Why are Americans so terrible at learning languages?

I was born and raised in the United States. Growing up in a rather rural area of the country, I didn’t have a whole lot of cultural exposure or top-grade resources for learning a language. So it wasn’t until I got to University and started studying German that I actually got to immerse myself in the language-learning experience. As soon as I did, I absolutely fell in love with learning new ways to communicate with people, and went on to teach myself more and more languages!

A few years into my language-learning journey, I was at an event to celebrate a friend of mine’s ordination to the Catholic priesthood, where I was introduced to a man who told me that he had worked as a French teacher for years. I excitedly told him how much I loved studying the French language, and we got into a conversation about language study. Eventually, he asked me what other languages I spoke, and I listed the four or five languages I had studied in any real depth at the time.

“So you’re a polyglot,” he said, smiling. “How very un-American of you.”

We both laughed because we knew how true it was. Comparatively to so many other peoples in the world, Americans (USA) are notoriously awful at learning languages. Speaking two or three languages is such a normal quality in most of Europe, for instance, but in the USA, telling somebody that you speak even just a second language is inevitably met with the response of “that’s so cool!” Even when practicing with native speakers of a language as an American, it’s not at all uncommon to hear someone excitedly say “this is so cool! I’ve never heard an American speak my language before.”

Americans simply aren’t expected to know a second language.

So why is this? Why is it less common for an American to speak a foreign language than it is for a Spaniard? Why don’t Americans make more effort to branch out into other methods of communication?

There are several reasons why this is true, so let’s explore a few of them:

1. Americans normally don’t need a second language.
This may sound arrogant, but hear me out. More than any other factor, it’s important to consider that, unlike people in many countries, living in the USA, one can easily enough make it their entire lives without once speaking a second language. It’s commonly said that nothing motivates one to learn quite like necessity, and the fact is, most Americans have absolutely no necessity to learn a second language, at least not to the point of fluency. Would it make some things more convenient? Perhaps. But enough to make a noticeable impact on the way that they live their lives? Usually not.
To illustrate this point, let’s take a look at the Netherlands: It is completely normal for a Dutch person to speak three to five languages by the time they reach adulthood. They are the golden example of a polyglotic society. But why is that?
Because almost nobody else speaks Dutch.
Sure, Flemish and Afrikaans have a high mutual intelligibility, and there’s a sizable Dutch-speaking population in South America, and so forth, but that doesn’t change the fact that most of the Netherlands’ business is done with countries with very few Dutch-speakers. Because of this, education in foreign languages absolutely takes priority. 
Not so with the United States. 

2. The United States is ENORMOUS. 
This is one of the main reasons that people in many other countries don’t understand. The United States is gigantic. The third largest country in the world by land mass (and the second largest is Canada, directly north of the contiguous United States, which shares a primary language of English). Unlike in many European countries in which any serious travel might take you into another country or region with a different language altogether (you can drive from the north end of Germany, a very large country to the south end in about 12 hours), in the United States, you could drive continuously (without sleeping, eating, or stopping for gas) in a straight line for TWO DAYS and still be in the United States, without having to use more than one language. And that’s just in a straight line – you could hypothetically drive around the United States for an entire year without once crossing your own path. So even with an active travel-life, one could go his/her entire life without once breaking out of their native English (or even in many cases, his/her native Spanish). 

3. So much of the world not only speaks English nowadays, but it’s more or less the same English.  
Obviously, there are noticeable dialectal differences – there’s no denying that – but English is a bit of an oddity among languages. Its dialects aren’t nearly as disparate as, say, the Spanish dialects or the German Dialects (many of which, in both cases, ought to be considered separate regional languages, rather than dialects). Why are the English dialects so standardized, despite being very different stylistically? There are several contributing factors, but I believe that mass-media is chief among them. At this point in history, most of the English-speaking world grew up watching the same sorts of movies, listening to the same sorts of radio programs/podcasts, and reading the same sorts of books, all with a standardized-enough version of English. 

Why is this important? Not just because it reinforces the first point, but also because it actually affects our ability to learn and adjust to different ways of communicating. An Italian boy might grow up being spoken to in all sorts of different regional languages, and this forces his mind to adjust. He needs a high degree of adaptability and mental plasticity. So by the time that he tries to learn another language, his brain is already used to that. The average anglophonic American, however, grows up being constantly surrounded by only one way of speaking, which results in a very low plasticity and adaptability. So by the time that they try to learn another language, they are far more stuck in their ways than the boy in our previous example. 

Hopefully, this has lent some clarity to a very common question, but as with all things linguistic, there are always more reasons and more nuances to be explored. So share your theories with us! Why do you think Americans are stereotyped as bad language-learners?