Ya, seconded. I moved to Ireland in 1993 and for the first decade or so while I was getting to grips with English and assimilating I didn’t really notice because I was still watching a lot of German TV but after a break during college, jesus christ, I noticed the dubbing. I mean Manfred Lehman voices: Bruce Willis, Depardieu, Lundgren, Defoe, Madsen, James Woods and Kurt Russell. Snake Pliskin and John Mclane sounding like the guy from Tatort is just weird when you start speaking English natively and don’t even start me on Norbert Langer.
I listened to someone speak on this. The jist was, people in European countries are proximal to one another as opposed to the US which is proximal to Canada and Mexico. Many native English speakers here that are close to Mexico speak Spanish, incidentally. Distance from Netherlands to Spain is closer than California to Texas, so it makes sense when you think about it in that context.
A different view @Rob5589 is that language is a tool.
If you don’t need that particular tool you won’t use it if you already have one that works.
My workshop is full of tools. I don’t buy tools I won’t use.
American’s speak Spanish because they need to use that tool. But if you don’t predominantly work / interact with non English speakers it’s a waste of time.
Canada is bilingual but I’m not learning French as hardly anyone speaks it in the West.
If I move East I’d got to evening classes and learn the French word for entrepreneur.
@Rob5589 distance might be one thing and I partially agree with that viewpoint, but I’ve also met people from the UK who had no interest in learning another language. @Barney’s viewpoint as a tool is also valid, but I believe learning a second (perhaps even third) language in school broadens your horizons. Can’t say what my life would have been like if I had only stuck with my mother tongue.
In any case, to bring it back to more in line with the topic/music and also still tangentially related to language, this one always cracks me up:
Exactly - and what we tend to forget: it’s not only about communicating with people, but having access to literature, movies, and yes: songs!
Literature is a great example. I read quite a few Dutch novels and poems.
As my girlfriend reads really a lot, I gave her some recommendations what Dutch novels to read.
As she reads only books in German, English, Russian and Spanish … but refuses to learn the most beautiful language on earth, she had to read the German translation.
A great example is “Turks Fruit” (“Turkish Delight”) by Jan Wolkers. A really good book (which was also made into a movie by Paul Verhoeven … with Ruther Hauers!).
This book really holds the soul of Holland in a way. But I read the translation and I was like “meh”.
It’s not only words, it is feel that gets lost when a book is translated. It’s a hollow shell of something that was so full of life (and death).
The story is still strong, so my girlfriend had tears in her eyes while reading it. But there was so much more in it which she will never grasp.
Languages are a key to magic, in my opinion - not only tools!
The sad thing is languages get much harder to learn as time goes on. Best time is when you’re a kid. Second best time is now, but it’s a pretty distant second.
Not sure I am aware of the Bush connection (or what he might have said), but learning the French word for entrepeneur is like learning the Italian word for consigliere…
Funny you should phrase it that way, because teenage me walking into a music store and buying my first bass ever (a black Squier Affinity Jazz Bass with a white pickguard that at the time I thought was the sh#t), a cable and a tuner, then walking home and calling my guitar buddy went like this:
-Hey dude, what’s the tuning for a bass?
-It’s Mi La Re Sol
-Stupid tuner is giving me English letters!
-Oh yeah, Mi = E, La = A, Re = D, Sol = G. Tuners use English letters for some reason lol
Another interesting thing, even within music there are languages. The traditional music of countless peoples are not meant for the Western standard notation. I often daydream of getting a fretless and playing traditional stuff, then give myself a reality check when I realize I can’t even yet properly play my Western songs on my fretted one…