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I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks

(www.theguardian.com)
1009 points n1b0m | 2 comments | 19 Mar 25 11:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.406s | source
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Gigachad ◴[19 Mar 25 12:37 UTC] No.43411054[source]▶
Governments need to start putting out travel warnings on the US. It’s becoming an increasingly dangerous place to visit.
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Euphorbium ◴[19 Mar 25 12:46 UTC] No.43411130[source]▶
And remove visa free travel for americans.
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apwell23 ◴[19 Mar 25 12:51 UTC] No.43411189[source]▶
would make european tourist spots so much clamer and nicer
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briandear ◴[19 Mar 25 13:04 UTC] No.43411362[source]▶
https://fpa.org/british-and-french-vie-for-worst-tourists-ti...
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greatpatton ◴[19 Mar 25 13:30 UTC] No.43411718[source]▶
The article is rather funny as French are supposedly "terrible at foreign languages", but try to find a Briton that can speak anything else than English, it's like finding a needle in a haystack.
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1. bloak ◴[19 Mar 25 13:55 UTC] No.43412060[source]▶
People say that, but do we have any proper data, preferably on assessed language knowledge rather than claimed language knowledge?

There's some crap going on in France that English is specified as a requirement for many jobs even when it quite obviously isn't needed. So people lie and nobody cares. On the other hand, it seems to me that people in England are overly modest about their language abilities. I think if you handed out written instructions in French or German on how to win £1000 then a lot of people who wouldn't normally claim to know any foreign languages would successfully follow the instructions.

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2. ben_w ◴[19 Mar 25 16:58 UTC] No.43414502[source]▶
It's hard for me to be exactly confident when comparing my 25-year-old GCSE grade C (or was it D?) in French to the current numerical grading system, but I think it's it's somewhere around the peaks of these graphs: https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2024/04/languages-are-sti...

My grasp of French is so monumentally bad, that last time I tried to say "I can't speak French" in French, the French woman next to me didn't understand because I said it wrong.

My German is coming along OK, but only because I've been living in Berlin since late 2018.