Nope. Until you travel you don't even have the slightest clue what a privilege it is to speak English or be from America. Educated middle/upper class people everywhere except china (where there is almost no english at all) generally speak at the very least broken English, if not fluent english.
That being said:
One of the most interesting people I met was in china, and I'd say complex ideas were 75% communicated in english. Google translate or wechat translate supplemented the conversations.
One of the other people I met was in Korea. His enlgish was probably closer to 50% and complex ideas almost certainly required a translation app. Great memories though.
I would probably have a conversation mediated entirely by google translate once every other week or so, and google translate was generally good enough to get an idea of menu's or communicate to people with absolutely no english ability at all. Nearly all conversations I had in china were translated via WeChat.
Traveling made me regret circumventing the language requirement in college so much.
> Traveling made me regret circumventing the language requirement in college so much.
I can feel this. I did the opposite. Instead of circumventing the requirement, I studied 5 different languages, and then continued 2 on to relative proficiency.
This has been, in my opinion, of tremendous benefit in living on and traveling to multiple continents.
I had an advisor whom I admired who was competent in some 12 or more languages. I was so jealous. I guess I probably still am.
That's very interesting. However I am not sure whether being middle/upper class has any association with being able to speak english. Frankly I don't think there is a class distinction in China (despite an economic one maybe).
I would like to point out if helpful that in China our education of the English language is much more geared towards reading rather than speaking. Students are generally equipped with enough to read and understand given adequate time but probably not speaking. However regional difference also may exist (first tier cities vs second, third etc). I used to feel ashamed about our english level in east asia in general. But then again now I think about people in the anglosphere where French and Spanish are largely taught but no one would expect a large proportion will be able to converse in them :)
> Until you travel you don't even have the slightest clue what a privilege it is to speak English
Agreed; almost everywhere, you can find someone who knows some English. The other time I realized who a privilege it is was looking for a second language to learn. There isn't a clear answer if you already know English. The English privilege you might completely miss is that, outside of China, the internet is English-first.
You are getting downvoted because it's completely unclear why the term "broken english" is offensive or not fit for use. You also did not propose an alternative.
I promise my use of it was entirely descriptive and not at all a judgement of the person speaking it. I have the utmost respect for anyone who can communicate an idea in another language at any level. I see my self as deficient for not being able to do so and think of myself as lesser and a poor citizen of the world for only speaking english.
The term broken means something was once whole and is no longer. There's plenty of alternatives like non native speaker, beginner speaker, etc. I'm generally extremely non PC but this one is a pet peeve of mine.
As a native English speaker living in Russia, it really made me realize how difficult and nerve racking language learning and speaking is. I don't consider my Russian skills "broken", just very incomplete; a WIP.
Broken in the sense "broken line" (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=broken+line&ia=web); not "once whole", rather "with breaks (pauses/gaps) in it". Like when a conference breaks for lunch, it doesn't mean the conference was whole and now is inferior.
Did you speak the local language?