. Thankfully I have a two door wrangler with all terrains that is a breeze to drive in snow, very rarely do I have to chain up.
So it will snow at night but warm up during the day so you’re dealing with icy conditions that have a layer of melt water on them. Or freezing rain that flash freezes at dusk to black ice. And so on.
Was a bit of a learning curve for me, having moved from subtropical Florida to Colorado the land of eternal winter. I bought a Subaru.
I had an Uber driver in Florida last time I was there (business) and when he found out I was from Canada he told me he went to Boulder in the winter for a vacation and thought it would be cool to rent a car and drive up a mountain. Yeah, he was pretty freaked out by that driving experience. :)
Good call on the Subaru. My wife had a couple and they were great in the snow. First car we ever had with heated seats, too!
I used to (sometimes skipping class) drive in the mountains almost every day when I was living in Boulder attending CU. I loved it and miss it dearly.
A few years ago I was stuck in a terrible traffic jam, five hours through ice and snow for a drive that should’ve been 50 minutes.
A woman froze in her car in that jam, and since then I’ve made sure to always have a warm sleeping bag in the car.
Also, heated side mirrors are so nice
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.
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.
Without those two I may have never gotten into english that well.
FTFY. Not a dig, just correcting your already very good English.
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?
American english is the standard dialect for online content. And without exposure other dialects can be really hard to understand.
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?
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.
Yep. French Immersion was the way to go if you started in elementary school or had above average academic skills for late immersion. I’m still disappointed I had to stop when I moved and getting to the school with the program just wasn’t feasible (had done two years of immersion prior). By the time I moved again it was Grade 10 and the presumed fluency was so high I would have struggled very badly.
Now the best option is dating a French girl, but my wife has reservations.
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…
and could barely speak a few basic sentences after 5 years of schooling
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.
Exactly. Unless things have changed dramatically, one or two years of a foreign language is a requirement in high school, and there are more opportunities in lower K-12 these days from what I hear. However, you’re right that this is not especially helpful without some immersion, and the practice of trading your kids to a foreign family for a year is far less common. Then, after K-12, opportunities to practice greatly diminish.
The German mother of a good friend moved to the US West coast when she was a young adult, married, and had my friend. She never lost her German accent. When I was in my early 20s, I had the opportunity to live and work in Germany for a couple of years, and when I came back, I was fairly fluent - enough to pass as a native from a “different region.” I visited my friend when I returned, and tried to have a conversation with her mother in German; she sadly informed me that she had forgotten most of her German, and could no longer converse… there are few opportunities to speak in German on the West coast, and even native language skills attrophy if unused.
In a related annecdote, when I first returned to the states, I’d sometime fail to remember the English words for the odd thing, like “trash can.” All I could remember was the German word for it.
All thay has gone away. Years later, I can barely hold basic conversations in German. Maybe some people have an ability to retain language skills without practice, but I believe it’s far more common to lose fluency you once had.
That’s a good anecdote.
For my part I took Spanish from 2nd or 3rd grade all through college. I basically knew enough to be dangerous and it was occasionally useful in online chat where my broken Spanish was marginally better than some people’s non-existent English. But honestly the biggest strength was that I knew enough to be able to tell when Google translate did a bad job conveying my meaning.
Nowadays I’m several years removed from the last opportunity to use it at all and I hardly remember anything. It’s definitely a “use it or lose it” thing.
Reading always helped me to, at least keep the language alive in my head. So reading and understanding were never a problem.
But conversation? That degrades quickly to the point where people ask you from what country you are visiting…
It also has to do with the wide diversity of languages spoken. The elementary school where my kids go put out a statement during the pandemic that there are 32 different languages spoken by kids at home. They had gotten many requests for school communications in more than just English and Spanish, and had to explain why that wasn’t feasible.
So there are a ton of bilingual kids in their school, but my kids could learn the 4 additional languages spoken by the kids in their classroom, and the following year they would need to learn 4 entirely new languages. They learned to count to ten in several languages, but like you said, they will never have the opportunity to become fluent if they don’t go somewhere less heterogenous.
Only speaking one language fluently makes me feel like garbage regularly, none of my schooling really stuck and I can never commit to language or feel enough confidence to use anything I do learn.
In Sweden kids learn English from second grade and a third language from fifth grade.
What really annoys me is how many programmers seem to expect us to only be able to understand one language. I much rather have the program made in English than to read a bad Swedish translation.
