On a separate note, I do agree that using multiple languages as a general indicator of intelligence is inaccurate. Language is contextual. An American has much less use for knowing a second language than a European or an Asian does. It’s like arguing that doctors are smarter than engineers because doctors know more anatomy than engineers do.
Well, I hate to say it, because it’s so obvious, but in Quebec most people speak French (and a surprising number speak no English at all), and just about all signs are in French. And that’s about as near the U.S. as you can get.
But your point about most Americans not needing a second language is perfectly correct. I’m the exception because I do visit Quebec regularly. (I also go to Germany on business occasionally, so I wish I spoke German, but I don’t unfortunately.)
Ed
As an American who’s lived in Europe for almost a decade now, I can testify that ignorance works both ways. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve had to correct a completely false impression of the US. There’s nothing wrong with that on its own - why should people be expected to know everything about a country they’ve never lived in? - except that Europeans sometimes tend to be more smug about what they assume is their superior knowledge. Case in point: a review I read once in the Irish Times of a fictional book that was set half in Ireland, half in New York. The reviewer mocked the author for his mistake in placing Counties Kerry and Sligo next to each other … and then went on to discuss the chapters that take place in “the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood of the Bronx”.
Of course it is probably generally true that people in other countries know more about America than Americans know about those countries, but leave the US out of the equation entirely and you’ll find the same pattern repeated. For example, the Irish know more about Britain than the British know about Ireland; the Dutch probably know more about Germany than the Germans know about the Netherlands. And it isn’t just an international issue either - I don’t know what part of the Netherlands the person who sent this question to Cecil is from, but if it’s Amsterdam, I’d be willing to bet he knows a lot less about other cities in his country than people in those cities know about Amsterdam.
Anyway, here’s one interesting study, for whatever it’s worth.
You Scots have Andy Goldsworthy. You win!
For those who don’t know about Andy, check out the photographs of some of his incredible naturalist art.
I gave this a moment’s thought, then it occurred to me to wonder whether America is necessarily unique in this regard. Surely other countries find familiar the image of the harrumphing middle-aged conservative saying “Whatever Johnny Foreigner has in his country, we don’t want any! What’s this pasta about anyway? Don’t need that, do we? Spotted dick was good enough for my grandfather and it’s good enough for me!”
What I would point out is the vast difference between Americans visiting a foreign country, and Europeans: namely, the various nations of Europe aren’t surrounded by 3000 miles of open sea. If Americans want to visit a foreign country other than Canada or Mexico, we have to fly. Europeans? Not so much — you can hop in a car and drive across as many borders as you like. This puts up an economic barrier to travel which continental Europe doesn’t have to deal with. I’m not sure how Great Britain fits into this, since the nation is an island; it’s always been my impression that there has been a certain amount of insularity there too, for the very same reasons. A multitude of nations together on one landmass will intermingle; a lone nation on a distant body of land, has nobody to mingle with (at the same expense).
And as I think I pointed out, Canada is not terribly foreign. 
That’s a good point. There are a few places in Canada I’d like to visit, but fundamentally I don’t expect anything much different than what I could see in several other places in America, either. Vancouver is nice, and I’d like to go there, but whenerv anyone describes it… it’s not much different than Seattle in what you can see and do there.
I had two years of French 1960-1962, but the first time I ever had to communicate in French was at a Tim Horton’s in La Prairie last September. Amazingly, I managed. (It helped, I’m sure, that I’ve sung a little French opera. I imagine it may also have helped that I identified myself at the outset as an American, rather than an English-speaking Canadian.)
Probably more than you think, but it strengthens your case, because the chance to interact with foreigners on an equal basis are very slim. Californians don’t need to pick up Oregonese just in case they run into an Oregonian at a hotel in Las Vegas who doesn’t understand Californese. The Latino immigrant and Anglo native communities move largely in separate orbits, and the need to interact is usually limited to contexts such as directing workers. And the average consumer in a supermarket has little need to talk to the people who picks his lettuce out of the ground, vital though their work is to that consumer. I imagine a French tourist might make the acquaintance of a German tourist in a Paris hotel, and talk about having seen St-Chapelle the previous day, or recommend a good cafe around the corner. On a linguistic level, we have nothing like that in America, absolutely nothing.
