I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.

Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.

edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.

  • ominouslemon@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 year ago

    Speaking more than one language. Being from Switzerland, we’re required to study 2 languages (+ our native one) at school. So it’s not infrequent to encounter swiss people who speak 4+ languages

    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
      0·
      1 year ago

      we’re required to study 2 languages (+ our native one) at school

      This is crazy to me. I studied French at school for years and got to a decent enough level, but then when I tried to take Spanish later on I couldn’t deal with it. Maybe if they’d been concurrent it would’ve been a different story but I just couldn’t keep the languages separate in my brain. Then years later when I moved to a different country the French pretty much left my head as a new language replaced it.

      I guess I’ve only got one “foreign language center” in my head and only one language can occupy it at any time.

    • NotYourSocialWorker@feddit.nu
      0·
      1 year ago

      In Sweden kids learn English from second grade and a third language from fifth grade.

      What really annoys me is how many programmers seem to expect us to only be able to understand one language. I much rather have the program made in English than to read a bad Swedish translation.

      • hglman@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        As in non swedish programmers try to translate into Sweedish for you?

        • Turun@feddit.de
          0·
          1 year ago

          Presumably what they meant, yes. Sometimes YouTube translates video titles for example. Of course, the video is still in the original language, so it’s completely useless, except for videos without speech.

          Every program should have a setting to define in which language you want to interact with it.

          • zaphod@feddit.de
            0·
            1 year ago

            YouTube supports multiple audio tracks these days and sometimes it decides that I should listen to a dubbed version of a video. Somehow all media players are very limited when it comes to settings for language preferences.

            • Turun@feddit.de
              0·
              1 year ago

              Which is ridiculous and funny, because our (at least 15 year old) DVD system can swap between audio tracks flawlessly!

    • aard@kyu.deOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      In Germany it’s also mandatory - but learning the language at school unfortunately doesn’t necessarily mean you can speak it. LucasArts adventures contributed more to my language skills than my first English teacher. I’m always shocked about the lack of English skills in a lot of Germans when I’m back visiting. Rather surprisingly one of my uncles born in the 30s spoke pretty good English, though.

      We’re now living in Finland - me German, wife Russian, we each speak to the kids in our native language, between each other English. So they’re growing up with 4 languages.

      It’s quite interesting to watch them grow up in that situation. When learning about a new historical figure my daughter always asks which languages they spoke - and few weeks ago she was surprised someone only spoke two languages. So I explained that some people only speak one language - she gave me a very weird look, and it took a while to convince her that I’m not just making a bad joke.