[BlackButterfly]

Originally Posted by CptSternn

Define 'alot'. As a rule, most americans NEVER leave america. How many people do you know with a passport? In Europe, more people have passports than driving licenses. Also, how many people do you know that speak more than one language? Holiday in a different country each year?

OK, if I could take a train for an hour or two and pass through three differrent countries, maybe I would have more initiative to get a passport and learn more languages. For Pete's sake, most of the countries in Europe can FIT INSIDE the U.S. at least three or four times over, and still leave room to build bridges in-between. And of all those countries, you have English, Spanish, French, Greek, Italian, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish and then the more obscure blended languages. It kind of becomes necessary to be at least bi- or trilingual and have passports.

America, however, is a lot bigger, and we DO travel. Some of us, however, would like to get to know a wider portion of our own continent and our nearest neighbors before we go traipsing across the ocean, and that can be a lifetime commitment just traveling and getting to know this hemisphere of the planet. Almost all of our schools readily educate us in the languages needed to communicate with our closest neighbors (French for parts of Canada, and Spanish for Mexico/South American), and a growing number is expanding that selection to other languages.