Yes exactly. Google is a big culprit of this, for instance translating descriptions of apps in Google play or giving me results on Google search in Swedish when I specifically wrote it in English. If I had wanted results in Swedish I would have written it in Swedish. Adding quotation marks doesn’t even help. I miss the time when you actually got what you searched for and not what Google believes that you search for… YouTube has an issue in the app when looking at playlist. Since the word “visningar” is so much longer than “views” the rest of the line is cut off. So you for instance can’t see if the video was posted 1 month ago or 1 year. This is more a failure of gui due to translation than the translation it self though.
On the subject of shitty translations: a budget webpage translated “disabled”, as in “this option is turned off”, as “funktionshindrad” which means a person with a disability. I bug reported it and the initial response was:
We do not currently support this functionality, but will pass your feedback on to our product team, who will make a note of it and try to incorporate it into our product as soon as possible.
Two months later they wrote that it would be forwarded to their product team for “whenever there’s an update in our system”. That was 10 months ago and it still isn’t fixed.
Presumably what they meant, yes. Sometimes YouTube translates video titles for example. Of course, the video is still in the original language, so it’s completely useless, except for videos without speech.
Every program should have a setting to define in which language you want to interact with it.
we’re required to study 2 languages (+ our native one) at school
This is crazy to me. I studied French at school for years and got to a decent enough level, but then when I tried to take Spanish later on I couldn’t deal with it. Maybe if they’d been concurrent it would’ve been a different story but I just couldn’t keep the languages separate in my brain. Then years later when I moved to a different country the French pretty much left my head as a new language replaced it.
I guess I’ve only got one “foreign language center” in my head and only one language can occupy it at any time.
Knowing how to swim. Basic life skill in a water-rich country, but many expats can’t.
Surprisingly, many Irish don’t know how to swim, even though it’s an island.
We learned swimming in primary school in Germany, no opting out.
But having lived in several African countries and now in China, it’s surprising how many people not only can’t swim, but are deathly afraid of water.
If you can’t swim, bring desthly afraid of water is a good survival instinct.
After an incident of near-drowning as a toddler, my parents prioritized swimming lessons in my childhood. I can never remember not being able to swim. However, when I was in the military, there was a survival swimming section where you had to get in a pool with full clothing and a weapon, and swim a length. You were supposed to keep the weapon above water at all time. So you’re doing a side-stroke with one arm holding a 7lb weight above water, in long-sleeved shirt and pants (I recall being grateful no boots or socks). Most of us California boys made it; lots of people didn’t make it with the rifle the whole way, or tapped out without getting anywhere at all. The point is, near the end, when I was exhausted from fighting the water, and it was starting to get hard to keep my head above water, I felt an unexpected panic rising. I can easily believe that if it had gone on much longer, the panic would have taken over and years of swimming experienced would go out the window, and I’d have ended up thrashing futiliy in the water like the guys who dropped out at the start.
Drowning is a singularly frightening experience.
One of my friends is 33 and she and her older sister can’t swim. They grew up on a rural farm far away from any body of water. “Where would we have learned or practiced?” Over the years, I have learned that a lot of people in the US cannot swim, especially when they were poor as kids, even in major cities near water.
One of my friends is 33 and she and her older sister can’t swim. They grew up on a rural farm far away from any body of water.
Gen-X. Lived near a lake or ocean 80% of my life. Grew up poor. Swimming lessons were a costly luxury that didn’t make the budget. Ever.
(Un)surprisingly, the US had lots of public pools, but they got removed because of racism. Definitely affects everyone especially the poor with little means of travel. https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-be-everywhere-in-america-then-racism-shut-them-down/
Maybe that’s different from state to state. I grew up in Hessen but don’t remember having mandatory swimming lessons. I learned it mostly on my own so I don’t even have a „Seepferdchen“ and know a few people from NRW who don’t either. I remember there was the option to do it in school but not sure why I didn’t take it then.
Either way, not being able to swim at all is pretty rare in Germany because going to the pool is a popular activity for kids here.
Same in the US. Most schools do not have their own pool and swimming is not a required skill. Tons of people don’t know how to swim here.
I cannot understand how someone can not learn how to swim. Idk, it’s like never learning to jump, or skip, or run?
I know things get harder to learn when your brain isn’t plastic and malleable (i still can’t roll my Rs), but it’s still strange and seems dangerous.
I cannot understand how someone can not learn how to swim.
Poor kid. Couldn’t afford lessons. Revel in your privilege! :-D
In Australia it’s not just knowing how to swim but where to swim and when. A lot of tourists drown in the ocean here because they don’t know how to read the waves / don’t have an understanding of the local area.
