Many Brits were taught a second language at school (11-16, some starting earlier) but there was very little opportunity to use it outside school, so most did the bare minimum and never continued with it.
I learned French and German at school but they are both very rusty. I’ve since picked up very rusty Spanish. All 3 enough to survive in bars/restaurants and find my way around a new place (eventually) but getting better is on my big long list of things to do.
> You could just jump on a train for 35 euros and be in France in a few hours
So first off, you're assuming that they live in London, as that is the only place with a direct train link to France. Second, the Eurostar website has ticket prices "from £39" which equates to €45. But that's the "from" price. Looking at all availability up to the end of October, there is one day where you can get a £63 ticket, another day where you can get an £86 ticket and all other days are £97 or over. So just "jumping on the train" isn't the cheap carefree jaunt you're making it out to be. The average full time salary in London is £37,000[1] and average rent in London is a staggering £31,524[2]. Those numbers only work because a lot of people are house sharing - it is impossible to live in the UK on £5476, especially in London. That one way ticket to France is approximately 1/7 of the average Londoner's weekly wage.
Living in London is horribly expensive, but being so close, European travel from the UK is often similar in price to travel within the UK. As well as Eurostar there are many cheap flights and both can be similar to the costs of train travel within the UK.
Brexit has sunk the pound so the costs of holidays abroad will be relatively more expensive now, but as kids we often took summer holidays in France because it cost less than going somewhere in the UK.
I get that but, unless you're earning £100k+/year, hopping on the train to France every weekend to go practice your French is prohibitively expensive and not realistic
Doing it every weekend would be prohibitively expensive, but then so would taking the train to Manchester or anywhere else a similar distance within the UK.
Now living in the west coast of the US I really miss the freedom to visit so many different places for so little, whether that be cheap Eurostar fares or cheap budget airline flights.
How expensive is plane travel in the US compared to the EU? The language won't change, but the variety of the US is pretty immense. You could hop on a plane from LA and be in the Texas desert, or the peaks and snow in Colorado, or the Great Lakes, or the swamps in the South. And even leaving the States, tropical islands of the Bahamas are only 5 hours away, Canada is three or four, and Mexico is even closer. I would have expected air travel to be cheaper relatively speaking in America than Europe, especially with the higher salaries. The environmental impacts of all the flying aren't great though obviously.
Where budget airlines exist in the US the fares are comparable, they just fly far fewer routes than in Europe so you often end up paying standard airline prices.
The variety of the US is immense, but its size is immense too! San Francisco-New York is three quarters the distance of London-New York and the western half of the US is practically empty other than the coast.
Looking at my old email receipts I have a lot of £50 each way tickets from RyanAir and EasyJet. My last trip to Mexico was $200 each way (though that was at least twice the distance, Mexico is huge too!)
No need for a train. I could find conversational French/Spanish/German really easily where I live now in London. I have at least 5 native speakers of each of those languages who are friends and live within a mile of me. Right now it is just laziness.
Finding local language communities locally might be harder in less cosmopolitan areas but it just takes a bit of effort.
As an 11-16 year old learning those languages at school it was a lot harder to do so.
I call this the "I don't understand why Europeans don't go for lunch in Paris" puzzlement. I've had variations of this conversation with many American friends over the years ... :)
Distances just hit differently on their side of the Atlantic.
It’s considerably less tiresome and costly to cover long distance in cars.
I noticed that a 500km ride in France is very long distance. A once in a summer thing. While a 350miles trajectory in the us is something I can do with less friction.
This is a big factor, but living in the US I do miss the cheap flights that made weekend city breaks within Europe cheap and easy. From San Francisco it seems like the only place you can get a similarly cheap flight to is Las Vegas and I've never understood the attraction of gambling...
Many Brits were taught a second language at school (11-16, some starting earlier) but there was very little opportunity to use it outside school, so most did the bare minimum and never continued with it.
I learned French and German at school but they are both very rusty. I’ve since picked up very rusty Spanish. All 3 enough to survive in bars/restaurants and find my way around a new place (eventually) but getting better is on my big long list of things to do.