Features of American life that have become characteristic, such as fast food and mediocre, watery beer–even though that is not entirely accurate or fair–came about largely as the result of geography. The expense of transporting goods over long distances to sparsely settled areas encouraged homogenization and discouraged variety. Because nearly everyone, everywhere is on some level an immigrant, there are very few places in America where there is a continuously existing ancient, dominant culture. In terms of mass media, Los Angeles and New York more or less set the tone for the entire country–just as Paris does for France and London for England. Yet here the effect is to homogenize further a country the size of Western Europe and Great Britain combined. These aren’t necessarily justifications for being insular and ignorant of the world beyond our borders, but they do contribute to making that happen.
And then we have to remember that historically, foreigners seen in the media tended to be the elites of the countries they came from. It is not true that every German or every French citizen is nearly fluent in English, but it is probably true that most international business travelers, scholars, artists, or politicians from those countries do speak English quite well. I have no doubt that the president of ING Bank speaks English, probably as well as I do, but the tellers at the Dordrecht branch, not so much. So from the American side as well, I think there was a tendency to assume on that basis that Europeans are more cultured than we.
There is a bit of insularity, I suppose. But even before the Channel Tunnel was built, it was possible to take a boat to France in less than 2 hours. You won’t find all that many adult Brits who’ve never been abroad, I wouldn’t think.
Heh. I studied German in high school, got fairly fluent with it, but never got to use it more than a couple of times. Then I went to Indonesia. While there, I took a six week crash course in Indonesian, and I am sooooo glad I did. All the Indonesians I worked with spoke English and were overjoyed to get to practice with a native English speaker. When they found out I was going to school to learn their language, they bent over backwards to help me.
“OMG! An American is learning OUR language! This is like being there when the first fish flopped onto land and took a gasping breath! We must nuture him!” 
At the risk of taking the conversation off the topic of food and back on, well, topic, I’m quite sure if you’re using the size of the country as an excuse for not giving a damn, then I’m pretty sure Australia has you beaten hands down. At least in America, if you desire you can actually drive to a few other countries. Not so much in Australia. Can’t get anywhere by bus. Yet we seem to be at least a little less ignorant to the rest of the world.
And how would one go about objectively determining the average degree of ignorance in Australia versus the United States?
I don’t know. Just off the top of my head, how about by how many people think they have a personal guardian angel?
But we need guardian angels. We don’t have guardian koalas like they do in Australia.
I did too! High school and college both. And…sorry, here it comes…I spent a year over there as an exchange student. One thing about mastering a foreign language that always fascinated me was that you become fluent enough that the language no longer sounds exotic or different to you. Likewise, when I heard bits of Yiddish here and there after I got back, it I couldn’t believe how “non-foreign” it sounded to me, even though I couldn’t quite follow it. My nephew’s step-grandfather would touch his head and say it was called his “keppi”, and I understood. I had read a folk tale in some South German dialect (Alemannic I believe), in which the Standard German diminutive ending -chen is replaced by -i. Likewise Kop umlauts to Kep- under the influence of the i.
You can now easily get print media and TV over the internet, so it’s certainly easier to put your foreign language skill to use than it used to be. It’s not as good as being among the people and able to interact and converse, but it is a great deal more than we were able to do a generation ago.
I honestly have never run into an American who believed that. Guardian angels certainly aren’t something that a lot of people profess to believe in, although one can’t say the same about the literal interpretation of Genesis. But come to think of it, I hardly ever run into Fundamentalist Christians either, for all that one hears about them.
I was going to ask about Australia myself. How does that country stack up in terms of the things we’ve been discussing here? How many can speak another language well, or read/listen to news originating from other countries?
Well, I have run into Americans (and Canadians) who believe they have a personal guardian angel, but the belief is more like “Yes, wouldn’t that be nice, I do expect Jesus/God is looking after me, in a way, I suppose…” and thus if they checked a box on a survey it’d be “yes”, but really, it’s more of a sort of kind of vague hope.
(Which is my “belief” in the afterlife= a sort of kind of vague hope, which if then I checked the box on a survey…)