Man, I’ve tried to get decent at Spanish, and utterly fail, even with friends that speak it as a first language helping me.
There’s no way in hell I can think of anyone using English poorly as a second language as anything other than a peer. And they’ll likely get better at English while I still suck with Spanish.
Besides, I know too damn many people with English as a first language that are horrible with it.
Anyone even trying to use another language is a great thing to me. Our ability as humans to bridge the gap between selves with language is a powerful and beautiful thing, so someone attempting to bridge that gap further is just as beautiful, no matter how well they do it. It makes me happy when I run into someone making that kind of effort, and I can take the time to help them do what they want, or joust have a human interaction.
Plus, I’ve never, ever run into a situation where just trying to help someone navigate an English speaking majority didn’t end up with both of us smiling and at least a little better off than we were before. I wish I had the ability to learn new languages quickly and fluently. I just keep failing at it lol.
When I was younger, I genuinely wanted to study linguistics for a while. It was running into the difficulty with gaining fluency in Spanish that made me rethink that.
So, fuck hating on someone that’s putting in the effort. I have mad respect for that.
It’s been fun travelling to a few foreign places in the world as a brown long haired Indigenous Canadian.
My wife is Caucasian and she never had a problem asking for help or talking to people on the street in Europe. I was out on my own many times in places like Rome, Paris, Berlin just to sight see and the number of people that either just ignored me, looked at me in disgust or actively just wanted to avoid me was amazing. Not everyone was like this but a good percentage … I’d say more than half the time, people were nice … especially Germans which was a big surprise to me. We’d met many German tourist outside their country and the majority of them were jerks … meet Germans in their home country and they’re the nicest people you could meet and talk to. Spanish were indifferent, Portuguese will talk your ear off no matter who or what you look like, French will be nice to you only if you can speak a bit of French and Italians were the worst to people of colour. The English are great as long as you are sober and they are sober … I don’t drink and the only English people I ever enjoyed were the ones that were nowhere near alcohol … as soon as they get near drinks, nothing is enjoyable with them. BUT this is all my personal experience of having travelled to Europe many times over about 15 years.
As soon as I went out with my wife, I was treated better … but as soon as I was on my own, whole different story.
I have to say that racism is far less now than it was 30 - 40 years ago … I can say that confidently as a brown skinned person in Canada. My dad was born in the 1930s and he said that in the 1950s / 60s, racism was completely normal to the point where he wasn’t even allowed in some small towns in northern Ontario … it wasn’t a law, it was just a common understanding that ‘no Indians were allowed here’.
So even though racism is far less today … it doesn’t mean it’s been completely eliminated. And in some areas, its more prominent than others.
I’m curious if people changed their tune once they heard your Canadian accent. Was it their visual racism that led them to assume your country and be racist about nationality, or was it mainly just visual racism with nationality not playing much of a role?
It was a combination of appearance and language … if I didn’t look the part and I didn’t speak the part, I was more than likely down upon, especially if I were alone. Speaking English didn’t seem to help because English is such a common language now that most immigrants everywhere tend to know a little or a lot of English because knowing this one universal language greatly increases your chances of getting anywhere. I met lots of legal and illegal African immigrants in the south of Spain over the years and the common thing with many of them was that they all knew a good level of English to get by.
Just being brown in Europe automatically lumps you into being a foreign immigrant of some sort I find … to most people, if you are brown, and you are not obviously African, then you must either be Middle Eastern, Latino or Asian, all of which means you are probably a new, recent or first or second generation immigrant. And depending on which location you are in … the local people may or may not enjoy seeing foreign immigrants around.
I found Italian cities especially difficult … partly because they have a big problem with legal and illegal immigration and partly because they are all sick and tired of being a tourist park for the world. Spain was the same way but not as bad.
As far as nationality and saying I was Canadian … about half the people I told that to actually believed me. Most people laugh at the idea and others just dismiss it because there are not many brown skinned, long haired Indigenous people from Canada running around. Most people just assume I’m Latino, Filipino or some Asian who happens to come from Canada … maybe.
If you can speak more than one language, that’s really impressive to me. I speak English and beginner Spanish and I’m so timid I hardly even try to speak Spanish because I don’t want to sound like an idiot.
Approximately 60% of the world is at least bilingual, just as a heads up.
It’s less common to be monolingual than bilingual.
And there are places in the world where people expect you to be at least trilingual even.
