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And he's formed a bad generalization given a very much non-random sample.
When I visited France, I didn't do the tourist areas. My aunt/uncle and parents were with me. When they split up, my life became hell. They all assured me everybody in France knew English (same in Denmark and Sweden). Ha. None of the shopkeepers even knew enough English to say the prices for things my mother or aunt pointed at. I was running from shop to shop being an escort interpreter for two groups (and saw mostly what my mother and aunt wanted to see).
Then again, I get into strange places. I've been stuck talking to functinoally monolingual French speakers in Quebec, where most Francophones are at least minimally competent in English. Then again, I try to avoid beating already beaten paths. I go to Prague, and wind up spending the weekend not in the city, but in a pensionat 30 miles outside of town. I go to France, and hit up Boulogne.
In the Czech Republic, more than once I was surrounded by a group of people who knew no English. Or French. Or even Russian. It was Czech or nothing. Sometimes "nothing". A lot of the Germans I ran into were mostly monolingual, using a trip to "learn" Czech to drink lots of beer, instead; it was annoying to try to talk to them in English, French, Spanish, or Czech, when they only understand German (a language I seem incapable of learning). Those who were competent in another language? The college-educated professionals who needed to know a second language, the tourism industry workers for whom learning a second or third language was a job skill. A few times I was in a village where if I hadn't known Czech, I'd have had nobody to talk to. Few professionals there. Engineers often were monolingual--again, it depended upon whether they had a need for the language.
So who comes and visits, and actually gets to impress Americans by their knowledge of English? People who know English. If they don't know much English, they'll stay quiet and you just won't know that they're monolingual.
Oddly, while in Eugene, Oregon, I once got involved with the sister-city program. A load of Russians from Irkutsk showed up. At the end of their trip, they remarked how it was amazing that so many Americans knew Russian. The exchange program made sure that Russian-speaking Americans were usually on hand, and they scoured the city for them. Again, a very non-random sample warped the Russians' impressions, and the damned sister-city folk were proud and agreed, the idiots, to reinforce the feeling of comraderie and good will. (When, in fact, they'd exhausted the bunch of us.)
I've been in various kinds of groups overseas. Sometimes I'm around people like myself--college educated, grad students, or among people learning another language. Other times I've gone slumming, or found myself not among academics and quasi-academics, but around working-class or lower-middle class people. I prefer the latter, but usually have to speak their language since they're pretty much monolingual. Many of them studied English or French or German in high school (not all). Almost all forgot it or learned it poorly. Which, to be honest, sounds very, very familiar.
To return to the Czech example. There were a lot of monolingual Americans that I couldn't manage to avoid. They hung together, forming a kind of ghetto. Most tried to avoid learning anything more than minimal Czech. I suppose the response should have been for Praguers to learn English (which those in the tourism-service industry did).
Obama's too quickly embarrassed, and gives away his lack of comprehension at the limits on his own experience, as well as concerning what drives multilingualism in some subcommunities in Europe and elsewhere.
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