Comment: Re:Half of circumference? (Score 2) 332
I am pretty sure that most Europeans know at least two languages, and quite often three.
As a European who lived for significant amounts of time (several years) in Italy, Germany and Norway, this depends a lot on the size of the country. Germans, Frenchmen and Italians do not need a foreign language since their entire lives can go on just fine with their mother language only: dubbed TV series, translated manuals for electronic gizmos, this stuff. Same goes for Japanese and Chinese. And Americans. They all have their language classes in school, but you really do not know a language unless you use it once in a while, so they learn just enough to pass the classes and then forget it.
In smaller countries with small languages (Scandinavia, Netherlands, Finland...) people speak at least workable English because they need it for their daily lives. Plus some languages are similar to the point of being ridiculous (e.g. Danish/Swedish/Norwegian), so it is really easy for some to raise the count. Yes, there is also something to be said about the school systems, but country size is very important in defining actual need.
It's also important to define what we mean by knowing a language: being able to order a beer, to entertain casual conversation, or defend a doctoral thesis? I read once a nice definition by some random linguistics expert on Usenet: "If you can have a bitter, verbal-intensive, emotional fight in a foreign language, then you know it".